Submissions policy

So you want to publish a book with Mapletree Publishing Company. Thank you for considering us. Please conform to our guidelines, as we may not respond if our guidelines aren't followed.

While we are happy to deal with agents, Mapletree does not require the author to have an agent before we will look at your work. We have a sifting process, though, so don't expect your manuscript to gain the attention of an editor immediately.

Is this a book that Mapletree wants?

Right now, we are working through a backlog of manuscripts waiting for publication, and won't be accepting any submissions until we've worked that list down somewhat. We estimate that by June, 2008, we will be considering more manuscripts.

Our mission is to publish excellent books that gently promote religious values, primarily in the areas of homeschooling, regional history, and quality fiction. We are looking for quality work by talented authors who are market-oriented. Our company is an energetic marketer, and we market our books mostly by promoting our authors in broadcast, print, and electronic media. We need authors who will partner with us to promote their books nationwide, which may include some travel. Our authors have been interviewed on radio and television, on local shows and on national shows, for newspapers and magazines. We sell books to the major chains and to independent bookstores all over the United States. We also sell to book clubs, gift shops, military markets, and general retail outlets. Internationally, we sell to Canada, and, through agents, we sell translation rights to other publishers throughout the world.

We are developing a reputation for quality books. Our titles so far have gained the attention of respected national publications, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist, and we intend to continue the selectivity and high standards that won us that praise.

We have certain subject areas that we will consider. Please see our list at the bottom of this page. Please don't send us manuscripts that don't fit these subject areas. We have business reasons for limiting ourselves to these areas.

We are currently very limited in accepting fiction manuscripts from previously unpublished authors. We have existing authors that we are cultivating, and, at this point in the development of our company, are concentrating on expanding our nonfiction offerings. If you haven't published with us before, your novel has to be truly outstanding for us to consider it.

We also have one absolute—what we publish needs to be decent and uplifting. We don't need to agree with everything in the manuscript, and we aren't going to set hard-and-fast rules on what to include or not to include, though we certainly don't want novels with explicit sex scenes or that promote immorality or violence. Valuable lessons, however, can be taught using characters who are without question bad examples and who use bad language, and they can do awful things that are part of your book. We are looking at the overall purpose of your book—does it leave the reader a better person for having read it? Does it promote faith, kindness, honesty, loyalty, and virtue? If it doesn't, we won't accept your work because it doesn't fit our mission.

Beyond that, your manuscript needs to be well-written, persuasive, and interesting. A nonfiction author also needs to have some credentials in the subject matter—a reason for people to consider you an expert.

Should I send a query?

If you have the material already written, send the entire manuscript.

For nonfiction, if you want to know whether you should proceed with an idea that you feel meets our criteria, send a proposed table of contents and a description or outline. If we like your idea, and if you can demonstrate that you have the credentials and the ability to write a credible book on the subject, we may sign a contract with you based on the proposal. Then we will work with you on the development of your book.

For fiction, we want to see a completed manuscript.

How should I submit my manuscript?

We need two things from you: your manuscript (or just a book proposal, if the work is nonfiction), and a completed author questionnaire. Please send us your manuscript electronically, as an e-mail attachment, to manuscripts at mapletreepublishing dot com. We do not accept paper manuscripts, because we do all our editing on the computer. We edit and correspond with our authors by e-mail, so you will need to have e-mail capability in order to work with us—that's why we require e-mailed submissions.

Manuscript preparation guidelines

The following are our standards for manuscript preparation. Try to conform to them as much as you are able. Many of these are fairly common document-preparation guidelines that should work for most national publishers. (For an excellent exposition of manuscript preparation guidelines, see also Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition), The University of Chicago Press, 2003, sections 2.10−2.18, pp 61−62.)

