Two questions

Lantern Jack · Feb 15, 2007

1) How do you write a short cover letter for a non-requested short story for a lit review?

2) If a lit review only accepts on-line submissions, and requests they be in the body of the e-mail, how should the short story be formatted? Should a cover letter accompany it?

Thanks!

Jamesaritchie · Feb 15, 2007

Questions

1. Same as any cover letter. You mention any relevant credits and qualifications, and if you have neither, you say nothing.

2. Anything placed in the body of an e-mail should almost always be formatted by having no indents, and an extra space between paragraphs.
Send along a cover letter if you have anything worth saying in a cover letter.

emeraldcite · Feb 15, 2007

Dear Editor:

Take it, or else.

Sincerely,

Author.

Seriously, follow Mr. Ritchie's advice.

PeeDee · Feb 15, 2007

Formatting for the story: Unless specified otherwise, I would send it as Courier, double-spaced is generally nice.

Because even though they're reading it online, when you go through fifty or so stories a day, you don't want to have to re-do someone's formatting. It's not the end of the world, but it can get annoying.

WHen I read stories that come attached to e-mails I tend to "View as HTML" which just opens the story in a new tab in my Firefox browser. So I'm always delighted when it's Courier and easy to read. Means I don't have to find my glasses.

(which is not to say I'd reject a story just because it shows up in Times New ROman or anything)

Lantern Jack · Feb 15, 2007

Much thanks all!

Jamesaritchie · Feb 16, 2007

PeeDee said:
Formatting for the story: Unless specified otherwise, I would send it as Courier, double-spaced is generally nice.

Because even though they're reading it online, when you go through fifty or so stories a day, you don't want to have to re-do someone's formatting. It's not the end of the world, but it can get annoying.

WHen I read stories that come attached to e-mails I tend to "View as HTML" which just opens the story in a new tab in my Firefox browser. So I'm always delighted when it's Courier and easy to read. Means I don't have to find my glasses.

(which is not to say I'd reject a story just because it shows up in Times New ROman or anything)

If a story is sent in the body of an e-mail, rather than as an attachment, font doesn't matter much, it can be changed with a couple of clicks, but times New Roman is usually the standard for in the body stories.

When sending as an attachment, however, standard format, along with Courier 12, is the standard.

PeeDee · Feb 16, 2007

If it's in the body of the e-mail, I don't care what the font or size is, for the reason you state. However, I was talking about attachments. Blessedly, no one sends me stories in the body of the e-mail.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 16, 2007

Body

PeeDee said:
If it's in the body of the e-mail, I don't care what the font or size is, for the reason you state. However, I was talking about attachments. Blessedly, no one sends me stories in the body of the e-mail.

I find a fair number of publications that are so afraid of attachments that they do ask for in the body submissions. Drives me crazy, but you have to follow guidelines.

PeeDee · Feb 16, 2007

Jamesaritchie said:
I find a fair number of publications that are so afraid of attachments that they do ask for in the body submissions. Drives me crazy, but you have to follow guidelines.

I've seen a couple, but they haven't been major publications that I'm dying to publish with. And I'm wary of putting it into the body of the e-mail, since that sometimes does strange things.

For example, certain word documents (in nice, pretty twelve point type) will suddenly appear in the e-mail as eight point type, in arial narrow, sometimes with strange shapes or letters thrown in. Which I realize can happen, but it doesn't show up on my end, when I'm sending it. It shows up on THEIR end, and I don't find out about it unless they include my original text in their reply.

That said, it's hardly a major crisis. If I had to send it in the body, I would, and I wouldn't have any major angst over it.

spinnerin · Feb 16, 2007

Jamesaritchie said:
I find a fair number of publications that are so afraid of attachments that they do ask for in the body submissions. Drives me crazy, but you have to follow guidelines.

At least with my zine, it's not that we're afraid of attachments, but that we're working on a sufficiently assorted set of computers to make it a pain in the neck. I'd rather switch to only paper subs than have to come up with a plan for converting and storing files in a manner that we could use.

Requiring plain text helps eliminate bad formatting we're just going to strip, weird fonts, etc. Plus, with Gmail we can use their label system to keep track of who read what and whether we liked it. Instant CMS.

PeeDee · Feb 16, 2007

Gmail's label system has made my professional life (in terms of being a writer and an editor) immensely easier.

Jamesaritchie · Feb 16, 2007

spinnerin said:
At least with my zine, it's not that we're afraid of attachments, but that we're working on a sufficiently assorted set of computers to make it a pain in the neck. I'd rather switch to only paper subs than have to come up with a plan for converting and storing files in a manner that we could use.

Requiring plain text helps eliminate bad formatting we're just going to strip, weird fonts, etc. Plus, with Gmail we can use their label system to keep track of who read what and whether we liked it. Instant CMS.

I can see the Gmail side, but not the conversion or storage side. That's easy, no matter what kind of computers everyone has. If RTF doesn't work for everyone, someone is about thirty years out of date. For that matter, what word processor can't open a Word Doc?

How many people do you have judging stories? More than two scares me to death.

KTC · Feb 16, 2007

Jamesaritchie said:
1. Same as any cover letter. You mention any relevant credits and qualifications, and if you have neither, you say nothing.

2. Anything placed in the body of an e-mail should almost always be formatted by having no indents, and an extra space between paragraphs.
Send along a cover letter if you have anything worth saying in a cover letter.

