Electronic Manuscript Preparation Guidelines for Authors

Unless prior arrangements have been made, the University Press of Mississippi requires that manuscripts be submitted in electronic form. The disk that you submit will be used for copyediting and typesetting the manuscript. In this process the files may go through multiple conversions. PLEASE KEEP IT SIMPLE. Do not use your software to format your manuscript and customize the way it looks. Excess formatting must be stripped out to ensure that the whole process goes smoothly.

The following guidelines must be followed as you prepare your electronic manuscript.

·  Do not assign "styles" to achieve different formats for subheads, block quotes, paragraph indents, etc. The default, or "normal," style should be the only style in your manuscript.

·  Do not use the space bar to achieve tabs or indents or to align text.

·  Use the same typeface, or font, throughout the entire manuscript. If a second font containing special characters is used, please alert your editor.

·  To insert notes, use your software's built-in endnotes feature. Use the feature "as is"; please don't reset any of the options. Before typesetting the press will move these "embedded" notes to a separate file so that they can be set in a note section at the end of the book.

·  Format prose extracts (block quotations) and verse extracts with your word processor's feature for indenting paragraphs. Insert a hard return only at the end of a paragraph or a line of verse. Do not "line up" text using the space bar—adjust the indent level instead.

·  Save each chapter as a separate file. Each additional part of your manuscript—front matter, introduction, references, appendixes, figures, etc.—should also be saved as separate files.

·  Do not use the automatic hyphenation feature.

·  Produce any special characters using your word-processing program's built-in character set. If a special character is unavailable in your program, hand-insert it on the printout, and write the correct character; then call it to the attention of the Press in your cover letter.

·  Do not insert an additional hard return to create extra space between paragraphs. Where you wish to indicate a space break in the book, type "<space>" on a line by itself.

·  For the bibliography use the hanging indent feature in your word processing program. If you are unsure how to do this, simply indent the first line of each entry (i.e., format them like the paragraphs in the rest of the book).

·  Indicate the placement of tables and other figures, but do not drop the actual figures into the text files. If you have the figures in electronic format, keep them in separate files. Photocopies of the tables, illustrations, etc., can be placed in the hard copy of the manuscript to aid in placement.

·  Copy your final, completed manuscript onto disk, then print a copy of the manuscript from this same disk. The electronic files and the printout that the Press receives must match exactly. Do not make any changes to the disk after you have printed out the final manuscript. If you must make changes after you have prepared the final printout, do so on the printout (hard copy) in colored pencil. Supply a list of page numbers with changes.

·  Finally, label your disks, and include the name of the software you used to produce your manuscript (e.g., "WordPerfect 11" or "Word 2003").