The pitfalls of story submissions

You'd think after more than ten years of submitting short stories to magazines and anthologies I'd have got it down to a fine art. Satisfied with the finished piece even after you've left it alone for a couple of weeks? Great, now slap the right formatting on and send it in, awaiting the inevitable acceptance with your feet up. Five minute job, right? Wrong, particularly if you're prone to procrastination (most authors) and worried that a submission that fails to follow the guidelines to the letter will send you straight onto a blacklist. How is it so difficult, I hear you ask (pretend you asked). Fellow writers, prepare to nod along in recognition. Readers, let me tell you a story...

I'm not even going to talk about picking the right place to send a story to, that's a whole different hours-long process. Particularly with online magazines, I can't always remember where I've read something, so even if I think this piece would be perfect for the one that had that story about dancing hippos last month, I've still got to find which one that was. Let's assume I've decided, by whatever process, that War Story needs to go to the Bumper Book of War Stories, it fits their requirements on length and subject matter, they're still open to submissions and they don't need me to send it through the post (temperamental printer, amazing disappearing envelope stash, and remembering to go to the post office? No thanks). Even if I've submitted to them before, I need to check their guidelines because a) they might have changed and b) I might misremember.

Now comes the tricky bit. A few bewildering places don't specify much other than that it's legible, so inevitably I spend five minutes looking for the checklist of guidelines I must have overlooked somewhere. Most want 12-point font, the odd few want 14-point, and most want double-spaced. Times New Roman or Courier are the standard fonts, some want another specific font, or don't mind as long as it's not Courier. Some want anonymised manuscripts, some want name and address at the top of the first page, with name and page number in the header. Some want a word count at the top of the first page, some want it in the header, some at the end of the story. Some want you to write END at the end. Some want indented paragraphs, some want no indents, just a blank line between. Some want italics as italics, some want them indicated another way.

Some places want a 3rd-person author bio at the start or end of the manuscript, some want it in the cover letter, some don't mention it at all (and then accept the story, don't ask for one, and leave you as a detached name with no background information or links. Some even ask for one and then don't use it). Some want a proper cover letter, some say it's optional. Then we're onto how they want it to reach them. The two main choices are Submittable or email. With email there's then the question of do they want an attachment (and what kind), or the story pasted into the message body, and do I have to lay the subject line out a certain way, e.g. SUBMISSION: JY Saville, War Story. Some places ask for submissions via a form on their website, with all the usual pitfalls there (looking like it hasn't submitted anything, going through endless rounds of I Am Not A Robot photo-clicking).

Submittable is a bit like Paypal for stories. The writer has a Submittable account, which stores name, address, email address so you don't have to re-enter them each time. A magazine that uses Submittable for submissions will have a button (like the Paypal button on a shopping site) that lets you upload a file and fill in the title, sometimes a cover letter too. So, I would log in to my Submittable account, state that it's War Story I'm submitting, upload WarStory.odt (unless they've specified a different filename structure, like Fiction_WarStory_Saville.odt) and ignore the optional cover letter box, because I never know what they're looking for. That sounds reasonably simple, but .odt (open office format) is rarely accepted and I mostly have to convert to .doc or .docx which means headers and footers aren't always as I expect them to look, and one particular story often acquires a page break. There's also a problem with Libre Office or Open Office .doc files in Submittable losing the last line, so I have to remember to add blank lines at the end without adding an extra page.

Once I've gone through all that and updated my submission spreadsheet, I've usually had quite enough and declare myself through with story submissions (until the next time). This is why, despite dutifully noting which markets accept simultaneous submissions, I rarely end up sending the same story to more than one market at once. Despite that, I'd made more than 100 submissions this year by the end of September and I'm still plugging away at it when I'm feeling particularly patient. Here's to the patience of magazine and anthology editors too, I know there's usually a reason for the rules (like email subject lines used to filter messages to the right folder) and they're not just being arbitrary. Except of course the evil ones.