submission

Submission

Overview

Get a finished manuscript out the door. This skill checks submission readiness, drafts the submission package (query letter, pitch, synopsis, blurb, comp titles), builds the manuscript in submission format, and keeps a tracker of where the book has gone. Package files live under submission/ in the story project. The author sends every submission themselves; this skill prepares materials and records outcomes.

Prerequisites

A story project with a complete or near-complete draft. Verify story.md exists in the project root and read its status, genre, sub-genre, premise, author (or authors for a co-written book), contact, and language fields. If status is not complete or revising, tell the user the package can be drafted now but the readiness check will fail until the draft is finished.

Language And Market

language (a missing field means en) is the book's language. Ask which market the user is submitting to. The query letter, Shunn manuscript format, comp conventions, and word-count norms in the references are the English-language (mainly US and UK) market's. Other markets have their own practice: some publishers take submissions directly rather than through agents, and many ask for a synopsis and sample pages in their own format. Ask the user for the guidelines of the agents or publishers they are targeting and follow those; never present English-market conventions as universal. Write the package in the language the agent or publisher reads, which is usually the book's.

When to Use

• Checking whether a manuscript is ready to submit
• Drafting or revising a query letter, pitch, synopsis, blurb, or comp list
• Building a Shunn-format manuscript for agents or magazines
• Writing a retailer or back-cover description for self-publishing
• Recording queries sent and responses received
• Submitting short fiction to magazines, anthologies, or contests: simultaneous or exclusive submissions, rights, response windows, and status queries
• Choosing and ordering the stories for a collection, and its previously-published acknowledgements
• NOT for self-publishing production (ISBNs, retailer metadata, print interiors, launch, rights deals and contracts): use the publishing skill. This skill still drafts the blurb and retailer description it uses, and records the rights a short-fiction market buys
• NOT for pitching a series of several books or writing its series overview (use series-continuity); the query for book one is still drafted here
• NOT for revising the manuscript itself (use revision-continuity)
• NOT for reader feedback rounds (use feedback-triage)

Hard Rules

• Never invent the author's bio, credentials, awards, publication history, platform, or contact details. Ask the user, or leave a clearly marked [TODO: author to supply] placeholder.
• Never invent agent, publisher, or market names, submission guidelines, pay rates, rights terms, response times, dates, or responses. Tracker entries come from the user.
• Never send, email, or upload anything. The user submits.
• Never claim sales figures, bestseller status, awards, or endorsements for comp titles or the author that the user has not confirmed.
• Package copy describes the book as written. Read the manuscript and the bible; do not promise events, tone, or an ending the draft does not deliver.

Workflow

1. Readiness check

Run the deterministic checks and report every finding before drafting:

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .
story prose .
story report .

Review the output of the commands above:

1. story check . (validate, links, and continuity) has no errors. List warnings for the user to accept or fix.

2. story prose . shows no avoided spellings, and the user has reviewed the other findings. If style-sheet.md is missing or still the scaffold, suggest the voice-style skill first.

3. No [TODO markers remain in chapter prose. story validate warns about each chapter that still has one.

4. Open questions and planted promises are resolved, or deliberately left for a sequel (check story.md precedes). Once story.md is status: complete, every open question and planned or planted promise or clue is a story continuity error, which fails the story-checks CI. An undecided thread stays open: a promise or clue at planned or planted, or a question at open. Once the user confirms that a thread pays off in the next book, record that decision in continuity/exemptions.md rather than changing the thread's status:

   ---
   type: exemption-log
   exemptions:
     - code: complete-with-open-promise
       pattern: "continuity/promises/the-sealed-letter.md is still planted"
       reason: "Pays off in book two."
   ---
   

   Rerun story continuity . and confirm the finding shows as dismissed.

Then check what the CLI does not report:

5. Every chapter has status: revised, final, or complete. List any still at outline or draft.
6. The total word count sits inside the range for the category in references/word-count-norms.md. Those ranges are rough conventions for the English-language market only: state the number and the range, and ask the user to confirm current norms for their market. For a book in another language, report the count and ask for that market's norms instead. A Chinese or Japanese book is counted in characters: report story wordcount .'s character total, and story validate . checks target-characters against per-form character ranges where a source sets one. Never pad or cut to hit a number without the user's direction. When the count is well outside the range and the user wants to change it, hand the book to revision-continuity's length pass (../revision-continuity/references/pass-checklists.md#length-pass), which budgets the cut or expansion by chapter and arc instead of trimming every chapter evenly.

