Submission Guidelines

The number and kinds of photographs to be reproduced in your book are subject to approval by the Press. Photographs should be glossy black-and-white prints of good reproductive quality, preferably 8 x 10 inches in size; black-and-white or color slides are also acceptable, though not preferred. Color transparencies or high-quality prints are required if the photographs will be reproduced in color (in the book or on the jacket or cover). To avoid damaging photographs, never write on them (front or back) or use paperclips to attach captions or explanatory notes about cropping or placement; instead, number them by affixing to the back a premarked label, indicate preferred cropping on a photocopy, and provide a separate list of captions for all illustrative material. For manuscript review purposes, photocopies of photographs will suffice. The actual photographs and permission to reproduce them must accompany the final manuscript (prior to copyediting). When seeking permission to reproduce photographs that are covered by copyright, you should ask for world rights in all languages and editions. Do not obtain or pay for photographs until you've been told by your sponsoring editor that they will be used in the book.

For additional information about photographs, including captions, see our guidelines for the electronic preparation of manuscripts.

Graphs, Line Drawings, and Maps

The number and kinds of graphs, line drawings, and maps (i.e., figures) to be reproduced in your book are subject to approval by the Press and must be in a form that is suitable for photoreproduction or scanning. We discourage the inclusion of simple pie charts and three-dimensional bar graphs. Our guidelines for preparing charts, diagrams, and maps provide detailed information about the final form for all figures that do not already exist in printed form (whether previously published or not). For manuscript review and copyediting purposes, you should submit draft (not final) versions of these figures, since changes may be required. For figures that are already in published form, you should submit clean, high-quality photocopies or 8 x 10-inch black-and-white glossy prints, along with permission to reproduce the figures in your book. When seeking permission to reproduce figures that are covered by copyright, you should ask for world rights in all languages and editions. Do not obtain or pay for graphs, line drawings, or maps until you've been told by your sponsoring editor that they will be used in the book.

For additional information about figures, including figure captions, see our guidelines for the electronic preparation of manuscripts.

The number and kinds of tables to be included in your book are subject to approval by the Press. When seeking permission to reproduce tables that are covered by copyright, you should ask for world rights in all languages and editions. Do not obtain permission or pay for tables until you've been told by your sponsoring editor that they will be used in the book. All tables, whether taken from another source or written by you, will be reformatted to the Press's house style and therefore must be submitted in electronic form.

For additional information about tables, including notes and sources, see our guidelines for the electronic preparation of manuscripts.

As the author or editor of the manuscript, it is your responsibility to obtain, or to instruct the contributors to an edited collection to obtain, and to acknowledge at the appropriate place in the manuscript, such permissions as may be required to reprint any copyrighted material, whether previously published or not, that falls outside the bounds of fair use (i.e., reprinting material without receiving permission for usage). This includes but is not limited to graphs, line drawings, maps, photographs, tables, musical scores or examples, portions of or entire chapters, and quoted prose, poetry, or song lyrics. Such permissions must be obtained in writing and submitted with the final version of the manuscript (prior to copyediting). You should request world rights in all languages and editions. Please remember to allow adequate time for a response to your permissions queries, at least two weeks. Click on the links below for samples of permission request forms

Request for Textual Material

Request for Modified Article

Request for Illustration/Art (formal)

Request for Illustration/Art (informal)

Request for Unpublished Material

Request for CDs

Interview Release Form (formal)

Interview Release Form (informal)


Section 107 of the Copyright Law of 1976 indicates that the following factors must be taken into consideration when determining fair use:

1. the purpose of the use, including whether such use is commercial or nonprofit/educational;
2. the amount quoted in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
3. the nature of the copyrighted work;
4. the effect of the use upon the market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In deciding what constitutes fair use, it is reasonable to expect that a book of readings may be more commercially profitable than a critical study and that using one 4-line section of a 100-line poem is less significant than using 4 lines from a 12-line poem. You must also take into account the familiarity of the poem or poet. Even if you may be quoting two lines from, for instance, a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, you are better off requesting permission from the estate. Lyrics and music almost always require permission, no matter how much you are reprinting, because of their strictly enforced copyrights. ASCAP and BMI represent most songwriters, composers, and music publishers. If some of your own writing in the manuscript has been previously published, either in journals or books, you may need permission or assignment of copyright from the earlier publisher, depending on the length and nature of the reprinted material.

