Submissions

 

 

Thank you for your interest in Northern Sanctum Press. Before submitting your manuscript, we have a few suggestions for your consideration.

 

We currently only accept submissions of completed manuscripts from Canadian authors. If you are not Canadian, or your manuscript is incomplete, you will not be given consideration. At this time, we do not have the leisure to commission works-in-progress.

 

At this time, we are only considering fiction novels. No non-fiction, self-help, religious, or other type works will be accepted.

Please review our ‘prepping for submission’ overview for formatting and style tips.

 

We accept electronic submissions only, in either rtf or doc formats as an email attachment sent to submissions (at) northernsanctum (dot) com. Please do not send manuscripts by regular postal mail.

 

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Prepping for submission

 

Every publisher has a particular style and flavour to their choices, and we are no different. Below you will find a list of our particular preferences, please note that other publishers may not have the same requirements. If you are submitting a manuscript for our consideration we will look for these key traits, none of which necessarily exclude a ms from consideration but rather demonstrate

 

Show, don’t Tell: If your main character is telling us everything through his/her thoughts and memories, then you might need to revisit the writing. The reader should experience the story action alongside your MC through the five senses (taste, touch, see, hear, smell) rather than hearing about it through your MC. Watch out for these red flag words: noticed, felt, saw, heard, smelled…etc. These are indicative of internalization and although it has its place, tends to be over represented in many mss.

 

Balance: solid walls of narrative intimidate the reader. Break up text with dialogue. Break up the dialogue with text. A nice balance of black and white on a page reads smoothly.

 

Extraneous words:

adverbs: Instead of ‘ly’ adverbs, use descriptive verbs. Adjectives and adverbs weigh down the narrative, slowing the pace.

That’s: Most can be gotten rid of, only 1/10 are usually properly used.

 

Active voice: If you are using ‘was’ and ‘had’ quite often, you should revisit your voice, making it more active. For example “He was beginning to get the feeling he was being watched.” Would be better written “His skin crawled. Someone was watching him.”

 

Dialogue tags: don’t use them most of the time. If you have ‘said’ anywhere in there, you probably don’t need it, it will be slowing down the action.

 

Use your thesaurus: rich writing does not have word repetition. If you find yourself repeating words in short succession (within the same paragraph, page or scene), dig out the old thesaurus and find an alternative word. Same can be said for character names, switch them up with pronouns and avoid starting sentences over and over again with either the name or pronoun.