Give a verdict: ready, ready-with-caveats (list them), or not-ready (list the blockers and hand them to revision-continuity).

2. Pitch and logline

1. Read story.md (premise, synopsis), the main arc files, and the protagonist's character file.
2. Draft a one-sentence pitch: protagonist + goal + obstacle + stakes, in under 35 words. ../story-init/references/title-logline.md has the logline recipe.
3. Offer two or three variants; the user picks. Save the chosen pitch at the top of submission/query.md.

3. Comp titles

Follow references/comp-titles.md. Propose candidates with a one-line reason each, mark every one unverified until the user confirms year, category, and fit, and save the agreed list to submission/comps.md.

4. Query letter

Follow references/query-letter.md. Draft submission/query.md with the hook, one or two book paragraphs, the metadata line (title, genre, word count rounded to the nearest thousand, comps), and a bio placeholder the author fills in. Keep the letter between 250 and 350 words. If the user names a specific agent, add a personalization line only from facts the user provides.

5. Synopsis

1. Generate the mechanical draft:

   story synopsis . --pages 1 --out submission/synopsis-1-page.md
   story synopsis . --pages 3 --out submission/synopsis-3-page.md
   

2. The CLI output is a scaffold stitched from the story.md synopsis and each arc's Setup, Rising Action, Climax, and Resolution sections. Rewrite it into polished prose: present tense, third person, main characters' names in capitals on first use, every major turn, and the ending revealed. Agents expect the ending; never withhold it.

3. Keep the 1-page version near 500 words and the 3-page version near 1,500. Overwrite the generated files with the rewritten versions and add the frontmatter from Conventions below.

4. If the output is thin, the arc files are thin: fill the missing arc sections with the plot-structure skill, rerun, then rewrite. --out never replaces an existing file in submission/, so to rerun, write to dist/ and merge, or delete the generated file first after checking with the user that it holds no rewriting they want to keep.

6. Blurb and retailer description

Follow references/blurb.md. Draft submission/blurb.md with a tagline, the back-cover copy (150-200 words), and, for self-publishing, a retailer description with the same copy plus a comp line if the user wants one. The blurb never reveals the ending.

This skill owns the retailer description: submission/blurb.md is its only draft, and the publishing skill reads it there. Keep it and the description field in story.md in step when the user self-publishes.

7. Build the manuscript

For agents and short-fiction markets, build Shunn manuscript format:

story build . --format docx --shunn
story build . --format shunn

These write dist/<story-id>.shunn.docx and dist/<story-id>.shunn.md. The DOCX has a running head on every page after the first: the author's surname, a short title, and the page number (Writer / The Last Ember / 2). The build takes the last word of the first author's name (the first word in a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Hungarian book) and the title before any subtitle, and cuts a long one to fit. When either is wrong, such as Le Guin, set surname or short-title in story.md; the build uses them whole. For a market that takes PDF, add --pdf to the shunn build: it renders dist/<story-id>.shunn.pdf (US Letter, Courier, double-spaced, running head) with a paged-media engine the user has installed, and stops with install hints when there is none.

The PDF and DOCX are US Letter, which North American markets expect. For a market that asks for A4 (most outside North America), add --paper a4 to the --pdf or docx --shunn build; the 1-inch margins stay. Go by the market's guidelines, not the author's language or country. An author who always submits on A4 can set paper: a4 under a build entry in cli-defaults in story.md; other builds ignore it.

Confirm story.md has author (or authors) and contact first; the title page uses them, joining co-authors with "and". Shunn builds leave out matter/ pages, as submissions expect. With form: short-story or form: flash in story.md they use Shunn's short-story layout: the text runs on from the title block, chapters become sections separated by a centred #, and there are no chapter headings or page breaks. Any other form starts each chapter on a new page. For self-publishing, hand off to the publishing skill, which covers EPUB and print builds (story build . --format epub, --format print --trim 6x9), retailer metadata, and launch.

