How to Publish with Us

How to publish with us

• If you would like to be considered for publication, you need to make an inquiry from the Submissions page on our website.
• If we like your inquiry, we will invite you to submit a full proposal.
• If we like your proposal, we will offer you one of our four contracts.

How long does the submission process take?

• Inquiry submitted to Proposal invited or declined - 1 week.
• Proposal submitted to contract decision - 3 weeks.
• Reader reports usually completed within two weeks of Proposal submission.
• Times can vary by up to a week depending on volume of submissions and staff availability.

Why do you reject inquiries and proposals?

Here are some common reasons we turn down manuscripts.

How do I submit an inquiry?

You can submit an initial inquiry from our Submissions page.

Video

I submitted an inquiry and now I have been invited to complete a proposal. What do I do?

When you log in to the CI site, you will have access to two pages, Book Details and Profile. Fill out the open fields on each page.

• The Book Details page is designed to tell us everything important about your book.
• The Profile page is designed for you to tell us everything important about you as an author.
• For guidance on how to fill out each field, read Chapters 2–5 of this Publishing Guide.The Dos and Do-nots of filling out a proposal

We will only consider your book for publication once.

If we offer you a contract, we will use the information here as the starting point for your sales, marketing, publicity and back cover copy.

Some of it, like the book title and your short bio, will feed through to our website and databases used by bookshops and Amazon, etc.

Show us your best work, take your time and do it carefully!

• Don’t include just a synopsis. We need at least 5000 words of the final text.
• Don’t use ampersands, quotation marks, hyphens and other special punctuation.
• Don’t use non-English characters, such as Greek lettering or French punctuation.
• Don’t copy and paste info into the fields. It messes up formatting.
• Do type it in from scratch.
• Do include info that you would be happy to see circulated; no private notes, comments etc.

You will diminish your chances of publication (at least of getting it without being asked for a subsidy) if:

• You provide a draft, not a polished manuscript.
• You provide sample chapters, not a complete text.
• Your work contains spelling and grammatical errors.
• Your work contains unprofessional styles of punctuation or formatting, such as words in ALL CAPS, or too many exclamation marks!!!
• Your work contains colour photos which you insist on keeping (as a general rule, we only print black and white, though exceptions can be made).
• Your work contains too many text boxes, charts and complex graphics (these are expensive to format for publishing and increase the cost of producing your book; though again, exceptions are made).

Guidance on individual proposal fields

For a quick guidance as you're filling it out, click on

For detailed guidance, our Publishing Guide has help articles on nearly every field (linked below).

Book Details

Book Details fields you need to fill out: Title; Subtitle; Strapline; Description; Audience; Market Position; Marketing Plan; Competing Books; Unique Selling Points; Estimated Sales; Author Sales; Estimated Word Count; Other Publishers; Files; Endorsements; Reviews; Categories.

Profile

Profile fields you need to fill out: First / Last Name; Website address/social feeds; Address; Full Bio; Short Bio; Previous books, detailed guidance in How To Fill Out Your Author Profile

I’m ready to submit my proposal. What do I do?

Click on the Click here to submit proposal button at the top of the Book Details page.

I have submitted my proposal. What happens next?

Our team of readers are notified for their comments on the proposal and the manuscript, usually within a week*.

Based on their consensus, our Managing Director makes a decision to offer a contract or not, usually within three weeks*.

There is nothing legally binding on either side until contracts are accepted.

I have published with you before. Do I still need to submit an inquiry?

Yes.

The presence of an existing ISBN and listings on retail sites causes issues and confusion. Also, it’s likely all your initial sales will have been taken up by the first publication, so we’d be starting from a more difficult standpoint…

How many inquiries do you invite to submit a full proposal?

Between June 2021 and May 2022 we received 1541 inquiries. Of those we declined 1098 and invited 443 to submit a full proposal, about 28%.

During this time we signed contracts with authors to publish about 160 books.

*Times can vary by up to a week depending on volume of submissions and staff availability.

Share this page: