Checklist for Authors Preparing Their Manuscripts for Copyediting and Submission to Columbia University Press
1. Please submit the Authors Questionnaire electronically with the manuscript.
2. Copies of all permissions letters (for copyrighted text or art) should accompany the manuscript.
3. If your book is a contributed volume, two signed copies of each contributor agreement should accompany the manuscript. The agreements will be countersigned at the press and returned to each contributor for his or her file.
4. A word and character count (including spaces and all notes) must accompany the manuscript. It is very important that you do not exceed your contractual word count. Your book has been approved, and a selling price and marketing plans have been generated on the basis of that length. Your word count will have been confirmed with you prior to sending your contract. If your final manuscript exceeds that count, it will be returned to you to make cuts unless you have prior approval for the new length from your editor.
5. Every chapter or essay must be in its own Word file. Two double-spaced hard copies, which you should print out from that final version, should accompany the electronic files. Even front-matter pieces should be separated into individual files. Number and name files sequentially (e.g., 01_titlepage.doc, 02_TOC.doc, 03_preface.doc, 04_acknowledgments.doc, 05_ch01.doc, etc.). We will not accept a manuscript in one long file. Be sure to include a title page with the exact title and subtitle, author/editor names spelled as you want them to appear in the book, and any other names you want there that acknowledge contributions to your manuscript. Please also provide a table of contents.
6. All hard copies should be on 8 1/2" 11" paper. Material that will require the attention of the manuscript editor (text, notes, footnotes, and bibliography) should be double-spaced; quoted matter can be single-spaced.
7. The entire manuscript should be paginated, and the numbers should run consecutively from beginning to end.
8. All notes should be embedded in the chapter files and sequentially numbered by chapter. They should print at the end of each chapter. If the notes are not embedded, our conversion macros cannot manage them effectively. Be aware that notes for edited collections will eventually be printed as endnotes (at the end of each chapter), while notes for single-author works will be printed as backnotes (at the end of the main text). Footnotes are cumbersome and expensive, and we will not generally set them. Similarly, tables should be prepared in Word and left in place in each chapter with their correct numbers (e.g., Table 1.1, Table 3.2) and titles.
9. Be sure to use a consistent citation system. If you use the author-date system found in the natural and social sciences, then the references list at the end of the book must list the author followed by the work's date. If you use humanities style, please use superscripts to refer to notes prepared in that style with a bibliography that corresponds in form to that system. Do not use dates directly after the author's name. We will not accept citation systems that mix the two conventions, e.g., author-date cites in text with a humanities-style bibliography. It takes too much time for the copyeditor to fix this minutiae. If you are confused, please refer to chapter 1 of our authors guide on the CUP Web site or to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed.
10. In notes that have repeated sources, give the full bibliographical information in each chapter’s notes on first appearance of that citation. Thereafter use the short form, i.e., last name of author, shortened title, and page number(s). If you have a bibliography, we prefer that you use short cites throughout the notes. This saves space as well as time in manuscript editing. If you have a bibliography, credits in captions should also be provided in the short form.
11. MS Word can produce European accents and characters, as well as Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. You can find these under Insert-->Symbol, using Times New Roman. If you are working with Asian transliterations, Sanskrit, Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, use the Arial Unicode MS font, which can also be found under Insert-->Symbol. No other fonts are acceptable, because they do not work with our editing or typesetting system. If you are submitting a manuscript containing ayns and hamzas, you have two options. Use either single quotation marks or the characters from the Arial Unicode MS font in the Unicode hexes 02BE (ayn) and 02BF (hamza), which can be typed directly into the Character code window in the Insert-->Symbol dialogue box. If you use quotation marks, you must be vigilant in your review of the edited MS that they all face the right direction.
12. ALL art for a project must be in hand and transmitted to production before an MS is released. An MS that is lacking some of its art program will be returned to the acquiring editor. All tables, even the simplest, should be placed in separate files. Tables and art should be called out in their appropriate locations in the text (e.g., “Table 1.1 goes here” and “Figure 3.2 goes here”). All graphs and illustrations should also be separate files or camera-ready hard copies; they must not be embedded in the text. Art files should be stored on CDs, a copy of which you should keep. You will receive an analysis of your art if some of it is not acceptable. The art guide accompanying your contract specifies the kinds of corrections that will be needed. At the same time you fix these pieces, please insert any edits that might have been made on the hard copy of your art by the manuscript editor. Boxed text should simply appear in the text files, where you want it. Boxes should be delimited with simple notes to the MS editor (e.g., “Begin box 1.1 here . . . End box 1.1 here”).
13. As stated in the CUP authors guide, you should restrict proof corrections to typos, grammatical errors, and updating statements when world events subsequent to typesetting would affect the validity of what you say. You can easily exceed your author-correction limit—for instance, by making more than one correction on every other page. Since you will be charged for corrections in excess of this amount that are not necessary, please make sure that all your final rewriting is done at the review of-editing stage.
