5 things every author should check before submitting to publishers

You’ve finished your manuscript. You’ve revised and polished until you can recite passages from memory. You’re ready to submit. But before you hit send on that query letter, there are five crucial elements that could determine whether your submission succeeds or fails. Taking the time to verify each one could mean the difference between a request for your full manuscript and a form rejection.

Your opening pages need to be bulletproof

When agents and editors request sample pages with your query—typically the first five to fifty pages—those pages carry enormous weight. For many submissions, they’re all that will be read in the initial evaluation. They demonstrate your writing ability, establish your voice, and set up everything that follows. If they don’t work, nothing else matters.

Your first line needs to hook the reader, though not necessarily with action or drama. What it needs is intrigue—a reason for the reader to continue to the second sentence, and the third, and the tenth. Your first page should establish your voice clearly enough that a reader could identify your writing style immediately. By the end of the first chapter, readers should understand what’s at stake in your story and why they should care.

One of the most common problems in opening pages is what writers sometimes call “throat-clearing”—the tendency to warm up, to provide background, to explain before the story actually begins. Resist this urge. Start where the story starts, not three scenes before it. If your story really begins when your protagonist discovers their spouse is missing, don’t start with them waking up, making coffee, and driving to work. Start with the discovery.

Watch for other red flags that immediately signal amateur writing: opening with weather descriptions or with a character waking up; burying readers in backstory before they have any reason to care; creating a passive protagonist who has things happen to them rather than making choices; confusing point of view shifts that leave readers uncertain whose head they’re in. Any of these can stop an editor from reading further.

Your structure needs to hold together

A brilliant premise will be rejected if it’s supported by poor structure. Before submitting, take a hard look at how your story is built. In the beginning—traditionally the first quarter of your book—is the inciting incident clear and compelling? This is the event that sets your story in motion, that disrupts your protagonist’s ordinary world and demands response. If readers aren’t sure what the story is actually about by the end of your first act, you have a structural problem.

The middle of your book is where most manuscripts falter. This is where complications should escalate, where your protagonist faces increasing obstacles and makes choices that reveal character. There should be a midpoint—a significant turn that raises stakes and changes the nature of the conflict. If your middle feels like your protagonist is just wandering from scene to scene, waiting for the climax, you need to add purpose and escalation.

Your ending must deliver on the promises your beginning made. The climax should feel both surprising and inevitable—readers shouldn’t predict exactly what will happen, but when it does happen, they should feel that it couldn’t have been any other way. Rushed endings are common because writers grow impatient with their own stories, but readers can feel when an author has cut corners.

At the scene level, every scene should have a clear purpose. It should advance the plot, develop character, or both. It should contain conflict or tension of some kind—not necessarily fighting, but competing desires or obstacles. And it should have its own shape, with a beginning, middle, and end. If you can’t articulate why a scene exists, consider whether it should.

Your characters need depth

Thin characters are among the top reasons manuscripts get rejected. Agents and editors want to fall in love with your characters, or at least find them fascinating enough to spend several hundred pages with them. This requires more than physical description and quirky habits.

Your protagonist needs both external wants and internal needs. The external want drives the plot—they want to solve the murder, win the competition, find their missing sister. The internal need drives the character arc—they need to learn to trust others, to forgive themselves, to accept that they can’t control everything. The most satisfying stories create tension between these two, where pursuing the external want forces the character to confront their internal need.

Your protagonist should make active choices that drive the plot forward. Stories about passive characters who have things happen to them rarely engage readers. Even when your protagonist is in a reactive position—responding to an antagonist’s actions, for instance—they should be making choices about how to respond. And by the end of the story, your protagonist should have changed. Not necessarily improved, but changed in some meaningful way that feels earned by what they’ve experienced.

Your antagonist deserves just as much attention. Nothing weakens a story faster than a villain who’s evil for no discernible reason. Antagonists should have motivations that make sense from their perspective, even if readers find those motivations misguided or repugnant. They should provide genuine opposition—if your protagonist could easily overcome them, there’s no tension. And they should be as fully realized as your protagonist, with their own desires, fears, and blind spots.

