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Information for Book Authors and Editors
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Author and editor guide
The high calibre of our material is important to us – all of our academic titles must receive a positive peer review before we take it to production, and we take pride in the quality of our copy-editing, design and marketing processes. This guide for potential authors and editors gives important information about our peer review policy, submission guidelines and publication schedule.
Style guide
Our preference is for authors and editors to follow the house style (based on the Harvard referencing system), although our copyeditors are also able to work with Chicago, MLA, APA and MHRA. Your production manager will advise you on this. If you are using house style, please familiarize yourself and any contributors with the rules laid out in this guide. We hope that this document answers all your stylistic queries, however, you can direct any additional style questions to naomi@intellectbooks.com
Download the latest Intellect Style Guide
Citation Style Language
We have created a Citation Style Language (CSL) file for Intellect House Style to be used with reference management programs. This CSL is compatible with Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and many more listed on the citation styles website.
Download the CSL file
Indexing your book
Indexing your book is one way to strengthen its academic rigour, making it more accessible and easier for a reader to reference. Intellect does not provide an indexing service in-house, so you will have to find funding if you choose to include one. If you are intending to create one yourself, please download our Short Guide to Indexing, which covers some of the basics of starting an index and notes our house style.
Download the Short Guide to Indexing
Image guide
It is very important that images are supplied as high-quality JPEG files as low-resolution images print fuzzy, jagged and blurry. This guide has been produced to help you check that your images are big enough to be used.
Alternative text for images
As part of Intellect’s commitment to innovation and accessibility, we ask our authors to provide descriptive text alternatives for all images, graphs and figures in your work. Useful guidelines can be found at the Diagram Center website and the Describing Visual Resources website
Download the Alternative Text Form
Download Alternative Text Guide
Visit our Accessibility Statement page
Tables, charts and graphs
Please use Microsoft Word’s table feature to create any tables, and embed them in the manuscript when you submit. Each column should be clearly labelled, and we prefer that you avoid the use of merged cells, colour or shading. Do not submit tables as images, PDF or excel files.
Graphs (line, bar, pie etc.) should be submitted as high-resolution JPEG files separately, and should follow the same standards as images. The data presented on any graph needs to be fully explained within the alternative text form. Graphs can be submitted in colour or greyscale, but do check with your production manager on how they will be printed.
Marketing your book
Marketing is crucial to the success of any title. This guide offers advice on what we do to market your book to reach the right audience and what you can do to help us promote your book.
Download the Books Marketing Guide
Contributor publishing agreement
Editors, please ensure that all contributors to your edited collection have completed, signed and returned this form. These should be sent to your production manager with your original submission as we cannot publish without the contributors’ agreement. The form contains information about our privacy policy and GDPR, Open Access, republication and image/text copyright. It is very important that all editors and authors have read and understood this form.
Download the Publishing Agreement
Chapter metadata
To improve the discoverability of our books, e-books and chapters, we ask for all authors to fill in a form with as much metadata per chapter as possible. Separate forms should be collected for every chapter of an edited collection. We encourage authors to provide funder information and grant numbers for any funded research, ORCID iDs, abstracts, keywords etc. This will not appear in the printed version of your book.
Writing better metadata
What is metadata?
Metadata is any data that describes a book, which includes obvious things such as title, ISBN and publication date, as well as ‘deeper’ data such as bookshelf-categories, keywords and table of contents – basically, all the information that can be found on an Amazon book page that helps the reader decide whether they are interested in a book or not. The keys to good metadata are consistency, accuracy and specificity.
Why do we need rich metadata?
This deeper metadata, or rich metadata, will help make a book more discoverable. It not only helps the research to be found and therefore be cited more and increases sales, it also helps the Intellect marketing team with their efforts in promoting the book with international reps and online shops such as Amazon.
But this is not all: Rich metadata also makes a book more accessible for a number of readers, not least to communicate to them that the book is accessible whilst also giving information about the book that can be extracted by screen reader tools. Read about Intellect’s commitment to make our publications accessible here
What happens if we don’t have rich metadata?
Without rich and consistent metadata, it is easier for a book, once it is not on the booksellers’ front lists, to get ‘lost’. Readers might just not be able to identify a book as the right choice for them because of a lack of information, or because of the many other titles that have similar, generic identifiers. If accurate keywords, subject codes, descriptions and author/editor information are available, a publication will still be discoverable in years to come – something Intellect is of course keen on, as we are proud to publish original thinking!
Where do we get the metadata from?
As our authors and editors naturally know their books (and their readers) best, Intellect is counting on their co-operation to help reach the right audience. While it is easy for us to access the superficial metadata, items like keywords and descriptions can be much more accurate, relevant and specific when coming from the authors and editors. We therefore ask for a survey to be filled in once a book has passed peer review.
This document gives advice on writing effective titles, abstracts and keywords in order to increase the visibility of your work.
Download the Writing Better Metadata guidelines
Proof corrections template
When carrying out proofreading of the typeset PDF of your book, please clearly list any changes on a table, using the page numbers and line numbers printed on the proof. Editors should also use this table for their own proofreading. Editors of collections should send contributors a copy of this table with the proof of their chapter.
Download the Proof Corrections template
Copyright permissions
It is the author’s responsibility to secure written permission from copyright holders for reproducing images, tables, figures or text extracts. If required, copyright permissions must be obtained before the book is submitted for production. When looking to use material from books/journals, contact the original publisher. For images from an art agency, museum, library or gallery, contact the organization. Photographers typically hold copyright over photographs. This letter can be used as a template when seeking copyright permission.
Download the Image Copyright template letter
Fair dealing
Some use of copyright material is allowed within academic publishing under ‘fair dealing’ in UK copyright law, or ‘fair use’ in US law. The UK and US interpretations of fair dealing/use do differ, and this is still a grey area in copyright. Please be aware that it is your responsibility if you choose to use content under fair dealing/use, and we do advise you to seek permission from the copyright holder wherever possible.
Visit the UK Copyright Service website for a fact sheet on using copyright works.
Visit the Society for Cinema and Media Studies website for advice on the use of film stills.
Visit the US-based College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts (2015) for advice based on feedback from artists, designers, curators, museum directors, academics, art historians, rights officers and publishers.
Ethical standards
We are committed to upholding high standards of ethical behaviour amongst our staff, authors and editors and maintaining these standards throughout the publication process.
See also
Information for Journal Editors and Contributors