Long Tale Press | Excerpt Submission Guidelines

Excerpt Submission Guidelines

Long Tale Press LLC is new in the publishing industry with a new concept on how books are selected for publication. However,we draw heavily on the industry standards to make the process as smooth as possible. Therefore, there are specific submission guidelines for writers to participate. Read these carefully. You need to know what we publish and how your manuscript will be evaluated. Disregard for these guidelines could result in your work not being posted for review, and in extreme cases could result in banning you from further submissions. Nobody wants that, so follow the guidelines closely.

We publish novels, novellas, and substantive short story collections. The minimum length is for a novella is 17,500 words. Minimum length for a novel is 40,000 words. Minimum length for a short story collection is 35,000 words. These are not an arbitrary numbers. The American Nebula Awards define a novella as 17,500 to 40,000 words. Therefore, a novel is more than that, and in our view a short story collection should be at least two novellas' worth in order to give readers a good value for their money. Please keep in mind that novellas do not sell for as high a price, nor yield as high a royalty as novels, but there is a market for them and we will consider novellas that have made the reviewer cut. Similarly, readers are going to be inherently more skeptical about short story collections because there is no guarantee that all the stories will be of equal quality, and therefore a short story collection will have an inherently more difficult time garnering the level of support from the community necessary to be published. Just in case there is any question, novellas, novels, and short stories are works of fiction. Fiction is stuff you made up. Please do not submit biographies, technical manuals, or how-to books. We may expand to those areas sometime in the future, but right now we are staying focused on fiction. A work of fiction may be based on actual happenings, but please don’t use names of real people other than for context. Keep in mind the common movie tagline: This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people living or dead is purely coincidental.
In order to submit your work, you should be sure that the work is entirely your own. We will not post, for example, sequels to Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, or any other published work unless you can show us a signed contract by the author of those original works that gives you permission to use the characters and settings. Fanfic, slash, drabble, etc. are not subjects for Long Tale Press and will be removed immediately if they are discovered. Reviewers will be able to flag possible copyright violations, so don’t think you can slip something by and get away with it. You, as a writer, certify that you own the rights to publish this work, it is your own work (or the work of you and co-authors), and that no one else will claim ownership.
If you submit your excerpt you are also certifying that
1. The entire manuscript is finished and could be submitted at anytime (that is, don’t submit chapter one in the belief that you’ll then write the rest if reviewers like it).
2. The manuscript is ready for publication, meaning that it has been edited, proofread, spell-checked, and is representative of the best work that you could put on a bookstore shelf. (This is not a first drafts site; there are plenty of those on the web, some of which we list in our writer resources section.)
3. The manuscript is not under contract to any other publisher and that all rights are available.
When you submit your excerpt, you understand that real readers will be reading and critiquing it. You agree that you will read the critiques with an open mind and respond to them when appropriate. These readers want your manuscript to be buyable and will offer helpful hints and ask questions about your intent when they make their evaluation. Do not attack reviewers. If they �just don’t get it,� it is your problem, not theirs. If you have to explain things to readers, it is unlikely that they will be interested enough in buying your finished work to vote it into the bookstore. Reviewers are also instructed not to critique you, but to focus on the work. They will talk about whether it holds together, is exciting or interesting, has good or bad character development, etc.
You can affect the outcome of your submission. In order to gain votes, it has to be read. People have to be interested in reading your submission. Therefore, encourage people you know who enjoy your kind of writing to join the Long Tale Press community and review your manuscript. Also, participate in forums and discussions so that people begin to recognize your name and look for your submission. Comments you make will include links to your active submissions; you do not need to “pimp your manuscript” in the comment. Let people know the kind of insights you have on their work and get respected as a writer with valuable input.
If, after you see some of the feedback, you decide that you really need to rewrite, you may suspend your submission, do the work, and resubmit. Previous comments will be retained, but the manuscript will be marked as revised. If you decide during the comment period that Long Tale Press isn’t the right place for you to have submitted, you may withdraw your submission. Long Tale Press does maintain the record of what has been submitted and what comments were made, but the submission will no longer be available for reading or commenting.
The following is what you will be asked on the submission form. Please be sure you have gathered everything together before you begin you submission. Incomplete submissions will not be posted. You may want to scan some of the sample submissions in the Submissions section before you start.

Synopsis. Think the blurb you see for a movie in the TV directory or movie rental site. Think of this as the pitch you would make to an agent, editor, or publisher. This should be no more than 100 words and should make people want to read your excerpt.

Length. Must be at least 17,500 words. Please be accurate to the nearest 500 words. We don’t need accuracy of 91,273 words range. Either 91,000 or 91,500 would be acceptable in this instance. Word counting mechanisms vary and if your manuscript is accepted, we will get an accurate count according to our own mechanisms. This is to let reviewers know if they are looking at a novella, short novel, medium novel, or a real tome.

Genre. As closely as possible, please relate your manuscript to a recognized genre of fiction. You can choose more than one, if applicable. The genres we have selected are:

Mainstream
Inspirational
Romance
Mystery
Thriller/Horror
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Young Adult Novel
Children's Chapter Book
Other (Please be aware that readers may be less willing to look at your manuscript if they don't know what it is.)

Tags. Please select a few additional descriptive terms that will help reviewers find excerpts that interest them. For example, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick could have a Genre of “Literary” and tags of “adventure, whale, quest”

Rating. There are young readers on this site. Please do your part to protect them from inappropriate material. Reviewers will be able to flag content that contains material beyond its rating, so please be thoughtful in your rating selection. Our rating system is similar to the movies.

G = Consumable by any reader
R = Mature content that is either sexual, adult-themed, violent, or just beyond what kids under 16 should be reading.
X = Explicit sexuality (think the difference between romance and erotica), hardcore violence, drug usage, and abuse.

Manuscript Excerpt. Please submit the opening chapter or two of you manuscript, up to 5,000 words. Our submission engine will mercilessly cut off anything past 5,000 words. It is better that you make the cut at a logical stopping point. Copy and paste the text of your submission into the submission box.