Questions about writing books?

[ChaosDrako]

The whole story is that I have been writing a novel since I was ten years old (it's been fourteen years now). I had a major setback when another author published their story, and it was exactly the same as mine. I shelved it and later returned to writing, completely revising it. The rate I'm going is that it might possibly be a trilogy or series. I understand the guidelines and how-to's to write a manuscript. Anyways, here are my questions;

What is the standard book format? I don't want too many pages for each book, so I would like to know when to break between novels.

Who is a good publisher to submit a fictional medieval story? There is no offense to anyone, but I noticed many are really anal of what they want. My novel is full of teen romance, adventure, mystery, mythical beasts, and the whole medieval works. It would help if I can get the same publisher to publish my poetry as well.

During the writing process, is there a way to protect my story if another author comes along and publishes the same story again?

 

[Athena]

Go to your local bookstore and grab a copy of Writer's Digest.
Go to your library and get a few back issues and read up on the publishing side of writing.
Every issue has a number of articles on what to do to get published.
Start there.

 

[StevenJPemberton]

You probably need an agent to submit to any of the reputable publishers, so figure out how you get one of them.

The ideal length for a book depends mainly on the age of the intended reader. Young adult is around 60k-80k words, adult is 80k-100k.

There's nothing you can do to stop anyone else from writing the same ideas as you. Ideas for stories don't belong to anyone. If you look more closely, you'll probably find they're not really that similar. If someone copies a large chunk of your actual writing, that's copyright infringement, which you can sue for. But how would they get hold of your book before you'd tried to publish it? And even if they could, they wouldn't need to.