Hey guys,
I posted up in one of the battles, but couldn't attach, so I thought I'd make a thread.
Most publications want you to submit a story in Times, 12 point, double-space, with indented paragraphs, page numbers, your contact information, and a word count. I've attached three versions of a WAR story to show you how I corrected it, and one of my stories "Fireflies" to show you how I send out my work.
Let me know if you have any questions or if I screwed anything up.
Good luck out there!
Good idea Richard.
At least five or six times already I have had to reformat a WAR story so I can read it without my eyes imploding. You gotta be careful folks, a slush pile reader would be likely to reject a story that was sent in so poorly formatted. I was willing to fix them to read for WAR, but not everyone might. You could be losing votes because of this.
Thank you for this. If I can't learn how to write, at least I can learn how to format.
Cool idea. On Fireflies, the last line is: “Fireflies” by Richard Thomas
I've never seen this before. Is it standard practice to tag the title/author on at the end like that?
hope it helps, guys.
@matt - that's not the last line, that's the "footer". it's on every page and tells you the name of the story and the name of the author. i put that, and page numbers, on every story i do just in case the pages get separated they know what story it is and who wrote it. you can see the text it slightly faded. most anthologies/collections list the name of the story and the author name on every spread as well as the title of the book. pick up a book and you'll see that the good ones do this. that way you can always find a story when you looking for it.
Thanks for posting this information, and pointing it out in the matches. I'm with Voodoo, it's been tricky reading some of these, and proper formatting is as fundamental as grammar and spelling.
@Richard - That makes sense. Ha, that was dumb of me. I was viewing on an iPad so the footer looks like the last line. My iPad does weird things to the formatting. Anyway, I'll check it out properly in Word. Thanks.
Richard, every publication I read or look at submitting to, asks for Courier or Times New Roman. Is this changing to just TNR? And a few semi-pro fantasy zines ask you to take out hard returns.
This seems to be (or has been) the de facto standard for formatting short stories:
http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html
I've seen it linked to on a lot of submission pages. I wonder if the paradigm is shifting now that so many stories are published for web/ereaders.
Richard, why is the web formatted story different? Any chance you can post the formatting rules for that one?
Thanks Richard. I wish we'd agreed to make format a rule for War, because it kind of irks me when I see something very far from that format.
The problem with it is, for people used to seeing everything neatly formatted like this, when something has a very different format, it provokes a (subjective) negative reaction and you don't want your story to stand out negatively for something so subjective, so you might as well get used to formatting like this.
Thank you for posting this, Richard.
there is a standard, but some place deviate. i do think Times or Times New Roman is the current font of choice. some places do ask for weird things, so always check your submission guidelines. Courier is pretty out of date, and i personally HATE reading it now. but always go by the guidelines.
a lot of websites don't have the coding for indents, it doesn't hold up. the ONLY way to separate a paragrah is by adding in an extra hard return. much like in this very post.
I'd like to say thanks also. There were some good stories that I was having a hard time reading becuase the font was too small and the lines too close. So eventually I had to reformat them myself. I honsetly have to say that if the storries were real close for me thenmy problem with the formatting may have affected the way I voted.
Thank you!
Thanks for the advice on the hard indents, it was doing my head in a little trying to understand what certain publications meant. I don't think they phrased it very well when they said don't use them ever.
This is the advice Kat Howard gave our class a week or so ago on Litreactor (Introduction to Fantasy & Sci-Fi):
Once you have decided which markets you want to submit your work to, look up their submission guidelines, and follow them to the letter, including submitting your work in standard manuscript format – basically, 12-pt. courier, double-spaced, 1-inch margins. No exceptions. Breaking the rules will not make you look extra creative or fun to work with. It will make you look unprofessional, and like you think you deserve special treatment.
I work for a speculative fiction magazine that pays semi-pro rates, and requests submissions typed using the Courier fonts. Right now, I'm getting them in a whole bunch of different fonts, but mostly TNR and Courier. However, our editor has said in the future that we're going to reject submissions that don't comply with our guidelines.
Blech, Courier. If the guidelines say Courier, do it. I can't even type in that font, let alone write and submit. But yeah, always follow the guidelines.
I agree Richard, Courier is ugly as sin. Jess, you need to slap your boss-hog editor upside his head and tell him to get with the program.
Though if the guidelines ask for a specific font - then yeah, folks deserve to be rejected if they ignore it. It isn't hard to format a document to meet their specs before you send it. Takes what, two minutes?
But to have someone actually request Courier over TNR - urgh.
Also - on indents, little bug-bear of mine when I am reading submissions for Solarcide.
I don't mind if they are paragraph formatted indents, that's fine. The site editor interface takes them out automatically. What I HATE is when people use multiple spaces rather than a proper indent. Like they hit the space bar five or six times each paragraph. I have to take those out, and it does my head in. Sometimes I can't even use find and replace because sometimes people aren't consistant with how many spaces they use, so the odd space is left behind. Infuriating. If I see this and the story doesnt grab me immediately - rejected. If the story is GREAT, then I'll fix it, but begrudgingly.
Oh, and double spacing after full stops. Argh. So very ugly. Please people, stop doing this. There is no need whatsoever with modern word processors. If you do it, read this please.
Yeah, I didn't want to mention doing the indent with the Word settings as that is a little more complicated, and it can be a bit tricky sometimes. I tusually just move the blue arrow things. LOL.
(see attachments)
But you can also go to Format-->Paragraph-->Indentation-->Special-->First Line (and then set it to .25).
(see attached)
Cool stuff.
Crossed Genres pecifically state "Courier is Evil". Hehe :D
Glad to see this. I wasn't sure if there was a certain format when submitting my first War story, but it wasn't mentioned in the guidelines, so I just went with hard returns and no indents. I see now that I should have chosen Times or TNR for my font, though.
So, just to be clear, hard returns or indents, but not both. Times (or TNR), 12 point, double spaced.
Thanks again!
I really thought I was the only reformatting before I read.
When I read on my iPad, the stories are all in Times and looks fine. When I read on my computer, I can see the original fonts people chose. So, I didn't notice so much since I did a majority of my reading on my iPad. (Or maybe it was just coincidence that the majority I read on my iPad used Times?)
I prefer to write in Wingdings.
and they're delicious!
Monospaced fonts like Courier are hard on the eyes, but have some technical benefits when it comes to the same number of characters per line and all that (some editors think it makes spotting errors easier, too, and the double-spacing is for handwritten notes between the lines). That's why screenplays always use them, because the production scheduling works off of page counts, which are broken into eighths, and are fairly predictable for scene lengths and such as they translate to screen time. Unless there's an action sequence or montage. So they can say "We're shooting this 3 3/8-page scene this afternoon" and know pretty much what they're in for, and that it's probably about three minutes on screen.
^great point, Gordon. forgot about screenplays, as that would make total sense. otherwise, forget Courier.