With regard to previously unpublished material, in general a small, noncontroversial quotation used without permission may be acceptable, whereas a substantial or controversial quotation requires permission from the author or the author's heirs, unless all rights have been yielded to another, such as an archive, in which case the archive is empowered to grant and must be approached for permission. Ownership of a physical item (such as a letter) does not give ownership of the intellectual property (the letter's contents). Barring clear and unambiguous assignment of copyright, all copyrights belong to the author, whether or not the material in question has been published.

These same general rules apply to quotation of interviews. It is advisable, at the time an interview is conducted, to ask the interviewee to sign a brief statement: "I give [interviewer] permission to use my interview(s) with him/her in his/her publication [working title]." See above for a sample interview release form. As a practical matter, short, inoffensive quotations from interviews may be used without permission.

Illustrative materials present another type of problem. Some are indeed in copyright; others, particularly those in the hands of a repository, may be in the public domain but totally inaccessible to the general public, in which case the repository can claim rights based on possession and access. Any payments required are essentially payments for services rendered, even though the forms stating the conditions under which publication may be made read much like copyright permissions.

Please bear in mind that although you may have received permission to photocopy or use materials from libraries or archives, the permission does not extend to reprinting the material in an article or book.

For additional information on copyrights and permissions, you may wish to consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). You may also wish to consult the Association of American Universy Press web site at http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/copyright/index.html for answers to your copyright and permissions questions.

The Press urges authors to write direct and clear English in a style that is accessible to the broadest possible audience for a given work. Please be sensitive to the social implications of language and seek wording that is free of discriminatory or sexist overtones. Our house style is based on but does not rigidly adhere to The Chicago Manual of Style on matters of bibliographic and note style, punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, number treatment, and so forth; on matters of spelling we consult Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1993). For some works the basic parenthetical reference style, with explanatory notes and works cited list, of Joseph Gibaldi's MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1999) is acceptable.

In general the Press does not consider unrevised doctoral dissertations for publication. If you're writing a book based on your dissertation, you'll find useful advice in The Thesis and the Book, edited by Eleanor Harman and Ian Montagnes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976).

Other publications useful to authors and editors include Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses; Claire Kehrwald Cook's Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985); and William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's Elements of Style, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

Accuracy

Please check, correct, and bring your manuscript and disk up to date before final submission. It is your responsibility prior to copyediting—not the copy editor's or eventually the proofreader's responsibility—to verify facts, including dates, and to check each quotation against the original source. You should check and correct the spelling of all personal and place names as well as all foreign-language terms, inserting accents marks as needed. Notes should be read against the text and the bibliography (if there is one) for correct and consistent citation of author, publisher, place and date of publication, and to verify that each note corresponds to the section of text indicated. If short titles are used in the notes or the text, please make sure that they are consistent from one chapter to the next.

Reference Systems

Notes, if any, will likely appear either at the end of the book (with running heads that provide inclusive page numbers relating the notes to the text) or at the ends of chapters (required for edited collections). If you have a preference for one placement or the other you should discuss it with your sponsoring editor. Bear in mind that we rarely set notes at the foot of the page.

Below are some examples of reference styles that are acceptable to the Press.

Endnote System without Bibliography

      1. John Friedman, "A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Planning Behavior," Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (Sept. 1967): 225-52.
      2. Ibid., 261.
      3. C. E. Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), 33.
      4. Ann E. Gordon and Mari Jo Buhle, "Sex and Class in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America," in Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 278-300.
      5. Lindblom, Policy-Making Process, 203-4.
      6. Gordon and Buhle, "Sex and Class," 280-83.

Note the inclusion of publishers' names (not mandatory but strongly preferred) and the avoidance of op. cit. in notes 5 and 6. When the state or country is needed in publication information, you should use the standard abbreviation, not the two-letter ZIP code abbreviation.

