At My Wits End on Emails

My trouble is in the pasting. When agents ask that we paste in the synopsis and first ten pages or three chapters, etc, I do the best I can with that. Each email, I comb through to make sure that the lines have the right spacing and that all the text is even and in the same format. It usually takes me about an hour and one half (depending on what the agent wants.)

I use Open Office and it doesn't translate well if I just copy and pasted into the box. I've tried everything to keep the format of my novel, even removing the formatted text option from the email options and going back through to bold or italicize everything that needs it. If I don't do this, the poems within my novel get awkward spacing, and some paragraphs have indentations where others don't.

So when I finally get it all done and perfect, I send it out. Last night I did this and when I looked back at the sent email, I discovered that although I had made the proper adjustments, the format of the paragraphs were squeezed together in parts of my second chapter and parts of the third chapter, the size of text was different.

Why does it do this? it is extremely frustrating, as my career with an agent depends heavily on this. I wish I could just copy and paste. That doesn't work. Painstakingly fixing the text doesn't work either.

After struggling with this for almost two years (I had taken a break in the search to re-evaluate my novel after an agent had requested a full ms then did not follow up. I found out she moved to a different agency shortly after receiving it), I am fed up! It feels a little unfair that something which is apparently out of my control should hinder the outcome of my career. Does anyone else have this problem with open office/gmail?

I know I still have the snail mail option, but some agencies no longer ask for this.

My two questions are, could agents be forgiving of this glitch? Should I mention this in my email? Or should I send out an email asking if I could send my chapters as an attachment because of this problem?

Okay, I'll try saving it as .txt but I had already set up the email for plain text. That's why I had to go through and redue all the formatting. I will see if saving it as .txt works.

RRK said:

Nuwanda, you can also try emailing it to yourself before sending to agents so you can see how the formatting worked out. Once you get a format that works, you should be able to paste it into different emails for each agent, right?

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True. I did that once, copying from a proper email, and it backfired of me. I have bad luck with tech stuff anyway, but I'll keep at it. Once I just tried forwarding it (after clearing out the prieveous contacts lists.) THAT was such a bad idea. Clearly I didn't clear it out enough and so it was sent to three agencies at once. Face. Palm.

So, no need to let the agents know within the email that I'm having these tech problems?

Thank you! Thank you!

benbradley said:

Run notepad. Paste into notepad. Then select that, copy, and paste into the email.

It makes it just like on typewriters and computers in the 1960s, except you still have both upper and lower case.

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Thank you! This is a good trick to know and I will give it a shot.

Araenvo said:

Also worth noting: Agents know this happens, and the formatting is not the end of the world - it's the quality of the writing the care about. I've heard more than one agent say outright that if formatting's screwed they just assume it's an e-mail problem, ignore it, and read the work anyway. Then, if they do request, it's as an attachment anyway!

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This makes me feel so much better knowing that agents aren't that evil, haha!

Thank you everyone for such quick and helpful replies.

Sage said:

Notepad is what I use for queries and other letters that are more or less used over and over. I hate using it for typing or if I have to review something, but it's good for losing the formatting.

I have found that Gmail has a great feature that fixes all formatting and spacing issues with any pages I send. I was having trouble with some paragraphs having spaces after them and some not and some being indented and some not. I found that if you paste everything in, then hit the "plain text" link, then "rich formatting" it automatically takes out all the formatting AND adds a space between paragraphs so they're easy to read. Then I just add any italics or bold that I think is really important back in.

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This is my exact problem! Unfortunately, because I'm quoting poems, characters, & other material, I need to keep some formatting. I did click the plain text option on google then went back through & adjusted where I needed. The end result was almost perfect...& then, the font size changed.

I should just give up on the formatting. The reason I have it though, is so that the read is smoother between character dialogue. Clearly the computer Sage doesn't agree.