As I've started to submit more frequently, and to a greater number of places, I've run into an previously unforeseen quagmire: formatting woes.

Now, I've known for a long time that it's very important to read all submission guidelines carefully, even if you've submitted to a given magazine/publisher/agency before. And if you don't already know this, you need to! Overlooking something in the guidelines can knock your story out of the queue fast as anything. I've worked (briefly) as a slush reader, by the way, and reading submissions that ignore the guidelines can get really annoying. (Block. Text. By which I mean, complete failure to break paragraphs, ever. Please do not be that guy. If the slush reader is mildly dyslexic, like me, you will make them cry. AND they will pass on your story.)

There are certain details I didn't know I'd have to deal with, most of which I fixed by studying Standard Manuscript Format. Most guidelines tell you to use Standard Manuscript Format when submitting your pieces. This read-along example is a HUGE help. Print it out, bookmark it, staple it to the wall next to your computer--whatever you need to do to keep it handy.


>>Em-dashes. What are em-dashes? Well, if you're using plain text, they look like this: --. MS Word comes with a lot of auto-format defaults that change things like this--it connects those wee lines and makes one solid one. Looks nicer on the page, but you will have to turn them off. I now have my Word set to do it this way automatically, but if you get halfway through your WIP without changing that, or if you run across a publisher that wants it the other way, a simple find-and-replace will usually do the trick.

>>Ragged-right paragraphs. That means don't justify. No, don't. Again, this looks nicer on the page, but it alters the spacing and can screw things up badly if you need to paste your submission into the body of an email, rather than sending the whole thing as an attachment.

>>Paragraph spacing. Double-space your paragraphs--I haven't yet run into anyone who prefers it otherwise, they might be out there, but this is pretty standard. However, another fun thing MS Word does by default is to add extra space between paragraphs, whether you want a break there or not. You'll need to tell it not to.

>>Attachments vs. Email-Pasting*. Some folks prefer attachments. Some prefer your piece pasted into the body of an email. Some prefer you to use the submission portal on their website. Some prefer snail mail. Make sure you know what's what before you send anyone anything. *If you do wind up pasting something into the body of an email? Not a bad idea to email it to yourself first to make sure the breaks fall where they're supposed to.

>>Fonts. MS Word used to default to Times New Roman 12 point font, which is what most publishers prefer. (Some prefer Courier New, but not many, and they're not as strict about it as they used to be.) The 2010 version of Word defaults to Calibri 11 point font. I do not know why. However, some folks are particular about serifs--those little "feet" on certain fonts. Times New Roman is a serif font. Calibri is not. Again, read the guidelines carefully. This is pretty easy to fix--just make sure, if you need to change the font, you change the header/footer too.

>>Page numbers. Use them. This one's easy for me to forget, for some reason. But yeah--make sure your name, the title, and page number appear on every single page of the manuscript.

>>Word counts. A "short story" doesn't mean the same thing to every publication. Nor does a "novel." Some folk don't want anything over three thousand words. Some will take up to eight thousand. Some don't want any under two thousand. With novels, some start the word count at forty thousand. Some start it at seventy. Make sure you know your parameters.

This is not an extensive list of Do's and Don't's, by the way. Just some of things I found myself tripping over and therefore needed to drill into my own head.