Outskirts Press Book Publishing – Approving Production

The final step prior to approving production on your book is making sure we have received your manuscript. There are several places to submit it throughout the process (including emailing it to your publishing consultant), but we make it flexible for our authors to expedite their personal steps through the pre-production process in whatever manner works best for them, independent of the status of their manuscripts. In this way, authors can complete most of the pre-production steps as they prepare for publication even before their manuscripts are 100% completed.

But ultimately, we require the final manuscript before we allow the author to approve production. So at this stage, I select my Word file for Fandemonium Volume 2 from my hard drive and upload it via the ‘Submit your manuscript electronically’ option. There is also an option to submit a hardcopy version, although that incurs an additional fee and slows the process down, so I highly recommend going the digital route.

With this final step completed, all that’s left is approving production by clicking the last box on our online check-list.

Now, in my case, Outskirts Press has already completed two steps (assigning my production team and my ISBN) and now needs to complete two more:

Accept the manuscript
AR Approve production

Since I just submitted my manuscript, Outskirts Press hasn’t reviewed and approved it yet. No surprising. Reviewing a complete manuscript can take a few days and unlike many of our competitors, we review and accept every manuscript we publish. This prevents your book from appearing alongside other, “questionable” books (which is what happens for authors publishing elsewhere). Like all self-publishing companies, however, I will be the first to admit that the subjective quality threshold for books we accept is very forgiving. But we draw hard stands on some unacceptable content: we do not accept books that are pornographic or libelous in nature, or books that obviously infringe upon copyrights (yes, taking content and/or images from the Internet without proper approval is a violation of copyright law; we don’t allow that for your protection).

Once your manuscript is reviewed, you will receive a Publisher’s Evaluation via email. This evaluation by our evaluation team sometimes makes some suggestions for ways you can improve both your manuscript and your publication. In many cases, it may even include a complimentary 1000-word “spec edit” so you can fully appreciate the value of copyediting. In other words, it’s beneficial, and more efficient, if you submit your manuscript earlier in the pre-production process than I did here. By the time you receive the evaluator’s comments, your Author Representative has probably already moved the book into the Production, in which case, you see this message in your Publishing Center: