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while we consider the stack of submissions already at our door. We will have open submissions again when we run out of books. However....
You may ALWAYS send us
a query letter and i f it looks like a good idea, we may ask to see a sample
chapter or two. All final projects are okayed by the book committee, with the
exception of series books where the earlier books in the series are already
on the site.
Meanwhile, please peruse the
submission guidelines listed below.
Questions? Feel free to email us.
Style Tips and Submission Guidelines for ebooksonthe.net
The publishers at ebooksonthe.net aim to produce books that are consistent in style and usage, just as paper publishing houses utilize a house style for their printed products. So before you submit your manuscript for review, please check it for the following:
Manuscripts should be sent as attachment files in .rtf format. Rich Text Format is a commonly utilized format that converts easily from one text processing system to another. Whatever word processing program you use—Word, Word Perfect, Ami-Pro, etc.—most will permit you to change the format of your file to rich text, by using the "Save as" command.
Please mark your scene breaks with asterisks, not white space; white space is often lost during conversion to html and other book formatting software.
Manuscripts should be single spaced, with an extra line between paragraphs. Do not use a bunch of space bands at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate a paragraph indent. Book manuscripts should be all in one long file—not an individual file for each chapter—and they should be formatted with no headers or footers in Times New Roman 12 point font. If you have illustrations, put them in separate files, and clearly mark which page number they should be on, or send them by mail.
Pause indicators and how we would like them formatted:
Hyphens—use the hyphen key.
Dashes—You type an em dash by pressing the <alt> key and typing 0151 on the numeric keypad. If you don;t want to do this, use two hyphens, with no space on either side.
Ellipses [. . .]—typed as three dots with spaces between. These are created by holding the <alt> key down and typing on the keypad 0133. There are three dots in an ellipsis, not five, not seven and certainly not nine! When you use ellipses to indicate a pause and they come at the end of a sentence or in a place where other punctuation might be appropriate, the three ellipses dots should be followed by the appropriate punctuation, a period, comma, or even a question mark. Click here for a quick tutorial on puctuation and ellipses. Remember, do not be redundant. If it is stated in the narration that there was a pause in conversation, there is no need to use an ellipsis.
Watch hyphenation. Be a minimalist, and make sure each and every one of your hyphenations is necessary.
We prefer to see narrative written in the past tense. Most narrative is written in past tense, dialogue in present tense, and flashback in past perfect tense. If your whole book is in present tense and if that was a conscious choice and if you feel STRONGLY about it, we can discuss it. And if the entire book, written in the present tense, is well-done, we won't mind at all. But we would prefer to see the narrative in past tense because, to speak frankly, often entire books written in the present tense don't do themselves any favors.
Thoughts are typeset in plain text when a thought tag (David thought) is used. Do not place quotation marks around thoughts. Direct thoughts, without a tag, are set in Italic type, which is available in most word processors. If you cannot use italic type, underline the copy to indicate it is to be set italic.