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.