IMHO, this should have sufficed as the answer you were looking for.

PeeDee · Feb 16, 2007

I know we have two people doing it, including me. Beyond that would get a bit confusing, I think. I suppose it could be done, but I like that we've both generally seen the stories that appear in the magazine. It means I can get behind it properly.

I wanted to emphasize, in case it sounded to the contrary, that I'm not actually a stickler for formatting. Not really. All my picky stuff up there are very, very gentle dislikes. Mostly, I just read the story, and that's about all I'm interested in.

spinnerin · Feb 17, 2007

Jamesaritchie said:
I can see the Gmail side, but not the conversion or storage side. That's easy, no matter what kind of computers everyone has. If RTF doesn't work for everyone, someone is about thirty years out of date. For that matter, what word processor can't open a Word Doc?

How many people do you have judging stories? More than two scares me to death.

It's only two people, but we work from two separate home computers and a laptop, and none of them run Windows. Honestly, keeping everything in email is just easier. I only use a word processor when I absolutely have to, and do most of my work in a text editor. I could probably read RTF files in the browser, through Google's conversion tool, but why bother with all of that if ordinary email does what I need?

If we're not getting submissions from good writers because of our guidelines, we'll reconsider, but so far I haven't seen any indication of that. I'm not trying to make it a pain in the neck, this is just what works best for us. Making it easy to read the submissions is important, because we're doing it in our spare time.

spinnerin · Feb 17, 2007

PeeDee said:
I wanted to emphasize, in case it sounded to the contrary, that I'm not actually a stickler for formatting. Not really. All my picky stuff up there are very, very gentle dislikes. Mostly, I just read the story, and that's about all I'm interested in.

I read a comment from Steve Eley on the Escape Pod forums about stories that follow their submission guidelines exactly being more likely to be accepted than stories that don't. Not because they were evaluating the work based on the formatting, but because people who paid attention to those details tended to be better writers. Have you noticed this too?

PeeDee · Feb 17, 2007

spinnerin said:
I read a comment from Steve Eley on the Escape Pod forums about stories that follow their submission guidelines exactly being more likely to be accepted than stories that don't. Not because they were evaluating the work based on the formatting, but because people who paid attention to those details tended to be better writers. Have you noticed this too?

Only to the extent that they're paying attention, and someone who is paying attention will be a better writer than someone who doesn't.

I don't have enough stories come in that aren't formatted properly (or at least, decently, which is all I really want) to judge, though. The stories which have come in without an ounce of useful formatting have also been the most lunatic and disturbing stories you can imagine that leave you going "What!? WHAT did I just read!?"

I had one story come in that wasn't formatted in anything useful. It was single spaced, Times New Roman, all of that. I read it anyway, because it's not going to kill me, and I liked it enormously. So when I sent it to the other editor, I re-formatted it into something useful and sent it along with my compliments.

Ten minutes later, I got an abashed e-mail from the guy, who had sent me his working file and not the special formatted file, and he felt terrible.

PeeDee · Feb 17, 2007

I should add that I am first, foremost and consistently a writer above alle lse, and therefore may not be the best indication of What Editors Think. There are plenty of editors who are writers, but some are just editors.

Some are nice. I try very hard to fall in that category. Like every other group of people, some are nasty, some are anal-retentive, some are worthless, some are picky beyond the bounds of being anal-retentive.

spinnerin · Feb 17, 2007

PeeDee said:
I had one story come in that wasn't formatted in anything useful. It was single spaced, Times New Roman, all of that. I read it anyway, because it's not going to kill me, and I liked it enormously. So when I sent it to the other editor, I re-formatted it into something useful and sent it along with my compliments.

Ten minutes later, I got an abashed e-mail from the guy, who had sent me his working file and not the special formatted file, and he felt terrible.

Ouch, that's embarrassing.

After we get our first issue out, I'm going to work up some stats on what we received vs. what we considered potentially worth including, broken down by geographic area, gender, adherence to guidelines, and whatever else I can think of. We tag everything yes/no/maybe as we read through the submission pile, so this shouldn't be too hard to do.

Stijn Hommes · May 22, 2007

PeeDee said:
I've seen a couple, but they haven't been major publications that I'm dying to publish with. And I'm wary of putting it into the body of the e-mail, since that sometimes does strange things.

For example, certain word documents (in nice, pretty twelve point type) will suddenly appear in the e-mail as eight point type, in arial narrow, sometimes with strange shapes or letters thrown in. Which I realize can happen, but it doesn't show up on my end, when I'm sending it. It shows up on THEIR end, and I don't find out about it unless they include my original text in their reply.

That said, it's hardly a major crisis. If I had to send it in the body, I would, and I wouldn't have any major angst over it.

Make sure you get rid of curly quotes. They can be a right pain when someone is looking at your file in another program than the one you made it with.

Two questions

Lantern Jack

My kitten knows kung-fu!

Jamesaritchie

emeraldcite

Art is Resistance

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Lantern Jack

My kitten knows kung-fu!

Jamesaritchie

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Jamesaritchie

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

spinnerin

geek.

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Jamesaritchie

KTC

Stand in the Place Where You Live

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

spinnerin

geek.

spinnerin

geek.

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

spinnerin

geek.

Stijn Hommes

Know what you write...