For a one-page metadata sheet to check the pitch facts against (title, series, author, word count, description length against retailer limits, keywords, BISAC subjects, and missing fields), run:

story build . --format metadata

If story.md has an ai-disclosure, check each agent's or market's policy on AI-assisted work and disclose as they require; see the editorial-review skill. Tell the user which file in dist/ to send, and remind them to check each agent's or market's guidelines for format and attachment rules.

8. Track submissions

Create submission/tracker.md from references/tracker-template.md the first time the user reports sending a submission. Add or update a row each time the user reports a submission or a response, using only what they tell you. On request, summarize: queries out, partial and full requests, offers, declines, and entries with no response after the window the user sets.

9. Short fiction and collections

For a short story, novelette, or novella going to magazines, anthologies, or contests, follow references/short-fiction-markets.md instead of steps 2 to 6: the story goes out in full with a short cover letter. Use the short-fiction tracker columns (submission type, rights offered) and the publication history section from that reference, and check the tracker before suggesting a market: a story with an open exclusive submission goes nowhere else, and an exclusive market needs a story with no open submissions. For a market that reads anonymously, add --anonymous to the Shunn build, which leaves out every name, the running head's surname included. To assemble a collection, follow its "Assemble a collection" section: choose the stories, find the linking threads, propose an order, and draft the acknowledgements from the publication history.

Conventions

• Package files: submission/query.md, submission/comps.md, submission/synopsis-1-page.md, submission/synopsis-3-page.md, submission/blurb.md, submission/tracker.md. The series-continuity skill owns submission/series-pitch.md, the series overview saved in book one; this skill does not draft it.
• Each file has YAML frontmatter with a type (query, comps, synopsis, blurb, submission-tracker, and series-pitch for the file series-continuity writes) and updated: YYYY-MM-DD.
• submission/ is outside the story model: the CLI does not validate it and builds never include it.
• Word counts in submission copy come from story wordcount ., rounded to the nearest thousand (87,000 words). A Chinese or Japanese book gives its length in characters, as story wordcount . reports it (12万字, or sheets of 400字 when a Japanese contest asks for them).
• Tracker statuses: queried, requested-partial, requested-full, offer, declined, no-response, withdrawn, plus submitted and held for short fiction.
• When the manuscript changes after the package is drafted, reread the package and update anything the revision made untrue.

CLI Maintenance

Use the Story CLI when it is available. If story is not installed, use the bundled fallback node ../story-maintenance/scripts/story.js with the same arguments. Use node <checkout>/bin/story.js instead only when the user names a Story Skills repository checkout or you are working in one. Write the script as an absolute path (resolve the fallback relative to this skill folder) and run it from the folder you would run story from, so . and other relative paths keep their meaning. Use Node, not Bun or a package script: Bun would load that folder's bunfig.toml (which can run code) and .env, and a package script runs from the checkout's root. If no CLI is available, perform the readiness checks manually and write the synopsis from the arc files.

After the readiness check, or any manuscript change made for submission:

story reindex .
story wordcount . --write
story check .
story prose .

Reference Files

• references/query-letter.md - Query structure (hook, book paragraphs, metadata line, bio), length, personalization, and common mistakes
• references/blurb.md - Back-cover and retailer description formulas for genre fiction, length, and taglines
• references/comp-titles.md - How to choose comparable titles, how to phrase them, and the verification rule
• references/word-count-norms.md - Rough word-count ranges by category for the English-language market only, to confirm with the user
• references/tracker-template.md - submission/tracker.md template and status definitions
• references/short-fiction-markets.md - Magazine, anthology, and contest submissions (simultaneous and exclusive, rights, response times and status queries, tracker columns, publication history) and assembling a story collection

Shared Conventions

Every story skill follows the shared conventions in ../story-maintenance/references/conventions.md, resolved relative to this skill folder. Read it before creating, renaming, or linking story files. If that file is missing because this skill was installed without story-maintenance, the essentials are: kebab-case ids and filenames, YAML frontmatter on every story-project file, _index.md registry tables that story reindex rebuilds (never edit them by hand), bidirectional links between entities, characters for who is on the page and mentions for who is only referred to, status: deceased plus died-in: chapter-{NN} for deaths, and no project-local generator or build scripts (run only the installed or bundled Story CLI).