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                            SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Our Submissions Department is OPEN to NEW Submissions. PLEASE READ and FOLLOW these Guidelines to be considered for publication. Thanks!


Gypsy Shadow is a royalty paying, non-subsidy electronic publisher. We ePublish high-quality, well-written manuscripts in a variety of genres and lengths. We welcome submissions of short story collections, novellas, novels, novels in installment and non-fiction works. For 2017, we will be accepting manuscripts of 10,000 to 50,000+ words in length. Any manuscript longer than 50,000 words contracted for publication will be placed in the queue for publication at the earliest possible date.

Genres: As you will see on the http://www.gypsyshadow.com homepage, we have a variety of original genres. Fireflies includes books which are fantasies and modern fairytales. Moonbeams are the science fiction, time travel and alternate reality books. Riddles are mysteries, suspense, horror, emigma and adventure stories. Shadow Dance includes dark fantasy, paranormal and supernatural stories. Dusky Moon includes erotica and hot romance (EXTREMELY LIMITED acceptance of this genre). Bard’s World is poetry, songs and lyrics (no longer accepted for publication). The Grove includes nonfiction except history. The Guild is for books about arts and crafts. Legends are tales of history, folklore, alternate history, historical fiction and religious fiction. New Springs is our youth and young adult section. Stardust stories are mainstream romances and chick lit. The Wee Folk section is for the children's stories. March Winds is the free reads and sample chapters section, if you would like to submit works to be included as an example of your writing style.

In regard to publishing print books, we will be selecting a few books (8-10) for print publication each year, although increasing this number is negotiable. Manuscripts must be at least eighty pages long to be considered for print publication. If you are interested in print, please contact us for more information. Print contracts are NOT automatically issued without mutual agreement.

Please FOLLOW these guidelines as closely as possible, or your manuscript WILL BE RETURNED to you for proper formatting or AUTOMATICALLY REJECTED.

Send us a cover letter via email with the entire manuscript attached in .doc format for Microsoft Word (please, NO .docx or .rtf format). Title your email: Manuscript Submission: Your Manuscript Title: Your Last Name and mail it to submissions@gypsyshadow.com/. In the cover letter, tempt us to read your manuscript with a short, vivid plot description. Also include any information about yourself which you feel could influence our accepting your manuscript.

Formatting guidelines: Use ONLY Times New Roman 12 point font throughout (NO large or fancy fonts can be accepted for the eBook, so we prefer to add them later ourselves for our final PDF), with NO page numbers, NO headers and NO footers. NO EXCEPTIONS, no matter how much you think you are better qualified to lay out your manuscript. ALL MANUSCRIPT FORMATTING is at our sole discretion.

In Microsoft Word, under the Home Tab, Select All and click on the Paragraph arrow to open the menu. Under indentation, set Left and Right at 0” and uncheck the Mirror indents box. Under Special, select First Line and input .3”. Under Spacing, set Before and After at 0 pt and Line spacing to 1.5. Click Okay.

We strongly suggest you use the Show/Hide icon on the MS Word toolbar and observe your punctuation and spacing as you write. This will enable you to see tabs, spaces (do NOT double space between sentences) and paragraph marks. As you write, please delete spaces after punctuation marks at the end of paragraphs. These should all be cleared, since they can cause text wrap problems in electronic formatting programs.

If you have set any Tabs, you will need to open the Paragraph Menu again and select Tabs at the bottom, then Clear All Tabs and OK. Additionally, if you have tabbed anywhere in the document, you will need to Replace the Tabs with nothing by selecting Replace in the Home Tab, inserting a Tab symbol (Click on Replace, More, Special, Tab Character. Leave the Replace field blank [NO spaces or any other character]. Click on Replace All.)

Please use ONE Enter only at the end of each paragraph, NEVER Shift + Enter (which creates an arrow, NOT a Paragraph mark) or Control + Enter (which creates a Section Break). DO NOT Enter at the end of each line, but ONLY at the end of an ENTIRE Paragraph. DO NOT enter Section Breaks of any kind in your manuscript, but insert TWO lines (TWO Enters) between chapters and ONE line between other breaks within chapters. Three or more Enters anywhere in your manuscript will cause problems with eBook formatting programs and will cause your manuscript to have errors as eBooks.

If you wish to learn more about formatting, an excellent resource is the Smashwords Style Guide, which we follow for all our eBook submissions online. It is located at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52/, as well as in the files in our author news group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheGypsyShadowNews/). EVERY MANUSCRIPT we receive must meet this criteria from Smashwords before we can process the manuscript for eBook publication. We do embellish manuscripts for final PDFs, but we must begin with a clean manuscript with as few formatting, grammatical and spelling errors as possible.

Please PROOF your entire submission for errors BEFORE sending it to us. A sloppy submission does not impress us favorably toward reading or accepting your work! The cover letter should also include the genre of your work, the word count, your complete contact information (legal name and pen name, if any; physical address and telephone number). We accept ONLY electronic submissions.

We publish first novels only if they are of professional quality. A literary agent is not required for submission. We WILL NOT consider simultaneously submitted or previously self-published manuscripts. We will consider ePublication of backlists of professional writers.

It may require up to three months for our editors to review a submission and come to a decision. If you do not hear from us that we have received your submission (this does NOT include acceptance or rejection of said manuscript, but merely that we have received it) within thirty (30) days of submission, please email Denise at denibartlett@gmail.com.

Attention: Manuscripts MUST NOT CONTAIN: pedophilia, rape, incest, necrophilia, bestiality, racial intolerance, or anything considered depraved or illegal, presented in a positive light or as titillation. Please note that in sexually explicit material, all characters participating in ANY sexual activity MUST BE at least eighteen years of age.

Please send manuscripts to:
Denise Bartlett, Chief Editor
email to: Submissions@gypsyshadow.com
Submissions sent to any other address at Gypsy Shadow WILL NOT be accepted and may not even be received.

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