SS Email Submissions

What email do you use? Depending on whether it is hotmail or yahoo or gmail or... etc. you will have different ways to format your text.

For example, my hotmail allows me to choose font style and size. As does Outlook Express.

Copy the text and paste it into Notepad, or another plain ASCII text editor. Use plain ASCII in your e-mail, not HTML. The more coding you insert (fonts, size, HTML), the greater the chance of funky formatting on the other end. Notepad will simplify the program, stripping out all of the special codes and characters Word and other word processing programs insert. Then copy from Notepad and paste into an e-mail.

Normally, you would underline to denote italics. In a body-of-email sub, simply add an _underscore_ to either side.

Double space between paragraphs, and don't bother to indent.

A lot of body-of-email places will have specific submission guidelines as well. (See Strange Horizons, for a pretty good and easy-to-follow example.)

Needless to say, if the market's guidelines contradict what I say, go with their guidelines.

Oh, and do e-mail a copy to yourself before you send it out, to make certain nothing strange happens that didn't show up when you composed the e-mail.

Makes sense. Unless rchastain is a purist. I've sent copy and paste items with 'Word' that didn't turn out perfect, but the editors could easily disregard the smaller changes in the transformations as a result of cyberspacial glitches. How distorted were they when they reached their destinations, rc?

I believe you can save it as RTF (rich text format) and then cut-and-paste it to an e-mail and the formatting will hold. Fahim did some tests down in the "Tech" thread; you might want to check that out. Here's the link:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29115

ac

Formats

Yes, save as RTF. I use WordPerfect. When an editor wants the story in the body of an e-mail I save it as RTF, then cut and paste. It works for me in that no editor has yet complained of a messed up format.

Strange Horizons guidelines work for me - agreeing with Jchines. Sounds like a lot of effort on first read, but worth it.

Jenny

I would assume they only receive ascii txt -- save and reopen the submission in wordpad as txt to see how it goes. Separate paragraphs with a blank line and avoid any 'smart' punctuation, symbols, tabs, indents etc