This time I’d like to get into some of the practical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of the writing business. Because, sad to say, writing is a business, and that means you have to deal with other people. Whenever you submit a story to a magazine or a competition, remember that you’re also sending it to a human being. A human being who probably has hundreds of submissions to go through.
Get on their good side early by making it suuuuuuper easy for them.
Start with your manuscript’s presentation. Tempting as it is to make your entry stand out with a weird font or something, at best that’s going to be annoying. At worst, your entry may be unreadable because whatever you’ve done is incompatible with their software. Avoid this by saving your creativity for the story itself and use the Schunn layout. Many submissions guidelines ask for Schunn anyway, but even if they don’t specify, you can’t go far wrong with this.
(Obviously, if a deviation from Schunn is necessary for your story, say if you’re using the text layout to create a shape and it won’t make sense otherwise, then go ahead and do that. Yes, I know, but artistic license. Otherwise…)
The only reason to deviate from Schunn is if the submission guidelines specify a different method. You DID check the submission guidelines, right? If not, go back and reread the title of this post. You’re trying to make things easy for whoever reads your entry, and the submission guidelines are where they’ve helpfully told you how to do that. If they want a particular font, use that font. If they want your entry double-spaced, double-space it. If they want your text embossed in flashing violet with sparkle effects… you get the idea. It’s their publication; they know what they want.
Competitions are often judged anonymously, so they’ll ask you to remove any identifying information from your document. If you’ve used Schunn, that means removing the name and address from the title page, as well as your name from the page headers. You’ll also want to remove your name from the document title (more on that later). The competition guidelines will often state that any entries that aren’t anonymous will be deleted. Assume they’re not kidding, and leave all your identifying information in the cover letter, which usually needs to be in the body text of an email.
Now, document titles. I think we can imagine how annoying it would be to try and find that one story you really liked out of a hundred documents all titled “Submission.” To avoid this, the guidelines will sometimes give you a specific format to follow, e.g. “[Your Name] [Story Title]” or “[Publication Title] [Story Title]”. If they specify a format, follow it. Otherwise, I usually use one of the two listed above, depending on whether judging is anonymous or not. Either way, your story title should be in the file name somewhere, just because it’s a lot easier to find that one story with dragons if you can tell, at a glance, which stories are likely to feature dragons. What are we trying to do here, folks? That’s right; make it easy for them!
Harriet Phoenix 