One of the hardest things to do is sending your completed manuscript out into the world of editors and publishers. To submit a manuscript is to throw it into what can seem like an ether, a void, an endless sea of unknowing, and it can cause quite a bit of anxiety to new authors who don’t know how the process works. Publishing can be an incredibly niche and closed off business, so here is a sneak peak behind the screen.
Moving through the slush pile is a daily activity that the acquisitions managers do. It is the first thing we learned while training for this position. Because Ooligan has a rolling submission process, our Submittable can get pretty full with author queries and proposal packages. We do our best to sort through everything and keep up with the incoming submissions.
What Are We Looking For?
Ooligan looks for culturally relevant stories that have significant value to the Pacific Northwest. This could be a coming-of-age story, a history of a sports team, or a cozy mystery set in Leavenworth, the Christmas town in Washington.
What Is an Author Query?
This is a first-round submission from an author. It contains the author’s query letter describing their story, who the author is, and is attached to the first ten pages of their manuscript. This is what we read to determine if the manuscript fits Ooligan’s submission criteria and mission as a press. We keep a close eye on the authors who follow the submission guidelines and who take into consideration the mission of the press.
What Is a Proposal Package?
The proposal package is the second round of submissions that an author will send us. Once this is received, we move it to our editing stack to read and evaluate. The package consists of a much larger description of the book, an author bio, content warnings (if applicable), and some ideas from the author for marketing and where they think their book will fit in the world. This is especially important because it gives the editors and marketing team an idea of what the author thinks of their book.
As we are a teaching press, the acquisitions managers are not the only people with eyes on an author’s proposal. A manuscript will circle around to about two or three students/staff members of the press so they get an idea of what evaluating a manuscript is like. Due to this, our evaluation process typically takes about six months. Each manuscript is evaluated on the value to Ooligan, what is working, what is not working, and if we have the capacity to edit this particular story. Ninety percent of the time, the developmental editing team will only be able to do one broad-scope edit before the manuscript can be handed off to the copyediting team. In specific cases, the DE team will be able to do a second, much smaller and time sensitive pass over the manuscript. For this reason, we also look for largely completed manuscripts.
Ooligan strives to handle every manuscript with care and to take into account every aspect, and angle, of the potential of each one that comes our way. It is an anxious time waiting for a publisher to get back to you about your story that has been worked on for years. That is not something that we take lightly.
Written by Rebecca Moss.