A Guide to the Dostoyevsky Wannabe Publishing Process

We've been through this process a few times and have been refining it over the years so that it is as smooth as possible for everybody.

STAGES OF THE PUBLISHING PROCESS

Initial Submissions Stage

Please look out for our regular calls for submissions. We welcome unsolicited submissions from writers (both agented and non-agented) only during those reading windows and will not respond to out of scope submission enquiries. At this stage, full manuscripts for fiction can be delivered in any readable format that you wish so please don’t worry too much about formatting when submitting. For visual books and non-fiction books we require proposals at this initial stage. Check the relevant submissions guidelines on the submissions page submissions.

All submissions must be sent to the relevant email address.

We can no longer talk about or agree or half-agree manuscripts over social-media or anywhere other than via the appropriate email processes and this holds for even if we’ve worked with you previously.

If your manuscript is accepted, then we move onto the next stage.

Contracts and Due Dates

Dostoyevsky Wannabe experiments with different publishing models some of which, due to aspects of how they operate, are rather more casual and require-only verbal agreements over email whilst others, such as our tailored model, involve standard contracts.

All contracts reflect the diminutive size of the Dostoyevsky Wannabe publishing side and the fact that all typesetting and design is done in-house. Proofreading and formatting is the responsibility of the author. Our contracts do not aim to promise anything that we can’t reasonably deliver and they are written to that effect.

It is at this stage that you will receive a date by which you must deliver your final correctly formatted manuscript.

Delivery of Manuscript

Once the contract is agreed, we will be in a position to offer a due date by which you should deliver your manuscript. The condition of the delivered manuscript needs to adhere to our formatting guidelines and house-style. The delivery of a satisfactory manuscript is the main condition with which we can move forward with the publication of the book. What qualifies as satisfactory can be found in our formatting guidelines.

Manuscript Review

In the event that the formatting of the manuscript doesn’t adhere to our formatting requirement then we reserve the right to reject the delivered manuscript which will delay the publication of the book.

The publishing side of Dostoyevsky Wannabe is very small and under-resourced and thus can no longer spend time fixing incorrectly formatted manuscripts.

Typesetting

At this stage the book will be typeset. The author has no involvement in this stage.

Final Review

The final review stage will involve the author conducting a final proof of the typeset PDF to check for any formatting or typographical errors that have crept in through the typesetting process before returning a marked-up and commented PDF detailing all of the errors (a single Word document detailing all errors with all page and/or line numbers is also acceptable). There will be no more rounds of revisions beyond this stage unless allowed at the discretion of the publisher.

Cover Design

Cover-design is completed as and when the publisher can get to work on it.

Post-Publication

It is at the author’s discretion whether or not they wish to hold a book launch event, but the author must not plan a launch until the book is out and on-sale. The responsibility for any such launch falls to the author.

COMMUNICATING WITH US

Pretty much all that you will need can be found in this guide and elsewhere on our site. Due to time restrictions and the amount of work that we do, we don't have a lot of time to discuss details of this process with you in person as much as we would have been able to do in the past. For the first few years, we just answered all queries about the publishing process in email or on social-media and all was well but as Dostoyevsky Wannabe has grown we have found it harder and harder to do that.

Unlike huge corporate publishing houses who employ large amounts of staff to produce lots of books, or smaller independent publishing houses who might outsource typesetting and cover-design to third-parties, Dostoyevsky Wannabe consists of only a very small team all of whom have other day-jobs) and we do all of the typesetting and cover design ourselves so there are just not the hours in the day to continue working on a one-to-one basis across email or social-media (incidentally, conversations on social-media tend to bypass our usual working practices and often therefore add more complexity and not less, books have ended up being delayed via plans that we've made with people in social-media inboxes).

If you have fully read everything on our site and you still can't find the answer to your query then feel free to email us and we will get back to you.