If your notes will appear at the ends of chapters, a full citation is needed the first time a work is cited in each chapter; if your notes will be gathered at the end of the book, a full citation at first appearance in each chapter is optional (i.e., once you have given a full citation for a work, you may thereafter, in subsequent chapters, use only the shortened form).

Endnote System with Bibliography

If your manuscript includes a bibliography that is primarily a single alphabetical list of sources, then shortened citations can be used throughout the notes (i.e., no full citations in the notes), as follows:

1. Friedman, "Conceptual Model."
2. Ibid., 261.
3. Lindblom, Policy-Making Process, 33.
4. Gordon and Buhle, "Sex and Class."
5. Lindblom, Policy-Making Process, 203-4.
6. Gordon and Buhle, "Sex and Class," 280-83.

The relevant bibliographic entries would be as follows (where books, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections appear in the same alphabetical list):

Friedman, John. "A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Planning Behavior." Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (Sept. 1967): 225-52.

Gordon, Ann E., and Mari Jo Buhle. "Sex and Class in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America." In Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays. Ed. Berenice A. Carroll. 278-300. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Lindblom, C. E. The Policy-Making Process. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969.

Note the inclusion of publishers' names (not mandatory but strongly preferred) and the avoidance of op. cit. in notes 5 and 6. When the state or country is needed in publication information, you should use the standard abbreviation, not the two-letter ZIP code abbreviation.

Author-Date System with Works Cited List

[text]
The ordinal scales also have potential use as a basis for designing interventions for handicapped infants (Robinson and Rosenberg 1987, 312).

[works cited entry]
Robinson, Cordelia C., and Steven Rosenberg. 1987. "Strategy for Assessing Infants with Motor Impairments." In Infant Performance and Experience: New Findings with the Ordinal Scales. Ed. Ina C. Uzgiris and J. McV. Hunt. 311-39. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

[text]
A reader-oriented literature would seem to call for a reader-oriented criticism, and that is what has come about over the past two decades with the confluence of postmodernism and poststructuralism (Arac ix).¹

[note]
      1. This confluence of the creative and the critical reveals the extent to which writing a novel is itself a critical act. As Waugh writes of self-reflective novels, they explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction (Metafiction 2).

[works cited entries]
Alcoff, Linda. "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory." Signs 13.3 (Spring 1988): 405-36.

Annan, Noel. "Bloomsbury and the Leavises." In Marcus, Woolf and Bloomsbury 22-38.

Arac, Jonathan, ed. Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Marcus, Jane, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Contrary to the MLA Handbook, we require that you spell out rather than abbreviate publishers' names. Also, notes should be reserved for comments, explanations, and other information that cannot be accommodated in the text. In books focusing on specific texts (e.g., the works of Virginia Woolf), two- or three-letter abbreviations for those texts may be used, provided a list of abbreviations, with references given in full, precedes the text.

Overdocumentation

Authors who use an endnote system are strongly encouraged to avoid overdocumentation. Readers should be led to the most important sources, not to every source uncovered during your research. Overdocumentation is relatively common in manuscripts based on doctoral dissertations and should be eliminated in the course of revising your manuscript for publication.

Anthologies and Edited Collections

Previously published articles and essays, whether they comprise all or part of a work you're assembling or editing, must be scanned or typed onto a disk and proofread against the originals. Unless you receive a waiver from the Press, via your sponsoring editor, we cannot accept for copyediting and typesetting pages that have been photocopied from the original publications.

For edited collections, the style for notes and references must be uniform throughout, whether the essays have been previously published or are being written for the collection. This consistency of style, together with the editor's introduction, helps to give unity to the finished book. The editor should provide each contributor with a style sheet and, before the final manuscript and disk are submitted, must impose consistency where the contributors have not.

Each contributor should provide the editor with a disk version of his or her essay (using the word-processing program specified by the editor) and a matching hard copy. It is the editor's responsibility to reformat the files as needed so that the final printout submitted to the Press employs one style throughout. A table of contents for the collection is required and should include the title of each essay and the contributor's name. A list of contributors that provides current affiliation, a few notable publications, and relevant research interests should appear at the end of the manuscript.

If any essays in the collection have been previously published, permission to reprint them or assignment of copyright from the original publishers may be needed and should be obtained in advance of final submission of the manuscript.

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