Supporting characters shouldn’t blur together. Each should have a distinct voice and personality, a reason for being in the story, and ideally their own agenda that sometimes conflicts with the protagonist’s goals. If you can swap the dialogue of two supporting characters without anyone noticing, those characters need more development.

Your dialogue needs to work

Dialogue problems are immediately apparent to experienced editors. Good dialogue is one of the hardest things to write, and getting it right can elevate a manuscript from competent to compelling.

The first test is whether your dialogue sounds natural. Read it aloud—actually speak the words. Does it sound like something a real person would say in that situation? Are contractions used appropriately for the character and context? Real people don’t typically speak in complete, grammatically perfect sentences, except in formal situations.

But natural-sounding dialogue isn’t the same as realistic dialogue. Actual human conversation is full of false starts, tangents, meaningless filler, and redundancy. Good fictional dialogue has the rhythm of natural speech while being far more purposeful. Every line should accomplish something: revealing character, advancing the plot, or creating tension. Ideally, it does all three at once. If a line of dialogue doesn’t serve any of these purposes, it should probably be cut.

Watch for common dialogue problems that signal inexperience. The “As you know, Bob” construction—where characters tell each other information they both already know, purely for the reader’s benefit—breaks the illusion of reality. On-the-nose dialogue, where characters say exactly what they mean without subtext, makes conversations feel flat. Over-reliance on dialogue tags beyond “said” and “asked” draws attention to the machinery of writing. And adverb-heavy tags like “she said angrily” tell rather than show—it’s almost always better to convey the anger through the words themselves or through action beats.

Your presentation needs to be professional

First impressions matter, and a professionally presented manuscript signals that you take your work seriously. This might seem like the least important item on this list, but sloppy presentation can prevent your brilliant story from getting a fair reading.

Format your manuscript according to standard conventions: twelve-point Times New Roman or a similar readable serif font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides. Include a header with your title and page numbers. Mark chapter breaks clearly. These conventions exist because they make manuscripts easy to read and annotate, and deviating from them without good reason suggests unfamiliarity with professional norms.

Before submitting, proofread carefully for spelling and grammatical errors. Run spell-check, but don’t rely on it exclusively—it won’t catch correctly spelled wrong words or many proper nouns. Verify that your style choices are consistent throughout: if you hyphenate “self-esteem” in chapter one, hyphenate it the same way in chapter twenty. Check for formatting artifacts that sometimes appear when converting between file formats.

And always, always follow the specific submission guidelines of each agent or publisher. If they want the first three chapters, send the first three chapters—not the first five because yours are short, not a prologue plus two chapters because you think the prologue is essential. If they want a Word document, don’t send a PDF. Guidelines exist to make the submission process manageable; ignoring them suggests you’ll be difficult to work with.

The hardest part: getting objective feedback

The challenge with this entire checklist is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to evaluate your own work objectively. You’re too close to it. You know what you meant, which makes it hard to see what you actually wrote. You’ve read your opening so many times that you can’t tell whether it hooks a fresh reader. You love your characters, which makes it hard to see whether they’re fully developed on the page.

Before submitting, get outside perspective. Beta readers from your target audience can identify confusing sections, pacing problems, and character issues that you’ve become blind to. Professional analysis can reveal structural problems and opportunities you can’t see yourself. This kind of detailed feedback used to require expensive editorial consultations or fortunate personal connections, but now tools exist that can provide comprehensive manuscript analysis quickly and affordably.

One final thought: submitting too early is one of the most common mistakes authors make. The publishing industry is competitive, and you may only get one chance with a given agent or editor. Before you send that query, ask yourself honestly: if this is the only thing this person ever reads from me, does it represent my absolute best work?

If the answer isn’t an enthusiastic yes, keep working.

Not sure if your manuscript is ready? Get detailed editorial feedback with BarryEditor—analyze your structure, characters, pacing, and more before you submit.