Manuscripts must conform to our standards, as set out at the time of submission. This is to minimise costs for our authors as well as ourselves. You will need to convince us in the exceptional case where there are good grounds for departing from the standards. We will still require consistency.

When we first receive your book manuscript (electronically only please), a number of directors will read it and jointly decide whether it meets our criteria. We publish what the directors - all writers themselves - consider to be enjoyable, marketable books which other publishers cannot 'fit into their lists'.

Next, we review quality. Manuscripts which follow our standards can be finalised quickly. Those that do not can take many hours to finalise. If our directors find a significant number of problems, the book will be returned for revision.

In the production process we will:

• add leading title pages and trailing company pages
• add a table of contents
• add page numbers
• set print font face and size
• adjust margins to the target book size

Technical standards

Our technical standards are designed so that your book does not need substantial manual editing when the document reflows (repaginates) as a result of production changes. Therefore, the standards on the following three pages are mandatory (these standards are maintained by an associate on a different web site)

• word processing standards
• style sequence standards
• cover standards

Our standards are set out in the context of OpenOffice Writer, which we recommend as being better than Word for long manuscripts. However, authors are free to use any word processor, including Word, providing the manuscript can be opened in Word or in Writer with the recommended style sequence intact.

We recommend that authors adopt these standards early in the writing cycle, even before the decision is made to consider Goldenford as the publisher. Following the standards will benefit all authors, irrespective of the publisher you use.