How to Structure Your Manuscript for Maximum Impact

Manuscripts and books · 837 words · about 4 minutes to read

Princeton University Press asks for a chapter outline before it asks for a chapter. Its proposal guidelines request a list of planned chapters, each with a proposed title and a paragraph describing what is in it. The press also asks for a one-paragraph description of the argument and a fuller one running one to two pages. Sample material is welcome, and the press says not to send the entire manuscript unless it has been requested. Authors are told to allow eight weeks for a reply.¹

That order is worth noticing. The first thing an acquiring editor reads is not the prose. It is a description of how the book is put together, written by the author, in a form the press has specified. A book with a clear structure and rough sentences can survive that reading. A book with polished sentences and no discernible shape often does not.

The proposal is a structural document, and it is scored as one

Every element Princeton names is a question about organization rather than about writing. The brief description asks whether the argument can be stated at all. The chapter outline asks whether the parts follow one another for a reason. The list of comparable books, which the press asks for with title, author, publisher, and year, asks whether the author knows what shelf the book belongs on.¹

None of those can be answered by revising sentences. They are answered by deciding what the book is doing and in what order, which is why the work has its own name in the profession. Editors Canada defines structural editing as assessing and shaping draft material to improve its organization and content, and lists revising, reordering, cutting, and expanding among its tasks.² The Editorial Freelancers Association uses different words for the same territory, describing developmental editors as dealing with content, organization, and genre considerations.³

An author who cannot write the chapter outline usually does not have an outline problem. The book has not yet decided what it is arguing, and the outline is where that shows first.

The parts of a book have a settled order, and presses publish it

Once a book is under contract, structure stops being a matter of judgment and becomes a matter of sequence. Cornell University Press sets out the arrangement of the front matter for its authors: title page, dedication, epigraph, contents, list of illustrations where one is needed, preface, list of abbreviations, and note on transliteration. It also notes that acknowledgments usually go at the end of the book rather than the front.⁴

That last instruction surprises authors more than any other, and it is the kind of thing no amount of rereading will reveal. It is published, it varies between presses, and it is settled by the press rather than by the writer.

The back matter carries the same kind of convention. Notes, appendixes, glossary, bibliography, and contributor biographies each have a customary position, and an academic book can put more work into that apparatus than into a chapter of the main text. An editor checking the apparatus is doing copy editing as Editors Canada defines it, which includes checking mechanical consistency and factual accuracy.²

Completeness is a structural requirement, not an administrative one

The University of Chicago Press states the rule plainly: anything an author plans to have in the book must be submitted before copyediting, including all art.⁵ All text material other than captions and descriptions goes in a single Word file, with figures supplied separately rather than embedded. Every manuscript must include a title page, a table of contents, and the full text.⁵

Cornell puts the same requirement on permissions, telling authors they are responsible for obtaining permission to use any copyrighted material, including their own previously published work, before the final manuscript is submitted.⁴ A chapter that arrives after copyediting has begun changes cross-references, note numbering, and the index, and none of those can be fixed by the chapter's author alone.

Structure, in other words, is not only the order of the argument. It is also the state the manuscript is in when it arrives, and a press treats the two as one question.

What an editor settles, and what stays with the author

A structural edit can report what the pages are currently doing. It can show where two chapters make the same case, and where a section is announced and never delivered. It can also show where the order of evidence works against the argument, and where a stated chapter count does not match the chapters present. Those are findings about the document, and they can be shown rather than asserted.

What the book is for is not an editorial judgment, and neither is the scholarly claim any chapter makes. EditFast works on the arrangement, the wording, and the consistency of what an author has written, and leaves the substance of the field to the author and their own readers. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished chapters, proposals, and correspondence with a press.

An author deciding where to spend the next month has a reasonable test available. If the chapter outline can be written in an afternoon, the book has a shape and the sentences are worth the time. If it cannot, the sentences will be revised twice.

References

Princeton University Press, Proposal Guidelines. https://press.princeton.edu/proposal-guidelines ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
Editorial Freelancers Association, Editorial Service Definitions. https://www.the-efa.org/editorial-services-definitions/ ↩
Cornell University Press, Author Guidelines. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/author-guidelines/ ↩
University of Chicago Press, Manuscript Preparation Guidelines. https://press.uchicago.edu/resource/emsguide.html ↩

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