1. Simplicity is important. We don't want a fancy printout—we're interested in your words and how you use them. Keep formatting simple. This is the computer age, and we do all our evaluating, editing, and even type-setting on the computer. If you put extra formatting elements into the text, we will simply have to take them out before we can finish working with your manuscript, and this is laborious and annoying.
2. Please combine all files for the manuscript into one file before you send it to us—we don't want a separate file for each chapter. We like the table of contents, preface, back matter, etc. all combined into one single computer file.
3. Only the left-hand margin should be justified. Leave the right margin ragged.
4. To simplify our work, do not add any paragraph or page formatting to your text as you type—let your word processing program format the text for you. For example:
   •    Don't have hard returns anywhere but at the ends of paragraphs. (A hard return occurs when you press the "enter" key at the end of a line. Putting in a hard return makes the computer think you are starting a new paragraph.) And don't add extra hard returns between paragraphs—just one return, please, will indicate the end of the paragraph.
   •    Set your word processing program to automatically double-space your manuscript.
   •    Do not use the tab key to indent paragraphs. You can usually set your word processor to automatically indent the first line of each paragraph, and this is what we prefer.
   •    Don't put in page numbers manually, but let your program put them in automatically. Then, when changes are made to the manuscript, the computer will change the pagination appropriately.
   •    Don't use a hyphen to split a word at the end of a line. It doesn't matter if the right margin is ragged. Hyphens will remain and may move to the middle of a line when we re-format your manuscript to fit a certain sized book page, so only use hyphens for hyphenated compound words.
   •    Enter a "page break" command at the end of each chapter.
   •    If you don't understand these restrictions or have a special case, please contact us prior to submitting your manuscript to discuss them. E-mail us at manuscripts at mapletreepublishing dot com* or call us at 800-537-0414.
5. Don't use substitute characters. Don't type lowercase el (l) where the numeral one (1) is intended. Don't type capital oh (O) where zero (0) is intended. For unusual characters and symbols, use the "insert symbol" command rather than a makeshift substitute that looks like the symbol you want but isn't really. If you cannot find an adequate character or symbol, please draw attention to the situation in the text with a parenthetical comment in the body of the text.
6. Watch extra spaces! It can be very time-consuming for us to edit out certain extra spaces. For example:
   •    Modern publishing standards call for having one space, not two, after periods, colons, and at the end of each sentence.
   •    No extra space should be left after the final punctuation at the end of a paragraph. If you think you have stray extra spaces in your manuscript, turn on the "show ¶" command on your word processor, which will show all of the paragraph, tab, and space markings. Then delete tabs and extra spaces before you send it to us or any other publisher.
   •    Don't use tabs or spacing at the beginning of paragraphs. Instead, use the paragraph format command to format your paragraph so that the computer automatically indents the first line of each paragraph.
7. These manuscript preparation guidelines are fairly common for publishers who have fully entered the computer age. We would recommend them for submissions to other publishers, also.

8. Thanks for your help with this! Using these standards simplifies our editing work considerably.

   In what subject areas does Mapletree publish?

   Our passion is to publish books that gently promote religious values. Our primary expertise is with books about parenting and homeschooling and literary fiction. Our audience consists of those people who reject the degrading influences of much of contemporary culture and who want books that teach virtue and goodness.

   Here is the list of what we are presently considering:

   Nonfiction:
   •    Homeschooling
   •    Regional history
   •    Politics and public policy

   Fiction:     We focus on literary fiction and mainstream fiction. We don't publish any science fiction, fantasy, or youth fiction but will consider romance and adventure novels. And, as we stated above, at present we are mostly cultivating authors who have already published with us. If you are new to Mapletree, your manuscript needs to have quality writing and you need to be willing to work with our very talented editors to polish that manuscript so that it will get noticed. We are particularly looking for novels with substance and depth. That is, it needs to say something, and it needs to say it in a profound manner. Good novels are interesting, smooth-flowing, well-paced and well-written, with likeable, realistic characters. Great novels go a step beyond that and make you think, teaching you truth in a thought-provoking way.

   These are the areas where we have special expertise. We will not accept a book that we don't know how to market.

   We are not accepting any doctrinal works or scriptural study guides because we are marketing to general, national audiences. Also, books that are degrading, basically pessimistic, erotic, that encourage self-defeating lifestyles, or that have gratuitous violence will simply not be accepted.

   Children's books:     We don't publish any children's books or any youth books. We have no expertise in the children's market.

   Poetry:    No poetry either.

   If your manuscript doesn’t fit any of these categories, e-mail us or call with your questions, and we’ll be honest with you about whether or not we feel we can give you the expertise you need to help make your book successful. Sometimes we can give you tips on how to present your work to another publisher that has expertise in your genre.

   If I send my creation, don't I risk someone plagiarizing it?

   Current copyright laws protect you, the author, the moment you create your work, whether or not it is registered with the copyright office. If you have conclusive evidence that you wrote it, you're protected.

   *note on e-mail addresses: to foil e-mail harvesting programs employed by spammers, we post our e-mail addresses in this way. When we write: "john at doe dot com," we mean "john@doe.com."