Author Guidelines

When submitting your work for publication to The Collins Press as a contracted author, the material should be presented in the following way:

• A hard copy of the material must be submitted, along with the electronic disk files. It is critical that the hard copy correspond exactly with the electronic files submitted. The hard copy should include any last-minute updates to the disk.

• Disks should be submitted in either Word or Quark Xpress files. Please use Quark 4.1 or Quark 6.1.

• Line spacing and Word Spacing:
Use single line spacing and single spaces between words – even following full stops. Type should be flush to the left, including heads.

• Do not use the tab key to indent for the start of a paragraph – either do not indent at all and leave a line space to indicate the end of a paragraph or use the left indent under formats to indent automatically.

• For bulleted lists, an asterisk is to be used to represent a bullet. Type the asterisk, followed by a tab to the text. For numbered lists, type the number followed by a period, then tab to the text. Do not boldface the numbers.

• If including a quotation, please leave a line space before and after the quotation, and put the quoted passage into speech marks.

• Speech marks at all times are to be single unless denoting a quotation within a quotation, when double marks are used within the single.

• Number the manuscript pages consecutively.

• If you want to italicise something, ensure that it is also italicised in the hard copy, so it can be cross checked. Italics, like footnotes, do not always carry well into other computer programmes if the material is being reformatted so we need to be able to cross check them in the hard copy.

• For footnoting, please simply mark footnotes manually in the hard copy so they can be positioned by hand once the material is typeset. Like italics they often go astray when reformatted in other computer programmes. The corresponding notes are to be positioned at the end of the material, as a list of endnotes, and ought to be numbered chapter by chapter. So each chapter’s notes begin with 1, and the endnotes are then listed under the chapter heading at the end.

• Ensure that you keep a back up file of any material submitted.

• If supplying images or maps for inclusion within the body of the book these should ideally be provided as tiff files, with the material saved at 300dpi. If this is not possible then we require clean hard copy of these images, no bigger than A4 size, which will be scanned.

• Regarding copyright, all quotations of more than 500 words require permission and it is the responsibility of the author to acquire this permission. Quotations containing fewer than 500 words may also require permission and out of courtesy it is regular practice to contact a copyright holder if using their material. It is important for you to write to the copyright holders as soon as possible, and to send us copies of the letters of permission to keep on file. Likewise, permission to include a photograph or image for which the copyright does not belong to you is required, and again, we will need copies of the letters of permission once these are received. Since letters of permission may take some time to arrive from copyright holders, permission would need to be sought as soon as the contract is signed.

• As the author, you are responsible for providing the index. You may find it worthwhile to have a professional indexer to do the job. If your book is technical or scientific in nature, we urge you to prepare the index yourself as most professional indexers will not have the technical knowledge to do justice to such an index. Because the index is the last part of the book to be set in type, any delay in preparing it may delay publication. Begin collecting your index entries as soon as you have read the first batch of page proofs and the page entries can then be finalised once the final set of proofs arrive.

• The entries to be included in an index are names of people, organisations, institutions, events, places and so on.

Important Rules:

• Alphabetise entries beginning with Mc or St as though the full form – Mac or Saint – were used.

• Alphabetise figures as though they were spelled out – 40 under forty.

• Alphabetise abbreviated names according to the order of the letters in the abbreviation, not as though they were spelled out.

• Separate each entry from its page number with a comma.

• Keep entries as concise as possible.

• Combine similar entries where possible and cross reference where necessary.

• Set the index up in regular, single-columned pages and we will convert the entries into columns here.

• If you have ideas for cover images then please also submit them as your input will be valued.