How to Get Published

by Al Kalar

One of my jobs in this madhouse, is “gatekeeper”. I review new submissions to see if they get rejected up front or considered for publication. I hate saying “no”, but if I don’t, we’d be flooded with less than top notch material.

Lousy material takes too much time to whip into shape and often can’t be saved. Although we edit everything we publish, we’re not in the business of editing poor quality stuff to help a writer get published. There are people who do that and some are very good at it (and some are not). But, even though our editors are great, our job is publishing.

Back in May, I gave you 11 Ways to Get Rejected. Well, what about the flipside? You know, the goal of the submission process - acceptance.

Obviously, the most important thing is to not do any of those 11 deadly things.

We’re strictly an eBook publisher, so we do everything digitally. To get a novel accepted at AKW Books, you should do the following: (more…)

by Al Kalar

There are a number of ways to make sure your inquiry to a publisher is rejected. These are just a few of them and I’m sure the list will grow as author “wanna be’s” dream up new ways to annoy a prospective publisher. The examples are from our experiences here at AKW Books, but the problem isn’t one that this little eBook publisher has; the paper publishing industry suffers from the same

1. Try to rip off some other popular idea and thinly disguise it. If you want to write CSI books, pitch the CSI franchise owners, don’t try to write one “like” it. Heck, if you’re good enough, you might get a gig scripting episodes of one of the programs. If you LOVE Harry Potter, by all means try to rip off that idea; call it HogWorthy’s rather than Hogwart’s. Rawlings won’t mind and she doesn’t have enough money to sue you (and us) into poverty anyway. (more…)

by Al Kalar

Okay, so this has nothing to do with getting published.  I just thought you’d like to know what happens to your manuscript in the eBook publishing world of AKW Books.  This is our in-house cycle from inquiry to published work. We’ll assume you are sending in a work of fiction (non-fiction is slightly different, but many of the skills required and our procedures are the same).

When you send in an inquiry, it arrives in the same email box with all our other correspondence, so whoever opens it up will route it to one of our editors.  With this act, we assume you have read and agreed to our standard contract (Standard Agreement). (more…)