Submission Guidelines

It'd be nice if magazines and webzines and such could all get together and agree on exactly what type of format they want submissions sent to them in. That used to be the case. There was a standard submission guidelines form that pretty much dictated "double space everything".

Nowadays it's as varied as the magazines/e-zines. Everybody wants something different. It took me damn near two hours to submit 4 short stories this afternoon. I had to re-format each story from it's baseline Word format to suit each publisher's unique requests. Some people want RTF. Some people want ODT. Some want double spaced. Others want single spaced. Some want you to use their unique and custom submission forms. Others want submissions included in the body of your e-mail. Some want italics. Others want you to remove italics and underscore instead. Some want indented paragraphs. Others don't.

The list goes on.

It's a small complaint. It's not like it really takes that much time. But after spending two hours just to filter through around 15k worth of text and formatting everything in different ways, I'm ready for a break. Time for a beer and a snack.