SUBMISSIONS
The Florida Historical Society Press and Chapin House Books encourage new authors and already published authors to submit manuscripts for consideration for publication. To submit a manuscript, please comply with the following instructions.
1.To submit a new manuscript send it electronically, either by USB Flash Drive (preferable), on a CD, or via a file sharing service such as Dropbox. Any materials including storage devices like USB drives are not returnable. Manuscripts must be created in or converted to Microsoft Word or Adobe Indesign. Manuscripts submitted in other formats may NOT be considered.
2. Manuscripts must be submitted with a Table of Contents and with each chapter tentatively titled. Any manuscript seeking consideration must be complete and ready for editing. Partially completed chapters, extraneous insertions, fragmentary passages and other submissions that are not part of a completed manuscript indicate that the author IS NOT ready for consideration of his/her manuscript for publication. Materials submitted in such a fashion will not be considered. Sample chapters will NOT be considered unless specifically requested by the publisher.
3. Please do not use fancy or unnecessary formatting in your manuscript. Remove unnecessary styling. "Hard" carriage returns, that is the use of the "enter" key at the end of a sentence should not be used, except to start a new paragraph. Only single spaces between sentences and no spacing after last sentence in paragraph. Using a space or tab before a paragraph should not be done, instead use styling of paragraphs and characters. Manuscripts that adhere to a consistent style sheet reduce layout issues and indicate how you want the book to look. Be consistent with naming of paragraph and character styles and minimize 'overrides' of styles. Where text inside paragraphs change style, for example changes in the paragraphs like italics or bold, use character styling in addition to designating paragraph style. Manuscripts with chaotic styling frequently have to have the entire manuscript converted to plain text and then every instance of italics has to be character styled and every paragraph has to have a paragraph style assigned which will slow down layout significantly. Using style sheets and applying clean styles to the entire content without overrides will improve your productivity and will result in better digital publishing especially for rendering your documentation to html, epub and pdf files.
4. Please submit an author's biography, complete with a "head shot" photograph, with each manuscript. Please include contact information--telephone number, e-mail address and USPS address. In addition, please submit a one-to-two page description of the audience you want to appeal to, possible author appearance venues that you have direct communications with and your affiliation with any organization or group that might want to re-sale or purchase the published manuscript in bulk.
5. Please submit each chapter as a separate file. We will merge them where necessary.
6. Please do not send original photographs with your manuscript.
7. Photographs sent should be scanned photographs, using a minimum of 600 dpi preferred in a .tiff format. Pictures should be scanned as color (even if they are black and white, since this allows for the maximum manipulation by the editor). For color publications pictures should already be four color, CMYK. Pictures should have descriptive file names and consider numbering consecutively in the order you wish them to appear in the manuscript. Captions, including credit lines, should be numbered to match the photographs. Suggested picture placement should be noted within the manuscript like this, [Photo 1.] This will allow the editor to get an idea of how the text and the photographs relate to each other. Please Note: If you are submitting a manuscript for consideration, photographs may be submitted in a lesser format with only 96 dpi. These photographs will not be used in this format, but will provide the press with a good idea of the quality of available photographs and will facilitate their evaluation for use in the final manuscript.
8. Notes should appear as footnotes, in Arabic numbers. The preferred footnoting style is Turabian or the Chicago Manual of Style. Do not use endnotes and do not underline. Titles of journals, books and other clearly identifiable collection names should be italicized. Insert the footnotes with the word processor so that markers are generated, don't just superscript a number and add text in content.
9. Newspapers should appear this way. The town or city is written as it would normally appear in the text, while the name of the paper is italicized. Please do not use underlining. Thus, the Miami Herald or the Orlando Sentinel.
10. Do not use Latin abbreviations for footnotes, with the exception of Ibid. Ibid is to be used following a footnote with the same source. If the footnote is exactly the same, use only Ibid. If a different date or page is used, the footnote should appear as Ibid, page 5. Only Ibid is italicized. loc sit. or op sit. are not to be used.
11. Footnotes should restart at the beginning of each chapter, however it is most important that the footnotes were inserted with the word processor as footnotes not just text in the chapter with manual superscripts.
12. To save space, full footnote citations should be only once in a chapter. Subsequent footnotes citing the same source should be abbreviated:
1. Homer Jones, Life in the Fast Lane (New York: Cruddy Press, 1952), 2.
2. Jones, Fast Lane, 4.
13. We are a small press and receive numerous manuscripts for consideration. The review process can take a minimum of several months. The total process up to a year. Calling or e-mailing before the end of this period does not accelerate the review process.
14. Authors are responsible for for securing releases for privately owned photographs, oral interviews, previously printed or restricted materials, and other materials that may require the payment of fees or written permission for use.
15. Authors are responsible for generating a usable Index, if required by the publisher. You should insert the index markers with the word processor. Consider doing more than just key word searches and indexing by content also using index ranges if appropriate. Final page numbers should be assigned after the final "blue lines" are sent to the author for review. Failure to complete an accurate Index will result in delays to the publication of the work, as well as possible cost to the author. If you do not know how to generate or update an index, please visit CREATING AND UPDATING AN INDEX..
MANUSCRIPTS SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD BE SENT TO:
Ben Brotemarkle, Editor
Florida Historical Society Press
435 Brevard Avenue
Cocoa, FL 32922