Kube Publishing Submissions

Hello and As Salaam Alaykum,

We are now accepting portfolios directly from artists and illustrators for upcoming children's books published by Kube Publishing. 

This form is only for artists and illustrators, not writers. If you are a semi/professional artist and are writing AND illustrating a picture book or comic book, please submit a selection of your work along with some illustrations you have prepared for the particular project via the Children's and YA Proposals. 

We will only contact potential illustrators as and when needed. Do not email or message us on social regarding your work!

What we require

• A portfolio of your work
• A brief paragraph about yourself with your full name and contact details, including links to social media and a website of your work, if applicable. 
• An optional sample of your work

Due to the high volume of submissions we are not in a position to give feedback or critique. If we see potential of working together we will be in touch directly! Please note our editors or authors may already have an illustrator in mind for future projects. Submittable is not our only source for creatives. 

Thank you for choosing to submit your book proposal to Kube  Publishing

Our aim is to respond to every submission made, however,  we  cannot always guarantee that this will be possible. Furthermore, a  number of proposals are rejected because they do not contain enough  information, or because they do not give the right sort of information;  in order to give your project the greatest chance of being considered  for publication, please carefully read the guidelines for the type of  book you want to submit.

It can take up to 6 to 12 months, sometimes longer, for us to consider  manuscripts/proposals, with additional time often needed if other  opinions are sought. Before offering a contract for proposals we want to  pursue we will contact the author and discuss its merits and any areas  we would like to see improved. Should we reject your manuscript we will  not provide you with a detailed written appraisal of your work. In some  cases where we ask for a proposal to be developed and resubmitted,  additional feedback may be sent.

Guidelines

Kube is interested in publishing well-written fiction and non-fiction with an Islamic perspective, for children in the following age ranges:

• 0-3 years: board books up to 16 pages, up to 350 words
• 3-5 years: 24-32 pages, up to 750 words
• 5-8 years: 32-64 pages, up to 10,000 words
• 8-12 years: 64-120 pages, up to 20,000 words
• 13+/Young Adult: 100+ pages, up to 60,000 words

Please pay careful attention to these guidelines because the Editor  will not read your unsolicited manuscript unless you first send in a  complete submission. Your proposal needs to  include the following:

• A cover letter with your full name and contact details
• A brief CV/resume
• A one-page description of the proposal, including: 
  • A synopsis of the plot and description of the main characters;
  • The intended age group and audience;
  • A paragraph explaining what is unique or necessary about this book  in comparison to similar titles that are currently available on the market or our publishing backlist (Islamic Foundation and Kube). What is distinctive or different about this book?
  • Word length (actual or proposed)
• Your manuscript. If your manuscript is short, you may submit  the entire manuscript; otherwise, in the case of chapter books, submit  one or two sample chapters.

Please make sure that your spelling and grammar are correct! British  English is preferred, although North American English is acceptable.

• The whole manuscript must be in a single document (not separate documents for different chapters);
• Set your manuscript in plain text, Calibri or Times New Roman font,  11 point, 1.5 spacing, left-margin justified with document margins of  2.5 cm on all sides. Do not send manuscripts in fancy or coloured fonts.  Do not send in handwritten manuscripts by post.
• Do not send in artwork for your manuscript. If you have ideas for artwork or layout, you may submit these along with your text.
• If you are a semi/professional artist and are writing and illustrating a  picture book or comic book, please submit a selection of your work along with some illustrations you have prepared for the particular project.

After considering a submission, the Editor will contact you to say if  the Editorial team wish to see a complete manuscript for further consideration or not. This may take up to nine months if we send your  manuscript to be reviewed by external readers. Unfortunately we cannot respond to all unsuccessful submissions.

Thank you for choosing to submit your book proposal to Kube  Publishing

If you are a first-time author, or are still learning the ropes, then  reading and absorbing some how-to guides about book proposals and  preparing manuscripts is essential, as well as getting an understanding  of the publishing process and the book trade before you first approach a  publishing house such as ours. For trade or mass-market titles, a  popular guide is Michael Larsen’s How to Write a Book Proposal. For scholarly or academic titles, William Germano’s Getting It Published is very helpful; more specialized but equally important is Germano’s From Dissertation to Book for those who suffer from the delusion that their dissertation is the finished product.

In setting out to write a book, every writer needs some key reference  books by her or his desk. Some of the essential reference works are  listed in our house style guide (download here), chief amongst them should be Hart’s Rules,  a good Oxford dictionary, a thesaurus, and sources important for the  subject of your book. In addition to these, M. M. Gwynne, Gwynne’s Grammar (London: Ebury Press, 2013) is lucid and useful on grammar and on style too, as it incorporates the 1918 masterpiece Strunk’s Guide to Style.  An indispensable set of stylistic rules of thumb is George Orwell’s six  recommendations at the end of his essay ‘Politics and the English  Language’, which is widely available online.

Academia is notorious for inculcating bad writing habits. Germano’s works as well as Michael Billig’s astute polemic Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: University Press, 2013) and Helen Sword’s helpful guide Stylish Academic Writing  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012) are useful  correctives. Common bad practices include using far too many nouns, e.g.  turning verbs into nouns or using noun phrases, writing in the passive  tense, the overuse of jargon, writing about things rather than people,  lazy appeals to scholarly authority, too much redundant referencing and so on.

