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What Paladin Looks for in a Manuscript

Many potential authors wonder how Paladin decides whether or not to accept a manuscript for publication. Paladin welcomes book ideas from veteran authors and first-timers alike, and our editorial staff gives all of them serious consideration. Although we award publication contracts to only a small percentage of the hundreds of submissions we receive yearly, you can improve your chances of becoming a Paladin author by reading this inside glimpse of how we "critique" a submission and decide whether it's worth the risk--and hopefully the reward--to produce, publish, and market it.

The editors at Paladin evaluate each submission by asking a series of questions to determine whether the manuscript meets certain criteria. If it meets one or more, we will seriously consider it for our list. Some of the major questions (along with recent examples of how they've been answered successfully) include:

• Is the project on an entirely new subject not covered by the current offerings in our catalog? (We've published scores of books on every type of weapon imaginable--from blowguns to bazookas--yet for years we did not have a book on one of today's most popular weapons: defensive sprays. Doug Lamb filled that obvious void with his book Pepper Sprays.)
  
• Is it a new angle on an old topic? (Paladin carries a wide selection of books on knives and knife fighting, yet we did not have any titles on sword combat. That's why we decided to take a chance on the historical study Renaissance Swordsmanship by John Clements. It and its follow-up, Medieval Swordsmanship, are best-sellers today.
  
• Is it a definitive piece of work on a particular topic? (As soon as the remarkably detailed outline and impressive author's credentials arrived in the mail, we knew that The Ultimate Sniper, by Maj. John Plaster, would indeed be the ultimate book on police and military sniping. The same held true with Brian Price and his monumental work Techniques of Medieval Armour Reproduction.)
  
• Is it controversial or provocative? (Evan Marshall and Ed Sanow's Handgun Stopping Power elicited a storm of renewed debate over a topic that had been argued heatedly in the firearms press for years. The sequels Street Stoppers and Stopping Power only added fuel to the fire.)
  
• Will the author's credentials appeal to a significant number of customers? ("Jim Grover" is the psuedonym of Kelly McCann a popular Guns & Ammo magazine columnist and a gentleman well known in the counterterrorist, combatives, and combat shooting communities. His book, Street Smarts, Firearms, and Personal Security, and videos on firearmand unarmed combatives training are among the best products Paladin has to offer.)
  

Although this is not an exhaustive list of the types of questions we ask when evaluating manuscripts, it gives you an idea of some of the things we must consider before committing to the considerable time and expense of publishing a book. But unless you develop an idea, write it down, and submit it to us, you'll never know if your book proposal has "it" – that blend of being topical, well presented, informative, and marketable.

For detailed information on how to submit your manuscript, please read through our Submission Guidelines and/or E-mail our
Editorial Department.