Submissions

Author Guidelines

Please note that we do not accept unsolicited full manuscripts – authors should first contact us and send us the abstract of their proposed book or a sample chapter (in English or Hungarian) based on which we can decide whether we want to go on publishing the manuscript. If you plan to publish in English, please make sure you have English proof-readers and two peer-reviewers, and they send us their review of your text to certify that it is on the necessary – academic – level. We accept manuscripts that follow some formal guidelines.

AMERICANA eBooks is strongly committed to open access publication, thus we do not charge for our books and do not use DRM or other restrictive mechanisms. Readers can download our books for free without any registration process to go through. Our authors do not pay to get published (although all expenses that might arise with proof-reading and peer reviews ahould be paid by them). All our books are published under the Creative Commons license (Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0).

1. The manuscript should be in .doc format, with as minimal formatting as possible. The best way to achieve it is to leave the default settings offered by Word (or your favourite word processor) – do not tinker with margins or page layout or font settings. Paragraph alignment should be justified, headers left aligned.
2. Use standard formatting for your chapter and subchapter headings: h1 (heading 1) for chapters, h2 (heading 2) for subchapters, h3 (heading 3) for sub-subchapters, etc. Please keep in mind that your hierarchy of chapters and subchapters must be logical. Please insert page breaks before the start of new chapters.
3. If you use images, make sure to submit them in a separate folder and do not paste them into the manuscript. The manuscript should only contain the marks of the intended place of each image. Please note that images will be edited based on the requirement of the ebook formats we use (for instance, for the Kindle we may grayscale images, turn them into .gif and scale them to the necessary width and height, and if still needed, push its file size to the standard, acceptable size). Please also note that our ebooks are published under the Creative Commons 3.0 license – make sure that your submitted images observe the regulations.
4. Use parnethetical references in your text. The format should be (Author Year-of-publication, Page), e.g. (Johnson 1987, 23). Use endnote references only if absolutely necessary – i.e. only if the extra information conveyed in that content cannot be put into the main body of text as it would break the logical flow of the argument. For endnotes please use the automated reference insertion, do not enter them by hand.
5. Accordingly, the bibliographical reference style should be the following: Last Name, First Name. Year of publication. Title of Book. Place of Publication: Publisher. In the case of essays/articles: Last Name, First Name. Year of publication. „Title of essay/article,” in Title of Journal, Volume Number, Issue Number, Page from-Page till.
6. Citing electronic documents, such as ebooks: e-readers and electronic publishing formats (the standard ones we also use, like epub and prc/mobi) do not support page numbers, as digital documents are a new paradigm if one compares it with printed materials. While the layout and text of the latter is fully fixed and unchangeable, that of the former is fluid and adaptable to the particular device the ebook is used on. However, there seems to be an agreement by major libraries and style houses on how to cite ebooks – and we encourage the adoption of this fairly simple citation format: in-text references should include the author with the date, followed by the chapter and paragraph number in parentheses, e.g.: (Johnson 1989, Ch.2 para. 2.) or (Johson 1989, Ch2 ¶2); in the reference list the digital edition should be noted: Johnson, Philip. 1989. How to Cite eBooks. Random: Budapest. Kindle ebook. (With fixed layout epub3 standard ebooks you may use the page number as with the usual printed reference. The same goes for Amazon ebooks with valid ASIN reference where the page number can be retrieved by the Kindle device.)