Take account of the word count stipulated by your editor. The chapter should not exceed the agreed length. Figures and tables should be included in the word count with each figure counting as 500 words and each table as 300 words.

If you think you may miss this, then please contact your editor as soon as possible to discuss the implications. 
Please also be aware that this deadline refers to delivery of the whole chapter and that it won’t be possible to make more than very minor changes to the files once you have delivered them. We need to receive all the chapters at one time so be aware that if you are late in delivering your material you will be delaying the whole book.

Please check with your editor which referencing style you should use.

If your editor has provided you with a list of spelling conventions and/or other style instructions please adhere to it. It will improve the readability of the book if it looks like a coherent whole. 

If you are unsure about these points please check with your editor.

This is a contractual agreement between you and the book’s editor. Please ensure that you sign the agreement and return it to your editor promptly. 

Today readers and researchers discover books through a myriad of online search engines, websites, databases and indexes.
Please consider the key terms that you think interested readers will use in literature searches and incorporate them into the chapter title, abstract and key words in an appropriate way.  This will help researchers find your work and increase readership and citations.


Researchers using online databases often first discover a chapter of a book before discovering the book itself.  The chapter title should make sense in isolation.  For example, it is better to have ‘Introduction to Small Business Economics’ than merely ‘Introduction’ as the book’s first chapter.  

A good chapter title is concise and gives a clear indication of what the chapter is about.


We require an abstract of up to 150 words and a list of up to 6 key words/terms for each chapter with your final script.  This is a requirement for the chapter to be indexed by Google Scholar.

This information is included in your book’s metadata and has an important impact on the visibility of individual chapters in online searches and on the discoverability of your book as a whole. Please supply these as a single document entitled ‘Abstracts and Key Words’. Please do not include them in the chapter files themselves. 

Please provide ORCID author identification numbers for yourself and any co-authors to your chapter if you would like us to use them in the information we provide to third parties in promoting your work. If you do then please visit http://orcid.org.

Maths should be prepared using Word's Equation Editor software in your manuscript Word files. Using Word's Equation Editor software, the tools are already in the Word toolbar.

Distinguish carefully between superior and subscript characters and use italic type for any characters to be set in italic. Equations should be numbered consecutively within chapters. Please send a PDF of your chapter with maths so this shows clearly how the maths should look.

More Information

Before including these, please think about what each is adding to the reader’s understanding of the material (particularly if you have taken photos yourself). A photograph that does not look entirely professional can cheapen the look and feel of the book. Over-use of figures and photos can be distracting to the overall message.

Figures, graphs, maps and photographs that you submit to us must adhere to the following criteria. This ensures that the images that we publish in our books are legible, professional and of high quality. 

We may have no option but to remove figures, graphs, maps and photographs that do not adhere to the 6 criteria below:

1. Do not copy and paste your figure into a Word document, instead provide them as a separate file in their original format.

• Copying and pasting images into Word files immediately reduces their quality. 
  
  

2. They must be submitted as an EPS, PNG, PDF or JPEG file. We will also accept Excel documents, Powerpoint and Illustrator files.

• We cannot accept any other formats, so please ensure that your figures, graphs, maps and photographs are saved accordingly

3. They must be submitted in greyscale only and should be sharp, clear and legible.

• Any colour coding should be distinguishable in shades of black, grey and white. Different patterns could also be used to distinguish between different sections.

4. They should be at least 300dpi (dots per inch).

• The resolution of an image is critical to its quality in print. Images of at least 300dpi are considered high resolution and will look better in print. Please refer to the hyperlinked flowchart below for more information.

5. Their location in the chapters must be clearly indicated. All figures, graphs, maps and photographs must be given a title, number and caption.

• Simply indicate a point in the chapters where the figure should appear. Most of our authors write ‘INSERT FIGURE x.x HERE’ in a large font. They must be numbered consecutively within chapters. The first number refers to the chapter number and the second to that figure's appearance within the chapter.

6. Photographs must not include recognisable faces of any person/persons unless prior permission has been obtained.

• GDPR restrictions clearly state that reproducing the image of a person without their permission is against the law. As such, we cannot reproduce these photographs in our books.

Copyright

Please refer to the Elgar copyright policy carefully regarding figures and photographs. Permission may be required.

Reading software

Partially sighted or blind readers may use screen reading software to read the text of our books and will not be able to interpret figures or photos. If the figure is not explained adequately in the body text of the chapters please provide a short description of the figure that we can embed behind the figure in the ebook version as Alt Text. 

Tables and boxes

Much like figures and photographs, the tables and boxes in your submitted chapter must adhere to our criteria. This ensures that the tables and boxes that we publish in our books are legible, professional and of high quality. 

We may have no option but to remove tables and boxes that do not adhere to our 5 criteria outlined below from your chapter. 

Tables and boxes must adhere to the following criteria: 

1. They must be set within the text where you want them to appear.

• The easiest way of doing this is to create the table using the Word Insert>Table tools in your manuscript file.
   

2. They must be amendable and any text must be editable. 

• Screenshots or images of tables/boxes that cannot be edited or manipulated will not be accepted.
   

3. They must be numbered consecutively within chapters and referred to within the text as Table 2.3, Box 4.1 etc.

• This is our house style and we will amend your numbering to match this style.
   

4. They must have their own title and caption.

• The title should summarise the content of the table. The caption can describe the table in more detail or reference any data
  that you consulted when creating the table if necessary.
   

5. They must not feature any shading. 

• We advise use of bold or italic to highlight different key areas in table text, and avoid highlighting the whole cell/row/column
  as this can look cluttered or be difficult to read

 
Legal tables

These are only required for law practitioner titles and law textbooks, and not for research focused books.

If you wish to include legal tables please inform us when you submit your manuscript.  Please also check your contract to find out who is responsible for preparing the tables. If it is you, then please submit the list together with your final manuscript. You will be required to insert the correct page numbers once the manuscript has been typeset.

Deliver your files directly to your book editor, as the editor will wish to make their own checks and may wish to review the material before they collate the chapters and submit them to us.

Ensure that you have finished work on the chapter before you contemplate delivery of the material to your editor. 
Your book editor needs to deliver all the material to be included in the book to Elgar at the same time.  Once they have passed the files to us there will be no opportunity to make changes to the text other than to make minor copy-editing corrections.

If any of your material is under copyright to a third party (including your own work) you will need to provide documentation to your book editor confirming permissions has been granted to reuse the material. 

Please see our copyright guide in the Author Hub for more information on what material requires copyright permission.

All our edited books contain lists of contributors in a consistent format. 

Please check with your editor on the convention they have chosen, either:

• A brief affiliation only, or; 
• a short biographical paragraph, ideally a maximum of 80 words long.

Please check that your name appears exactly as you would like it to appear in the book and in exactly the same format in your chapter file.