Every publisher that allows unsolicited submissions will provide the prospective author with a list of what they want in the submission letter/email… And so do we…
But why do we ask for the particular details in our How To Submit section?

This is what we outline on the website:

“Your Submission Email should be include the following –

• Your name and contact details
• Pen name (if you wish to work under one)
• Title of your novel
• ‘The back of the novel’ – we want to see what you would put on the back of your work; no spoilers, no full plot descriptions, we want to only have as much as we would if we picked up the novel in a store and looked at the back
• Your submission – Word attachment (please make sure it’s compatible with all versions of Word)

Any poetry submission should also include authors you feel you resemble and why.”

The name and contact details probably are the most straightforward ones; after all, it makes sense that we know how to contact you if we decide to accept your submission! 🙂
Why the pen name though? Mainly because we feel that it’s a good thing to figure out straight away… And if you haven’t though about it till now, it also gives you the time to think about the option before reaching the contract stage (where you will have to let us know clearly before signing!).

Novel title – Now that’s always a difficult thing, isn’t it? I think that sometimes, ironically, more work goes into the title than into the whole novel! If you are still on the undecided stage with this, just send us your working title or a few alternative titles (if you are wavering between several). We’re very happy to help with that – after all, a fresh perspective can be just what is needed when looking for a title…

Most publishers ask for a synopsis and only a few chapters of the work… They want to look very quickly at an overview to figure out whether or not they are interested…
We don’t want that, because we want to look at your submission with the same eyes that a reader will have. We want to pick up your book from the metaphysical shelf and look at the back to figure out what is in the book… We want to read every page, not just get given a synopsis that gives away all the plot twists without any of the details that make those twists so fascinating and so effective…
So when you send us your submission, we want to feel like we are looking at the back of a novel that we’ve spotted tucked away on a shelf in a small, over-crowded book store with shelves from ceiling to floor and overstuffed armchairs inexplicably crammed into corners… That’s what we imagine your submission email is…

We also want the whole of your novel or anthology, not just a portion… We understand that some authors have had bad experiences in the past and are scared of sending everything to a publisher just in case that publisher might try to cheat them… However, we have to be sure that your work doesn’t have anything in it that would break our guidelines and we don’t want to accept a work only to reject it when we read through the entirety and find that there is a plot twist or a small element in it that clashes with our guidelines. It’s fairer to give you a certain and clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the basis of the whole novel, rather than have to keep reserving judgement on your novel or anthology and keep you dangling for weeks only to have to turn the novel down at the last moment when we finally get the whole novel…
We want to be able to read that whole book before committing to publishing it, because otherwise we are standing there holding a handful of pages hum-ing and ah-ing about it indefinitely whilst trying to track down the rest of the book that the pages are missing from… It’s frustrating for you and for us!

Now, why ask for extra information with poets? We find that knowing what poets you feel you resemble can give us a very clear idea of what type of poetry you’ve gone for, what emotion and mood you are trying to convey…
If you can’t think of any poets you resemble or if you aren’t sure, we’re fine if you leave this bit out; it is more a guideline to give us an idea what to expect, but it is less important than all the other details that we’ve just gone through…

The last thing to mention is the Subject Line instructions in the How To Submit section… Why do we want you to include those words? Simply because it makes it easier to sort through the emails and make sure that we answer everything on time and as efficiently as possible… Do try to make sure that the relevant words are in the Subject line and that’ll help with making sure that you get an answer as quickly as possible! (You wouldn’t believe where the emails can end up sometimes by accident! Too many folders!) 🙂

So, hopefully, this will make that How To Submit section just a little bit clearer… And make the experience of sending us a submission that little bit less complicated! 🙂