Author's Production Guidelines

 

Congratulations! Your manuscript has been accepted for publication at Deseret Book, and we're looking forward to working with you. To help us publish your manuscript in the most efficient manner possible, please follow these instructions:

 

1. Make sure your manuscript is finished. Do you still have source citations to nail down? Are you unsure about the spelling of certain names or places? Are there any unresolved questions you need to address? Instead of Don't includinge a note to your editor that "We'll need to include a fuller explanation here." Instead, just include the fuller explanation. Please take care of all such matters now, before production begins.

 

2. Make sure your manuscript is complete. Are all the chapters in place? Did you want to include a dedication? How about a preface or foreword? Do you need to include notes or a bibliography? What about diagrams, maps, or pictures? What about picture captions? If there's anything you want to show up in the printed book, we are counting on you to you're the one who will need to provide it. Now is the time to take care of these things. A checklist at the end of this document will help you think about some of the things you might want to include. Not all of the items on the checklist will may be appropriate for your particular book.

 

3. Make sure any necessary permissions have been taken care of. Are you using poetry or song lyrics? What about artwork or photos? Do you have lengthy quotations from other publications? All such items that are under copyright will need written permission from the copyright holder before we can use them. You will also need to secure written permission to use the names or photographs of other people and any stories about them, even if you are the one who experienced a story with them. If you are unsure about what material may need permission, please let us know of your concerns and we will work with you to determine what needs to be donethe step.

4. Submit photocopies of material you've quoted in your book so we can double-check the accuracy of your quotations. Include photocopies of each source's title and copyright pages. Remember to And please put label all of the these copies in the order in which they appear in your book. If you've edited the quotations for clarity or to modernize spelling, punctuation, or capitalization, please let us know so that we don't waste time changeing everything back to match the original sources.

 

5. Don't get fancy with your word processor. We're not really concerned with what your manuscript looks like, and our designers will change its appearance anyway. Elegant fonts, borders, and formatting just get in our way.

 

Do, however, be consistent. For example, if you've made one of your subheads Times New Roman 14-point bold, make sure all of your subheads (and only your subheads) are Times New Roman 14-point bold and not occasionally Arial 16-point italic. If your word processor supports paragraph styles (such as Heading 1 in Microsoft Word), we will love you for using them, but only if you do so consistently. Using Deseret Book's Author Tools template makes it easy. Ask your contact at Deseret Book to give you a copy, or download it.

 

If you're using automatically numbered footnotes or endnotes, please don't try to retype the automatic numbers to make them look bigger or numbered in a certain way, and please don't type periods after them. Just let your word processor do its thing.

 

Please don't include text in a "text box." Just type your text into the main body of your document.

 

Finally, don't embed charts or graphics in your manuscript file. Simply insert Put a note in the manuscript that says, "Picture 1a goes here," and then submit the chart or graphic as a separate file properly labeled named "Picture 1a."

 

6. Submit the text of your manuscript in electronic form. Regardless of what word processor you're using, please save your files as RTF (Rich Text Format) before submitting them to us. We'd prefer to have your manuscript in one file with all of its parts in their proper order. If your chapter files have been saved separately, make sure they are labeled numerically regardless of their chapter name ir names are in order and make sense. For example, you might name (chapter 1 as "Chapter 01" and chapter 2 as "Chapter 02."). If instead you've labeled the files for chapter 1 as "Charity" and chapter 2 as "Faith," it may not be clear in which order those chapters should go. You can submit your files by email (our preference), on floppy disk, or on CD-ROM.

 

7. Finally, mMake sure your manuscript is all in one piece, or at least that all the pieces are together in one place. Don't send your manuscript in bits and pieces, in fits and starts. Few things are more frustrating to an editor than to learn, late in the production process, that the author wants to include an additional chapter or section, or, even worse, a new version of a chapter that is already in production.

 

And Please don't send preliminary versions that your editor will mistake for the real thing, only to realize later that weeks of work have been wasted on the wrong manuscript. Once you have your manuscript finished, complete, and all in one piece, then submit it to your editor, and let your editor know that this is your publication manuscript, ready for production.

 

After your book is published, the best way for you to order copies is to call your contact at Deseret Book, which will be much easier for you and for us than if you go to a Deseret Book store.

Thank you for taking care of these matters. All of this will help us greatly as we prepare your book for printing. We're eager to see a beautiful, finished book that is everything you hoped it would be.

 

Checklist of Items You May Want to Include in Your Book

• Frontispiece, typically a photograph that appears on the back of the half-title page. This would be appropriate in a biography, for example.
• List of previous publications.
• List of contributors, possibly with their affiliations and credentials.
• Title page, with the book's title and subtitle and author name(s) worded exactly the way they should appear in the printed book.
• Dedication. This should typically be short: "For my mother."
• Epigraph, a short scripture or quotation that introduces your book: "Love one another."
• Contents page, with a listing of all front matter, sections, chapters, and back matter. Don't worry about page numbers, which will be different in the printed book than they are in your manuscript. If your book will include numerous photos or illustrations, you may want to include a list of them as well.
• Foreword (written by someone besides you).
• Preface.
• Acknowledgments.
• Prologue or introduction.
• Key to abbreviations.
• Chronology.
• Section pages, if your book is divided into sections.
• Chapters.
• Pictures, maps, charts, or photographs.
• Afterword or epilogue.
• Appendixes.
• Photo credits.
• Notes.
• Bibliography.
• "Puffs"-brief quotations from others endorsing your book.
• Blurbs-brief information about the book and about you that should appear on the book jacket.