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 .

Then check what the CLI cannot:

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. Every chapter has status: revised, final, or complete. List any still at outline or draft.

4. 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.

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

6. 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. No status means "pays off in the next book", so for each thread the user confirms is left for a sequel, add an entry to continuity/exemptions.md rather than changing its 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.

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.