On the journey from manuscript to printed book, you’ll work with our managing editorial and production departments and an award-winning team of freelance professionals to make sure the final product communicates your ideas effectively in an attractive and accessible package. The whole process usually takes ten to twelve months.
Submitting your final manuscript
After peer review is complete and your book is approved for publication, you will be invited to submit your final manuscript to your acquisitions editor.
- Prior to your final submission, the managing editorial department will review your manuscript and send you custom formatting instructions. Implementing this guidance will help your manuscript move more quickly and smoothly through the stages to come.
- Plan ahead: Prepare for this stage by reviewing our Style Guide, Guide to the Preparation of Final Artwork, and Accessible Image Guidelines.
Copyediting
An experienced copyeditor will review your manuscript for spelling, grammar, clarity, and consistency. Your copyeditor will identify potential barriers between the text and its future readers and help you break them down.
- Copyediting usually takes four to six weeks, but factors such as your book’s length and complexity and your copyeditor’s availability can affect the timeline.
- You’ll have three to four weeks to review the edits to your manuscript and respond to any queries from your editor.
- Plan ahead: This is the last opportunity to make substantial changes to your manuscript, so consider whether there are any final updates you want to make before returning the files to your copyeditor.
Cover design
A talented designer will prepare an original, eye-catching cover to help your book stand out on the shelf while also conveying its genre and audience through industry norms.
- When your manuscript is approved for copyediting, the managing editor will invite you to submit any preferences you have for your book’s cover, which we will be pleased to take into account during the design process.
- Plan ahead: Take a look at the covers of some books that are comparable to yours. What do you like (or not like) about them? Are there any images, colours, or associations that might elicit strong positive or negative reactions in your field?
Interior design and typesetting
Award-winning designers and typesetters create custom specifications for the interior of each MQUP book.
- Design considerations include choice of fonts; margin size and white space; treatment of headings, block quotations, and other elements of the text; image size and placement; and more.
- Most of our books are 6″ × 9″ and are printed in black and white, but heavily illustrated books, poetry books, and books in certain series may be treated differently.
- Typesetting usually takes two to four weeks.
- Plan ahead: If you have any special requests related to your book’s design, let the managing editor know before you return your manuscript to your copyeditor.
Proofreading and indexing
Thoroughly proofreading the text helps minimize errors in the final book, while an index offers readers a valuable road map to your arguments.
- You’ll receive the typeset proofs as a PDF, and you’ll have about three weeks to review them and mark any last changes.
- Proofreading is an opportunity to catch any lingering typos that have survived copyediting, as well as to make sure that text has been correctly formatted during the typesetting process. If you spot any bad breaks, missing italics, incorrectly styled headings, or any other problems, we will be glad to fix them at this stage.
- You can prepare your index yourself, or you can hire a freelance indexer. A good index allows readers to see the scope and structure of your arguments at a glance, as well as helping them navigate the text.
- Plan ahead: Browse the indexes in some of the books you consult most often. What do you like about them? What don’t you like? In what ways do they help you find the information you’re looking for? Find more tips in our Indexing Guide.
Corrections
Your copyeditor will review your corrections and the index, the files will be checked over by MQUP’s managing editorial team, and then your typesetter will enter your proofing changes and typeset the index. A few rounds of internal review ensure that all corrections have been entered correctly and completely before the files are approved for the printer.
Printing and binding
Around three months before the book’s publication date, final files are sent to the printer. Finished copies of your book are produced and shipped to our warehouses, arriving about a month before the publication date. From there, they are shipped to bookstores.
- MQUP books are printed on acid-free archival-quality paper, and we choose sustainable post-consumer-recycled options whenever possible.
Ebooks
An accessible ePUB and a digital PDF are produced from the print-ready files and released shortly after publication.
- Accessible ebook formats make your book’s contents available to a broader audience. They include features that assist with navigating the content and allow readers to use text-to-speech software.
- Plan ahead: If your book includes images, you will be asked to submit alternative text descriptions to be used in the accessible ebook. Please see our Accessible Image Guidelines for details.
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