Publish With Us

Tell Us About Your Book Project

Before sending us your full manuscript, we ask that you submit a book proposal. Your proposal will give us a general sense of the content, focus, and potential audience for your manuscript and help the Press determine if we are the appropriate publisher for your work.

At this stage, we also encourage you to contact either the Press’s Director or our Managing Editor, either by phone or e-mail, if you have any questions about the submission process. We would be happy to talk with you about the areas in which the Press publishes, its plans for the future, and how your manuscript might fit with these.

Submitting a Proposal

Your proposal should include:

• A one to two page abstract of the manuscript. This should describe your research and the main focus of your manuscript.
• An annotated table of contents. This should briefly describe the main focus of each chapter.
• A description of books similar to your manuscript, and how your manuscript differs from them.
• A description of what you think the potential audience for your manuscript will be. For instance, will the book have any course potential? If so, please mention any similar books that are now used in courses.
• An estimate of the manuscript’s total word count. Also tell us what kind of non-textual materials your manuscript includes, such as photos, maps, tables, or charts.
• Your curriculum vitae.
• An estimate of when you will be able to submit a completed manuscript to us.

If your manuscript began as a thesis, please also provide the following details:

• When and where did you defend your thesis?
• Who was on your thesis committee?
• What major revisions have you made (or plan to make) to the thesis before submitting the manuscript to us?

You should send your proposal to the Press Director, either by e-mail or by hard copy.

The Press’s editorial and marketing staff will review your proposal to see how well your manuscript would fit into our publishing list. This internal review assesses the submission’s relationship to the Press’s areas of editorial focus and mandate, and also considers production, financial, and marketing aspects. This initial review usually takes four to six weeks.

Submitting Your Manuscript

If we feel that your manuscript does have the potential to fit our list, we will ask you to send us your complete manuscript, which we will send for peer review to two outside experts in your field.

Your manuscript should be double-spaced and numbered consecutively. It should include:

• Title page
• Table of contents with page numbers
• An introduction or preface
• The main text
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Drafts of tables, graphs, charts, and figures
• Copies of photographs or illustrations
• Any other material that will be part of the final manuscript, such as appendices or a chronology.

We will ask that you send us three hard copies of the manuscript (they can be printed either double- or single-sided). Two copies will be sent to the outside peer readers, and one will be kept at the Press.

Peer Review of Your Manuscript

We ask peer readers to answer the following questions about the manuscript:

• Does the work make an original contribution to the subject area?
• Is the scholarship sound?
• Is the manuscript, as it stands, acceptable for publication? If not, would a revised manuscript be publishable? What revisions would be required?
• Is it important that this manuscript be published? Why?
• What suggestions do you have for improving the manuscript, relating to style, inaccuracies, omissions, etc.?

We will share with you blind copies of the peer readers’ reports when we receive them. We will discuss these reports with you, and determine with you which are the key points that should be addressed.

At this stage, you will be asked to respond to the readers’ reports. Your response can include:

• How you plan to revise the manuscript to respond to any suggestions from the readers.
• If and why you disagree with any of the readers’ suggestions.

Each manuscript reviewed will also be assessed financially. We will assess your manuscript’s estimated production costs, including any special features (e.g. colour reproductions) and potential market. All scholarly books require some form of financial assistance to be economically viable, and we will discuss with you if an application to funders such as the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP) will be required to make publication financially feasible.

Approval by the U of M Press Editorial Board

The peer reports and your response will then be presented to the University of Manitoba Press Editorial Board. Our Editorial Board is made up of scholars from different disciplines appointed by the university president.

The Editorial Board will look at several factors when considering your manuscript, including:

• The readers’ reports and your response to them.
• The quality of the manuscript and its suitability to our list.
• Our analysis of production and financial considerations.

The Editorial Board may make one of three decisions on your manuscript:

• Accept it for publication, perhaps with specific revisions required.
• Ask that you make revisions and re-submit the revised manuscript for a second round of peer review.
• Decline to publish the manuscript.

Once your manuscript has been approved by our Editorial Board, it will be assigned a place in our publication schedule. In consultation with you, we will set a deadline for your submission of the final manuscript with revisions and all accompanying material.

Our Contract with Authors

After our board has approved publication of your manuscript, we will prepare a contract for your book. Our author contract is a standard book publishing contract. It lays out the responsibilities of both the Press and the author for the production and distribution of your book. For example, it is the responsibility of the Press to publish the work, to edit it and market it in accordance with current publishing standards, and to pay the author royalties on sale of the book and its subsidiary rights. It is the responsibility of the author, for example, to deliver the completed final manuscript on time, to obtain permissions to reprint all material that is copyright elsewhere, to prepare or pay for preparation of an index, and to obtain all illustrations, graphs, and charts included in the manuscript.

Preparing Your Final Manuscript

We prefer manuscripts to be submitted in Microsoft Word format, with embedded footnotes and endnotes. Please consult the University of Manitoba Press Style Guide for details on formatting your manuscript. In addition to our house style, the Press uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, and the Oxford Canadian Dictionary as its major guides; for legal citations, we refer to the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 6th edition.

The final selection of photographs, illustrations, maps, charts, etc., to be included in your book will be determined in consultation with the Press. You should consult our Guidelines for Submitting Electronic Art.

Editing and Production

Editing is a process of consultation; the Press may be in touch with questions during the editing process, and, when the edited manuscript is returned, you may approve or reject suggested changes. At that time, you will also be asked to make any final changes or additions to the manuscript.

We will send you the first proof of the page layout for proofreading. The Press will also do final proofreading at that time. The design, cover, and typography of the book are the responsibility of the Press and the designer, but we welcome your input on these elements. After the final layout is sent to the printer, the Press will check the printer’s digital proofs. Once the manuscript is sent to the printer, you should receive copies of your book within approximately eight weeks.

Sales and Marketing

As a university press, our core sales market is comprised of scholars, academic institutions, and libraries. Our goal is to make your research as widely available as possible. We accomplish this through extensive direct marketing to scholars across Canada and the US, distribution of examination copies to secure course adoptions, review copy distribution to scholarly journals, direct mail campaigns to libraries and library wholesalers, advertising in leading scholarly journals, and book displays at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences and subject-specific conferences in Canada and the US.

U of M Press is also proud to have significant sales in the trade market. When we develop your marketing plan, we take care to determine the trade sales potential for your book and work closely with our sales representatives to place your book in appropriate retail stores.

When a manuscript is accepted for publication, the author is sent a detailed author questionnaire. The questionnaire is one of the main tools our marketing team uses to determine the various scholarly, trade, and niche markets for your book. It also forms the basis for catalogue copy, back cover copy, and promotional materials.

Marketing of new books begins 8 to 12 months prior to the book’s publication. While you are working through the editing process, our marketing staff create the marketing plans for your book. Approximately six months prior to publication, your book is listed in our Canadian and US catalogues of new titles, which are distributed to scholars, bookstores, libraries, and wholesalers. Our marketing staff also creates a detailed sales rep kit that outlines your book’s unique selling features for our sales reps. Our sales force then meets with bookstores, wholesalers, libraries, and on-line retailers to sell your book.

U of M Press has two distributors: University of Toronto Press, who handle our Canadian and international orders, and Michigan State University Press, who handle our US orders. Both distributors are fully EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) capable, which means that they are fully integrated with retail chain store electronic ordering systems (like amazon.com and indigo.ca).