Submitting your manuscript

Once you have finished writing your manuscript, it’s time to submit it along with all the supporting documents. Send everything to your assistant commissioning editor by email or, if your files are large, transfer them using the Edinburgh University Press SFTP site or a service like WeTransfer.

As a University Press, we nurture every project from idea to publication and beyond, to maximise its influence and impact. To achieve this it’s typical for books to undergo a full manuscript review when it is first submitted, to provide our authors with an additional opportunity to refine their work.

Before you submit

Mark-up your headings and display quotes

• Guidelines for marking-up your manuscript (docx)

Choose your cover image

We want you to love how your book looks, so we give you the opportunity to choose your own cover image (unless it’s in a series with a typographical design). Check the cover image guidelines for more details on choosing your cover image.

• Guidelines for choosing your cover image

Clear copyright

If your book includes material in copyright, you will need to clear permission to use it before submission.

• Find out about clearing copyright

Check and collect your illustrations

If your book has illustrations (pictures, graphs, tables, charts, maps – anything that’s not plain text), these must be of high enough quality to print and submitted as separate files. Do not embed your illustrations in your Word document.

• Follow the illustrations submission guidelines

Fill out your submission forms

• Edinburgh University Press Book Form (docx) – all books
• Illustrations Checklist (xlsx) – for books with illustrations
• Online resources checklist (xlsx) – for books with online resources

What to submit

• Your manuscript as one complete Word document, from the table of contents, through the text of the book, to the bibliography (you don’t include the index at this stage).
• Your completed Book Form.
• Cover image – either the high-resolution image or a link to the website where it can be found.

For books with special characters, non-Roman alphabets or other special features

• Your manuscript as one complete PDF document (created from the final Word document and submitted in addition to the Word document).

For illustrated books

• All illustrations as separate, high-resolution files (for more details on this, see the illustration submission guidelines).
• Your completed Illustrations Checklist.

For books that are reproducing material in copyright

• Your permission confirmations: copies of the emails or letters from the copyright holders.

For books with online resources:

• Online resources files. For text files, or combined text-with-images files, create these in the same way as your manuscript: as a Word document and separate image files.
• Your completed Online Resources Checklist.

Next steps: production

Once you have submitted your manuscript, your assistant commissioning editor will hand it over to our in-house production team.

• Find out more about the production process: from manuscript to finished book