To submit an initial enquiry you will need to send in:

1. A letter of enquiry – keep it short, with a few key facts about you and your project, with your contact details.
2. Project description – keep it to one page. Explain the big  purposes and ideas in the book, and why it should be published. This is a  chance for you to show you can write well, and structure and summarize  an argument (and not just a description).
3. Curriculum vitae – don’t send in your standard CV, tailor it  to one page to show: (i) you have the knowledge and experience to write a  book on this subject, and (ii) you have previous experience or training  that demonstrates an ability to write clearly and well.
4. An optional sample – provide one or two chapters as a sample of your work, if available.

If we are interested, we will contact you for a full proposal.

Please click here to read the process following this initial enquiry.

DO NOT send in a full proposal without hearing from us first. We do not look at unsolicited manuscripts.

Our aim is to respond to every submission made, however,  we  cannot always guarantee that this will be possible. Furthermore, a  number of proposals are rejected because they do not contain enough  information, or because they do not give the right sort of information;  in order to give your project the greatest chance of being considered  for publication, please carefully read the guidelines for the type of  book you want to submit.

It can take up to 6 to 12 months, sometimes longer, for us to consider  manuscripts/proposals, with additional time often needed if other opinions are sought. Before offering a contract for proposals we want to  pursue we will contact the author and discuss its merits and any areas  we would like to see improved. Should we reject your manuscript we will  not provide you with a detailed written appraisal of your work. In some  cases where we ask for a proposal to be developed and resubmitted,  additional feedback may be sent.

THIS IS FOR SUBMITTING FULL PROPOSALS ONLY

Only submit a full proposal if you have received an e-mail from us accepting your initial enquiry. To send us a letter of enquiry, please visit the Trade and Academic Initial Enquiry page and follow the instructions there.

We do not look at unsolicited manuscripts.

The book proposal: what’s needed?

1. A full contents outline, which includes a description,of the main points and arguments you develop in each chapter. 
2. At least fifty pages of the manuscript, whether that is one chapter or two. 
3. A description of your target readership and assessment of the competition
4. Word count (actual or proposed)

Guidance for your proposal

Contents outline: Don’t summarize the argument because it will make the proposal seem insubstantial but instead explain what you are going to do in each chapter and section, which issues you are going to discuss, and how the examples given illustrate your argument. In short, don’t merely summarize but talk about how you are going to write the book. It is often helpful to break up each chapter into three to four titled sections. The point of the outline is to show the editor that you can research, order and outline the book in a dozen pages or less. The outline should give a clear sense of narrative or structural flow. Give each chapter an opening hook and a climax at the end that links to the next chapter. In the contents outline, you must provide full details of proposed textual features, illustrations or half-tone photographs (send electronic samples, which must be at least 300dpi), tables and charts.

Manuscript: The point of the sample is to show how well you can write. After all, you might have a brilliant idea but if you can’t write clearly and engagingly then your book stands no chance of getting published. And what your sample should show is that you are writing well for your chosen genre under the broad categories of non-fiction trade or academic titles that Kube and the Islamic Foundation publish. If you are an established author, you may not have to send in a sample, but a first-time author may have to send in more. Don’t automatically assume that you should send in the introduction, but, rather, those chapters that are most pivotal to the book. They do not necessarily have to be consecutive chapters.

Target readership and competition: For trade titles, you need to segment and define your audience by age, gender, geography and so on. Never talk about general appeal in unspecified terms. The use of reliable evidence about the level of interest will strengthen the proposal. For instance a book

on legal claims after car accidents would mention how many millions are involved in accidents each year. Assess sales figures for books in your field. For academic titles, in Germano’s words, there is your ‘devoted readership’, such as family and close friends, who will probably expect free copies, then your peers in your field who are your ‘core readership’, then a ‘supplementary readership’ who might have a passing interest in your book. Finally there is the educated reader, which is probably one’s ‘wishful thinking readership’. So focus on explaining the size of your core readership and provide evidence, not speculation, on its size. It may not sell as much as a trade title but an academic title that finds the right specialist audience can still be marketable.

Finally, assess the competition and learn from it. The claim that no one has ever published a book remotely like yours before is only very rarely true. Look at similar titles that are currently available on the market, and especially those on our publishing backlist (Islamic Foundation and Kube). If we have a similar enough book on our backlist already, then it is unlikely that we will be interested in your proposal. What does your proposal add that is distinctive or different? For trade titles, it is not a disadvantage that there are other good sellers in your field, as it indicates strong demand. For academic titles, as there is a greater premium on originality, there is a greater need to demonstrate that originality by discussing the strengths and weakness of books closest to yours in your field.

Word count: This should be broken down chapter-by-chapter, and also section-by-section. As this can be a sensitive issue, it is best to consult with the publishing house on this matter

After looking at a proposal, the editorial team will inform you if they wish to consider the full manuscript for publication or, as the case may be, to commission a manuscript for publication.