Submission Guidelines Submitting Your Manuscript

Altera Press only accepts electronic submissions, in either Open Office Write format (.odt) or Microsoft Word (.doc not .docx) format,
or TEX format. Your manuscript should be in a single file (not seperate files for each chapter)

All documents should be formatted using a clear 12-point font size (preferably in Georgia), with 1 inch margins all around, on standard letter-size (8 1/2 x 11) layout. Your Query Letter should be to the point, one page or less. (Query Letter may be single-spaced and may be optionally included in the text portion of your email.)

Your Proposal should include a Marketing section which should detail your title, intended audience (age and genre), and reasons why you believe your work will attract a readership. Please detail your marketing plan, including anything and everything you intend to do to help us successfully promote and market your book.

Be certain all your contact information, including your email, is clearly printed on the cover page of your manuscript.

For nonfiction submissions, submit the Table of Contents with page number references included.

For nonfiction submissions, your Bibliography should include references to all source material, including: author, title of the work, publishing city and state, name of publisher, publication date, and page numbers of the quotations.

We do accept simultaneous submissions, but ask that you let us know the other publishers to which your manuscript has been submitted.

It is the author's responsibility to clear the use of all quotations that are under copyright. This includes prose quotations (more than a few lines) and all lyrics and poems.  We will need a the complete source information for all quotations and if accepted the permission for use of the copyrighted quotations.

Please submit your manuscript only once; duplicate submissions will be discarded.

Allow, at minimum, 8 weeks for a response to your submission. It may take longer, as the number of manuscripts being submitted to us will likely increase over time. You will be notified, of either acceptance or rejection, via email. If your manuscript is accepted for publication:

After we have examined your manuscript we may:

If you are asked to revise your manuscript, please accept this as the positive response. This is a strong indication that your manuscript has a potential for publication. Pay attention and incorporate all suggestions (unless there is clear misunderstanding on our part, then please give a clear but succint explanation).

If your manuscript is rejected, we will not provide a critique or evaluation of your manuscript. Many factors must be taken into account in deciding which manuscripts are accepted for publication, and rejection does not necessarily mean that the manuscript is not publishable, only that it is not right for Altera at this time. Our resources financing, time, current publishing schedule and staff are limited, and are only able to accept a limited number of manuscripts from the many submitted to us.