Erica Young, a freelance book editor since 2016, consulted publishing experts on what common mistakes authors make when submitting their manuscripts and compiled them in her latest blog post. Our president and publisher, John Koehler, was one of the experts interviewed:

Submitting your manuscript can be a nerve-racking experience. How do you know who to submit it to? What are they looking for? How can you give your story the best chance of getting published? If you’re a first-time author, it can feel especially daunting.

In this article, I share some tips and guidelines from the experts so that you can learn a bit about the manuscript-submission process from the other side.

I reached out to some popular publishers that take submissions from new authors and asked them about mistakes that authors make when sending in their manuscripts. Over the following days, I received a lot of responses — some were things that I expected and others surprised me. If you’re submitting to publisher after publisher and no one is biting, you may be making one of these common mistakes.

Read More to check out the full blog post!