Online Submissions

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, April 12, 2007
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Hard copies aren't exactly a thing of the past, but more and more people have made peace with online submissions. At Relief Journal, we've embraced them. For a publication with editors working all over the country, an electronic workflow makes a whole lot of sense. We can move submissions back and forth through the ether without churning up a small forest or depleting the national supply of novelty stamps. Unfortunately, each new leap forward brings with it a set of new challenges. The industrial revolution gave us the smoke stack, and the technological revolution has burdened us with formatting problems.

Paper is a univeral medium. When you print your manuscript, ink is applied to paper and the results look the same to everyone who looks. It doesn't matter if you used Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Apple's Pages or a simple text editor to type the story, once it's on paper there are no compatibility issues. Online submissions are different. The file you send is either your original word processing document or an export from your software to a (hopefully) compatible format. The editor on the other end of the tether may or may not be able to open your file, and if he does, the file may or may not retain the proper formatting (assuming you formatted it correctly to begin with).

What does it matter? Well, I'll tell you this. During every reading period for Relief, I have received at least one submission that I could not open, and at least more that, when opened, was unreadable gibberish. The stories might have been works of genius, but I'll never know, because I never had the opportunity to read them. Yes, I could get in touch with the authors and ask for a different file format or some troubleshooting, but you know what? Editors are busy. They have a lot of reading to do. And an author who doesn't bother to send a file that I can open seems like someone who doesn't care much about the work -- and how can he expect me to invest more effort in his work than he does?

If you're submitting online, then it's in your best interest to think through this compatibility issue. Believe me, it's simple, the easiest thing in the world to get right. But people still get it wrong, so I offer this advice to anyone with ears to hear.

1. Send a Microsoft Word document. You might not use Word or even like it, but for now it is pretty much the standard. If you send a Microsoft Word file, no one will have any trouble opening the thing, and it will retain its original formatting. This makes the editor's job easier and, if the story is accepted, the typesetter's too. Personally, I don't compose manuscripts in Word. For the last couple of years, I've been using Pages, a component in Apple's iWork package, and now I'm thinking about giving Scrivener a try. Before I submit a manuscript, I just export the file to Word format. Simple as that.

Needless to say, once you exports a file to Word format, you need to open it in Word and make sure that everything looks right. I've found that exports from Pages are usually clean, but occasionally the page numbers in the header need adjustment. Make the necessary tweaks to the Word file before sending it out.

2. Don't send RTF, PDF or Word Perfect files. I know that some people are going to read #1 and think that it's better to send a Rich Text files, or maybe a PDF, because these are univeral formats. Rich Text will work, but I still think a Word document is better, because it's a format people are more likely to be familiar with. I'll concede that RTF is an acceptable risk, though. The same can't be said for PDF. Don't get me wrong, I love PDFs, and they are the only way to insure that your original formatting is perfectly preserved. There are some contexts in which I'd send an editable PDF over a Word file -- graphic design is an obvious example -- but I'm going to suggest that PDF isn't a great vehicle for manuscript submissions. Most of the PDFs I receive from authors are not editable, which means that the text, when copied and pasted into a design file, will need to be reformatted by hand. Also, while it's possible to add sticky notes and annotations to a PDF, I find that more people are familiar with the tools for doing so in Word. When I read submissions for Relief, I usually download them all into a folder and then open them one by one in Word. Every time I have to switch software or run into a file that won't convert properly in Word, my frustration level is higher. Is it worth frustrating an editor just to insist on your technological preference?

About Word Perfect. I wouldn't even know it still existed except that I still receive files with that .wps extension from time to time. Most writers using a word processor other than Microsoft Word understand that they'll need to export their document as a Word file to insure compatibility, but for some reason Word Perfect users don't seem to have gotten the memo. Yes, MS Word is able to convert files in Word Perfect format, but relying on that conversion isn't a good idea. Think about it. It's your responsiblity as a writer to send the manuscript in the form you want considered. If I have to convert your file to a readable format for you, then make allowances for any oddball re-formatting errors, that's really asking a lot.

3. Please format your manuscript. In the mid-nineties, when I worked on the Gulf Coast staff, we received paper submisisons and then requested electronic copies on disk when we accepted a piece. For each issue, I'd end up with a foot-high stack of plastic floppy disks. Because of the time involved in the process, I think writers took greater pains to get the details right. Manuscripts looked like manuscripts, not blog posts copied and pasted into a file. Today, I'd say there's a fifty-fifty split between well-formatted manuscripts and ones that look like they were created as part of the author's out-patient treatment for mental illness. Either writers aren't aware anymore of what their manuscripts should look like -- they're more accustomed to HTML style formatting than print -- or they assume we want a raw, unformatted text that we can paragraph and punctuate any way we see fit! Brothers and sisters, it ain't so.

Double-space your manuscript. Indent your paragraphs, but don't add an extra line of space between them. (In a manuscript, which is already double-spaced, this error books particularly bad.) Use a reasonable font. I don't care if it isn't Courier or Times Roman, but at least choose something you'd actually see in a printed book. Keep your type size at a standard 12 points and don't boost the size for emphasis (or any other reason).

All of this advice is designed to do one thing: make your editor's life easier. It has the side benefit of helping you stand out in the pack, because (I'm sorry to say) following basic formatting parameters actually accomplishes that these days. As strange as it sounds, a clean, problem-free manuscript inspires confidence in me. It should be the other way around: the trouble-free manuscript should be neutral, while the problematic one raises red flags. But there are so many problematic ones (not the majority, but a significant minority) that simply getting this very obvious thing right is a point in your favor. Imagine that.

I'm thrilled that online submissions have become widely accepted. I'd take formatting problems over smoke stacks any day of the week. But the crazy thing is, these problems are so easily remedied. They only exist because authors either don't know or don't care. I suppose that gives those who do a slight edge. Make sure you're one of them.