Scrub Your Manuscript
I’m still mining great information from the panel discussion by small press publishers I attended at the Wisconsin Book Festival. As the discussion got deep into how to find a publisher for your chapbook, policies varied, from accepting unsolicited manuscripts to invitation-only, but all of the publishers the advice quickly turned to a point on which all agreed: if you want a publisher to seriously consider your work, the manuscript has to be perfectly clean. Here are their suggestions, which were made with poets in mind, but which apply to all writing you’re preparing for submission:
Read and Re-read
When you’re working on a manuscript, you will have to read and reread your work. It’s hard to catch your own errors: after all, you know what it’s supposed to say. Let a little time elapse between making revisions and reading the new version. And always edit on paper rather than on screen.
Seek Out Critique
Don’t send out anything that you haven’t showed to at least one other writer whose editing skills you trust. A reader will find things you can’t, from whether a poem delivers on its promise and how well the poems you’ve put together work as a collection to misspellings and bad line breaks. Get feedback on each major revision.
Fresh Eyes
The final step, after assembling, editing, revising and re-editing your collection is to have a fresh set of eyes read it over. Ask someone who hasn’t seen previous drafts of the poems or manuscript. Fresh eyes will find a surprising number of small things to fix in a manuscript you were sure was perfect.
Thanks again to the fantastic panelists and moderators: Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman, co-editors of Verse Wisconsin; Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press, B.J. Best, editor of Desperado Press (from whom I borrowed the gorgeous image above); F.J. Bergmann of Mobius-The Journal of Social Change; Lester Smith, president of Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and president of Popcorn Press; Ralph Murray of Little Eagle Press, Wisconsin; Linda Aschbrenner of Marsh River Editions and former editor and publisher of Free Verse; and Richard Roe of Fireweed Press.