The author submission package

When I was sending Eyemind off to Angry Robot yesterday I had to double-check their submission requirements several times.  Like all other agents and publishers, they have precise requirements for what they want to see.

Some of these are obvious, like the instruction to send the first five chapters of your novel.  I can't understand why someone would send chapters from further on in the book, but apparently they do.  Their logic is that the story only gets going in chapter three, so those are the best chapters.  The obvious answer to that is to say that chapters one and two should be deleted and the story should start with chapter three.

Other requirements are more worrying, like the requirement to sum up your book in one sentence.  If  the sentence I've chosen doesn't appeal to the readers, does that meant they won't read any of my carefully-crafted manuscript?  Agents are always advising us that, in the end, it is the quality of the manuscript that matters.  I can only hope that Eyemind passes this first brutal test.

The other thing that comes across strongly from their requirements is that they're very interested in your social media presence, asking you to state your Facebook, Twitter, blog, and website URLs.  It's almost compulsory for a writer to have a web presence, and for many publishers this has become part of their selection procedure for new authors.

We have to think potential celebrity when we're submitting our work.  Publishers want  to know if we can sell ourselves as well as our books these days.