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.