One Way To Avoid Rejection Of Your Manuscript Or Why Publishers Hate "Smart Quotes"

Ruth Zavitz forwarded this email on using "smart quotes" which was sent to her by Bob Zumwalt. It turns out that publishers are so busy that, sometimes, they will reject a manuscript simply because it will be too much time and work to clean it up.

From Bob Zumwalt:

"Gayle Surrette, IWW's Fiction admin, wrote this a while back.

It offers another perspective on formatting submissions that goes beyond our concerns at Novels-L. Learning proper formatting for our list is good practice for approaching an agent or publisher. They may not send a 'formatting problems' reminder in response to a sloppy submission."

From Gayle Surrette:

I have to speak to the smart quotes plain text thing.


First, I worked on producing a book a while back. I was the copy editor and spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with authors trying to get a decent copy of their stories for the anthology.

The more "famous" authors who publish a lot sent clean plain text documents. A joy to work with. Some had difficulties and while .rtf and .wp and .doc files were okay. Some of the files took quite a bit of massaging to go into the program we were using to get the book ready for the printers.

For the past couple of years I've worked on the WSFA Small Press Award (last year as administrator and this year as a committee member). Again lots of time spent trying to get clean copies of the file that didn't have the author's name, publisher's name in it (we do blind judging).

Again pretty much a horror show and a big difference between newly published authors ability to provide the proper document and older more established ones who did it the first time as explained
in the rules.

Now Gumshoe Review publishes one original fiction piece a month.

We've turned a couple of stories down as "not right for us" when in fact, we don't know because they were so poorly formatted after explaining that we wanted a clean document in either .rtf, pdf, txt, wp, doc, or odf -- with no smart quotes or other smart features because it's a bear to get that stuff out before going up on line.

Our members may think that turning in clearly readable documents in plain text is old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy but in publishing it's an absolute necessity if they actually want to get published.

For my part, on Gumshoe Review, I'm pretty much it for getting things formatted and up online. If it's too much work, I don't care how good the story is -- I'm not the only person in publishing that feels this way.

I've recently been reformatting novels from word documents and rtf documents to Kindle format for a friend who is a small press publisher.

The cleaner the document the easier it is to convert and that means no smart anything (quotes, apostrophes, commas, etc.).

Learning the tools of the trade is as important as learning the grammar, tropes, and tricks of telling a good story.

Using a Listserv enforces this and really it is a good thing for the writers.

Do publisher's accept documents with smart stuff in them, yes, they do. But I bet there's some formatting that goes on -- taking up lots of someone's work day -- to make the file work with their in-house software after it is accepted. Writers who don't cause extra work are much more likely to make a good impression.

Gayle