When making submissions, I always do my best to follow the posted guidelines. This time, I seem to have made an error however, and I'm wondering what I ought to do (if anything) to correct it.
I submitted a short story to an online magazine recently. They ask that all submissions be formatted in standard manuscript format. I formatted my story as such and sent it off.
Just today, I decided to peruse the document while I was working on another piece. To my horror, the formatting was botched. I'm not sure what happened; it might've been my error or a technological one, but the document was not double spaced and my by-line wasn't centered. Plainly speaking, the submission looked like crap.
So, I've been wondering. Should I email the editor of this mag and apologize? Re-submit? Hope that the editor will overlook my error and give my story a shot?
I submitted a short story to an online magazine recently. They ask that all submissions be formatted in standard manuscript format. I formatted my story as such and sent it off.
Just today, I decided to peruse the document while I was working on another piece. To my horror, the formatting was botched. I'm not sure what happened; it might've been my error or a technological one, but the document was not double spaced and my by-line wasn't centered. Plainly speaking, the submission looked like crap.
So, I've been wondering. Should I email the editor of this mag and apologize? Re-submit? Hope that the editor will overlook my error and give my story a shot?
That said, I think what I would do is to simply re-submit it with the exact same 'cover' e-mail as you did before, but add a paragraph saying that you'd previously submitted this story on (date) and subsequently discovered that the file had been saved incorrectly with the wrong formatting, and that you're resubmitting it formatted correctly. That way, if they recognise the submission, they will understand why you re-subbed.