Process Questions

ETC Press doesn’t offer story or line editing services. In many cases, our authors have fully fleshed out ideas for their work when they approach us. However, we do provide feedback on the book proposal during our conversations with authors and read over the submitted texts during design and layout.

What about copy editing?ETC Press doesn’t offer copy editing services. We expect our authors to have that done before they submit the final project to us. However, we are friends with many copy editors, and we’re happy to recommend them to you.

ETC Press has an author style guide, which explains how authors will turn in their manuscript. We do this to allow for an easy import from a Microsoft Word document into our design templates. (We separate content from design so we’re not using Adobe’s InDesign to design our books.)
Once we import the book’s content, our editor goes through the project, adds in the styles such as subheads or block quotes, adds the front and back matter (for example, the copyright page and About the Author).

The short answer is that you retain ownership of your work. You are simply giving ETC Press permissions to publish your work.ETC Press publishes all its work under one of two Creative Commons licenses:

ETC Press asks authors to submit a truncated version of book proposal for any new projects for two reasons.

The first is that our editorial board can better get a sense of your project so that we can best support you through the project together. The second is that it allows us to have a conversation with you not only about your project, but also the expectations we each have, so that we can make a more informed decision about whether to accept your book, and you can get the information you need to decide if we’re a good fit for your project.

Once the design process is finished, ETC Press editors will export the final print and digital proofs and send those along to the author.

Here is where the process gets a bit tricky. In traditional publishing, authors would read the proof, make corrections on the PDF, and send those back. However, our design templates don’t include pages. For example: If you pull up a book on a phone, a tablet, and a computer, the “page” of the book will depend upon the size of your screen.