How to Format your Short Story for Electronic Submission

More and more markets for short stories are online. Even print publications these days may take email submissions. However, because of viruses and other problems, most of them will not accept an attatchement. When they request that you put the story in the body of the email -- in pure text -- you will lose a lot of your formatting.

There are many ways to mark various formatting elements (like italics, paragraphs and section breaks) but there isn't a standard yet. So the best bet is for you to create a "text only" document that has markers already in it, and you can use a simple find and replace to change it to suit the editor.

Before you submit any manuscript, ALWAYS check out the editor's guidelines. Every editor is different, and you need to follow their directions.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A word processor

1. First back up your original file. You will be making major changes, and you might accidentally hit "save." (You could also start this process by using "Save As" to save a new document to a different name, like "TITLE-Email".)

2. Open your backed up document in your regular word processor. Don't worry about things like indents or centered text. Those things can be easily set by the editor later on. You will be looking specifically for three things: Italics (underlines), Paragraphs, and Section Breaks.

3. Italics are going to be the most painful process, because you can't automatically search and replace on them. Some word processors will help you find a style, but you will have to replace them by hand. Text format doesn't record style, so you need to mark the beginning and end of italics with an unusual bit of punctuation.. Most people use an underscore, like _this_, or an asterisk, like *this*. (You don't have to remove the existing style formatting - just add the markers.) Pick one of these, and use it consistently. If your editor prefers the other, you can do a simple "find and replace" in your word processor to change it.

4. Section Breaks and Transitions. Often you want an extra line space to mark a transition in the story. Or you may want to set off a poem, or even a chapter heading. The problem is that you are going to add an extra space to mark of your paragraphs in the next step, and your editor, later on, may remove those to suit her magazine's formatting. So you need to mark these off to make sure you keep them. Most people use either a number sign # (which is the universal typesetter's mark for "space") or you can put in three asterisks ***.
   
   The best way to find section breaks and transitions is to use your word processor's search function. You'll usually find it under "find" and "replace" in your Edit menu. You will need to search for a paragraph mark, and that is tricky because that isn't on the keyboard. In Word, there is a little button with a triangle in the lower left corner of your Find and Replace window. Click on it and it will give you more options, including a pop-up menu labeled "Special." That will give you the option to find and replace all sorts of things from paragraph marks to tabs, to page breaks. Use that to enter the paragraph mark into the "find what" and "replace with" lines. You want to search for places with two paragraphs in a row, and replace it with a paragraph, your section marker (# or ***) and another paragraph.
   
   IT IS IMPORTANT TO DO THIS BEFORE YOU GO ON TO THE NEXT STEP.

5. Paragraphs. Email can mangle your paragraphs. You've seen it in email, I'm sure. Lines get chopped up as "hard returns" are added to them. Your editor will need to be able to tell the returns that separate paragraphs from those the email program inserted. Therefore the standard is to separate paragraphs with TWO returns in a row. Go back into your "Find and Replace" dialog and this time replace every instance of one paragraph with two.

6. Clean up. The clean white space at the beginning of your manuscript will now be full of asterisks or numbers signs. Cut them out. Glance through to see if there is any place where you unexpectedly got too many returns, or none. Save the file as a "text only" file.
   
   Open the text file and it should now be consistently formatted like a webpage: everything is lined up on the left, there's an extra line space between paragraphs, and a marker setting off sections.

7. When you are ready to submit, read the editor's guidelines carefully. Note what information they want at the top, what they want to appear in the subject line. If they accept email submissions, they will tell you how they want paragraphs and italics to be marked. They may want something different than you chose -- but it's easy to change it now. If you chose underscores to mark your italics, and they want asterisks, or slashes, you can just search and replace.

Tips & Warnings

• If you submit to electronic magazines all the time, you may want to get in the habit of writing in this format all the time so you don't have to convert. It may actually be easier to convert this format back to proper manuscript format for those few markets that ask for paper submissions.
• I can't say it enough, ALWAYS read the writer's guidelines before submitting any manuscript.

Resources

• Ralan's Site, with market listings

[juliebmack]

on 3/3/2009 Thanks for these tips on formatting writing!

[Upon-Request]

on 3/1/2009 Good tips for writers!