Topics covered on this page
After you submit a manuscript to us | The contract | From manuscript to published book

Our publishing process

After you submit a manuscript to us

Receipt of your manuscript will be recorded. However, if you require confirmation of delivery, you should send your submission via registered mail, as we cannot acknowledge receipt of all manuscripts.

Our Acquisitions Editor, Diane Waters, is the first reader of all submissions. If she feels that a work shows potential, she will ask the author to submit the rest of the manuscript.

If her response to the work as a whole is positive, that manuscript is then sent to one or more of our readers for further assessment. These readers are selected because of their knowledge and appreciation of crime, mystery and speculative fiction. Your work will be assessed in a professional and confidential manner.

We are highly selective, so if you do make it to this point but we don't wish to publish you, you should still regard that as a very positive sign about your writing.

If we do not ask to see the rest of your manuscript, we will post you our response and your manuscript will be securely recycled. If you want us to return your manuscript, be sure to include an Express Post satchel or SSAE with sufficient postage for return to you, as we will not be responsible for any postal costs.

Although possible, it is unlikely that we will offer a contract to publish at this stage unless we are agreed that the manuscript requires very little work in order to be brought to a publishable, commercial standard.

This is why we may offer feedback on your manuscript which sets out the difficulties that our readers may have had with it. We may suggest ways in which the manuscript could be re-worked and you may decide to act upon our recommendations. This does not amount to an agreement to publish. If you re-work a manuscript along the lines suggested and re-submit it, we will be happy to look at it again, and at this stage we may be prepared to publish your work. However, we may decide against this. We still cannot guarantee to offer you a contract. You may decide, therefore, that you would rather retain your manuscript as it stands and send it to other publishers.

If we reject your manuscript, we cannot enter into further discussions or explanations. We receive so many manuscripts that we do not have either the time or the resources to follow up individual submissions.

You may also want to consider getting involved with a local writers’ group; peer critiquing can provide valuable insights into the writing and editorial processes (see our Links page). There are also manuscript appraisal services that offer detailed feedback on your manuscript. Unfortunately, even a very positive response from your writers’ group or manuscript doctor cannot guarantee that we or any other publisher will publish your work.

Ultimately, every editor or publisher makes a decision based on their own taste and perception of the marketplace.

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The contract

When we make the decision to publish your manuscript, we send a formal letter of offer confirming this intention. This will be followed by our contract: a legal document outlining terms and conditions, rights and financial details.

At this stage, you may wish to seek legal advice and we recommend the services of the Australian Society of Authors: the body that represents authors and can advise you of your rights and what to expect from a contract. The ASA is geared to dealing with book industry contracts and it will save the expense of hiring a specialist solicitor.

It is also worth checking what your local writers’ centre may offer. For example, members of the Queensland Writers’ Centre are entitled to free legal consultation through the Arts Law Centre of Queensland and can seek advice on book contracts.

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From manuscript to published book

Publishing is an expensive, time-consuming and risk-filled business. If we offer a contract to publish and you accept, it will commit you to making changes to your manuscript in line with what we believe will make your work commercially and critically successful.

Our aim - and yours - should be the same: to turn your manuscript into a published novel of which we will all be proud.

Typically, as soon as you’ve signed a contract, we send you the first round of notes and revisions based on the observations of ourselves and our readers. At this stage, these will be big-picture items: structure, plot points and character issues that we feel need attention. This is a two-way process and we welcome your feedback and encourage discussion on these points. The following rounds of revisions, while still possibly addressing plotting, etc., will tend to be more specific (syntax, dialogue, the use of proprietary names, etc.), and during this process your novel should increasingly feel more polished.

Your work should then be ready to send to the copy-editor, whose job is to look line-by-line for any flaws in punctuation, grammar, syntax, etc., that may have been missed. The copy-editor brings a welcome fresh set of eyes to your manuscript and may well find additional problems in need of attention.

Once copy-edited, your manuscript will be typeset and proof-read. This last part of the process should pick up any minor errors that have crept into the text at any stage of the process.

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