Writer’s Guidelines
Old American Publishing
Please query (editor.oldap@gmail.com) before submitting your manuscript.
A submission (or query) must include:
Your name (and pen name, if applicable)
Your email address and phone number
The title of your story
A brief description of your story. What book or movie is your book similar to?
Note: We do not accept poetry, but we love most kinds of non-fiction at Old American Publishing.
File type: We prefer standard PDF files. We will accept .doc, .odt and .rtf
Word length: 35,000 words minimum, 100,000 words maximum.
If your book is full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but it's a good story, we will probably correct it and publish it anyway at no charge to you.
If your book is poorly written and grammatically substandard, we will recommend you correct it and resubmit later. If you want, we can recommend two or three professional editors. You decide which one you want. However, we do not guarantee any work done by anyone who is not employed at Old American Publishing.
If we like your manuscript, we will generally get back to you within three to six months. We need to read it and evaluate it.
If we don't think we can sell enough copies to make it worthwhile to you and to us, we will let you know as soon as possible.
We sometimes publish novels, especially for authors who have published with us previously,
but we don't have a decent marketing program for fiction books. You will need to do your own marketing.
-----AI generated-----
If your book was obviously generated by AI and you didn’t bother to rewrite it, don’t bother sending it to us.
If you used AI to do your research and editing, that’s fine with us.
If you had AI write your book and you rewrote it to make it better and sound more human, we are okay with that.
Basically, if we can’t tell the difference, we don’t care. We just want well written stories.
Warning though: Most of the AI work we’ve seen is pretty bad.
Please don’t waste our time with AI slop, so we don’t have to put your name in our “Do not consider” list.
-------Photos and Artwork------
If you submit a PDF file for publication and include your photos and artwork, we are okay with that.
If you send your photos as separate files (which we prefer), please ensure that you send 300 dpi .jpg files.
If you took photos with your digital camera or phone, they will likely meet our requirements.
-------Book title------
Please include your title. We will probably change the title to make your book more saleable,
but we need a "working" title to refer to when we correspond with you.
-------Royalties------
Old American Publishing pays 50% of the net profit from a book, which usually translates to 20% of the retail price.
EBooks are more profitable than printed books and normally pay higher royalties.
-------eMail lists------
We prefer authors who have established email lists, especially for Family History books.
We do not need an email list for Hometown History boks.
If you want us to publish a business book and you have a valid email list--great.
If not, that's okay. Those books usually (slowly) sell themselves.
Yes, we edit and publish proprietary business books that do not appear on our website. This has always been our main source of income.
Note: Proprietary book income is what allows us to produce books for new authors that will not sell enough copies to cover our publication costs.
If you need an in-house book for your business but not for the public, please contact us.