Guide for Prospective Authors

We welcome submission of monographs, research aids and translations on the arts, literature and history of East Asia and Inner Asia.

Before submitting the manuscript itself, you should first send the Western Washington Center for East Asian Studies Press a query letter. Ideally, your letter should be no more than two pages and should include the following information:

1. the subject of your manuscript;
2. your general approach;
3. in what way the manuscript constitutes a contribution to your field;
4. approximate length in double-spaced manuscript pages, and number and type of illustrations;
5. your intended audience; and
6. your qualifications.

If you are aware of any previous publications of the Press that your work would complement, it would be helpful to mention them. With the letter you should enclose a table of contents and a brief sample of the text--perhaps your Introduction, if this constitutes a good summary of the manuscript.

Your letter and its accompanying materials will be reviewed by the Press's editorial board. The final decision to publish will normally be based on the evaluation of a complete manuscript.

Please note that unrevised dissertations cannot be considered. At a minimum, before submission it is a good idea to reduce excessive documentation and eliminate the summaries before and after individual sections, as well as other elements that make for a good thesis but stand in the way of a readable book.

If you are invited to submit the manuscript, you should send two unbound copies, double-spaced and numbered consecutively throughout, of as final and polished a manuscript as you can achieve. If illustrations are essential to the manuscript, send photocopies, with a few originals that will show the quality of your illustrative material. If you think some illustrations would enhance your text but are not critical, it is sufficient at this time to include some sample photocopies.

Once your manuscript has been received at the Press, it will be reviewed by the Press editorial board and perhaps by outside specialists in your field. The process of obtaining outside reviews can be time-consuming since the scholars the Press consults have many demands on their time, but we try to move expeditiously. It may be that further work is recommended before the manuscript is ready to be accepted for publication.

If your manuscript is accepted, you will be offered a publishing contract that spells out the reciprocal responsibilities of the Press and the author.

When final revisions and negotiations have been accomplished and a clean manuscript and disk have been sent to the Press, the manuscript will go to a copy editor.

At this stage, manuscripts are to be submitted both in hard copy (paper) and on a computer disk. A more detailed guide and style sheet will be sent for preparation of manuscript and disk, but in general, remember that:

1. the hard copy must be an exact printout of the disk;
2. double-space everything, including notes, bibliography, and long quotations;
3. leave wide margins--at least one inch on all sides; and
4. number the manuscript consecutively throughout.