From the submission guidelines of House of Honor Books:
The Manuscript
Attach the final draft of your completed work to your email as an MS Word file.
We don’t want to see sample chapters, and we don’t want to see an early draft that does not show us your writing at its very best.
To me, that’s straight forward and easy to understand, but apparently there are those who do not fully grasp what a finished manuscript is. When you submit your manuscript to any publisher, you’re saying, “Here take my baby. I’ve done all that I can. This is my story in its entirety. I’ve edited, revised, and polished it to the best of my ability. I’m done.”
If the publisher decides it shows promise, it then enters the que of editing. With luck they may find nothing (dream on), other than a couple of missed commas sitting together as cozy as can be with no real reason to be there. Or they might send you back a chapter for revising. Their only goal is to improve on what you’ve written.
Now is not the time to decide that you want to add more chapters or revise chapters. You are done with that aspect. You have seen any changes they made or requested you to make. But what if they made a change you object to? It’s called a discussion. Let’s say it happens in chapter two of your great work. Bring it up then, not when they’ve moved on to editing chapter 8+. That just bolloxes the entire editing process.
It's perfectly okay to have a logical objection. A good editor will have an equally compelling reason as to why it was changed and will listen to why you don’t like the change. By the same token, you need to set aside any knee-jerk response you have to changes being made to your ‘baby’ and listen to why they made the change. There shouldn’t be any hurt feelings. Again, their goal is to aid you in creating the best book possible.
If while making corrections the editor has asked for, you decide that you need to add another scene, paragraph or what have you to that chapter (Why? You’re done, remember?) for crying out loud, flag it out in the editing margin. Make sure they see it. Otherwise, you might end up with all kinds of grammatical nastiness. But again, when you submitted your manuscript it was complete. You shouldn’t be adding stuff now unless requested.
My best advice to avoid this? When you think you’re done, set it aside for a bit, then reread it. Do any tweaking you want before submitting it.
Judy Snyder
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