Submission Guidelines/Formatting Rules
Okay guys. In the name of our sanity and to make sure that your work does not get posted to LJ as a garbled sea of text, we're setting down some submission and formatting guidelines. Consider this compulsory reading if you're planning to submit, especially for story and other writing submissions - we'll be able to tell if you don't read this by the size of our headaches, and then you will find yourself at the mercy of a very annoyed management. XD
ALL SUBMISSIONS
1. For ease of organization and because the editor-in-chief has a secret paranoia that she will lose/leave out an entry due to a tragic inability to count, please label your email subject AND file correctly.
Email subject: [art/story/illustration] [penname/artist name] [story/art title]
File name: name_title.txt/jpg/etc
2. In your email (so maybe I am kind of paranoid about all this), PLEASE also include:
Your name/penname:
Email to be attached:
LJ name to be attached:
Title of piece (whether story, art, or other):
The penname is the name you wanted attached to your story. If you do NOT want your email or LJ-name to be attached, please tell me so that I will know to leave them out.
If you leave out this information I will MAKE SOMETHING UP and I accidentally post you under the wrong name/lj name/give out information you wanted to withhold - well, this would not have been the editor's fault.
STORY SUBMISIONS
1. All stories are to be submitted in .txt format only.
2. Please turn off autoformat - by which we mean NO SMART QUOTES/ELLIPSES
This means that if you are using Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, etc, you will have to figure out a way to turn the curly quotation marks into straight quotation marks ("), the curled apostrophes into regular apostrophes (') and the single quotation marks into regular quotation marks(').
From the Strange Horizons website, there's a detailed guideline of how this is possible:
a) Make a copy of the file containing your story.
b) Open the copy of your document in Microsoft Word or other word processor.
c) Select the entire document (Edit > Select All) and change the font to Courier or Times or another font in which curved or slanted quotation marks are visible as such. (In some fonts, such as Arial, curved quotation marks look the same as straight up-and-down ones.)
d) If your word processor has an option called "Smart Quotes" or "Smart Quotation Marks," turn off that option (see your word processor's help system for instructions).
e) Convert curved quotation marks to straight up-and-down ones. Here's how:
g) Now repeat with a curved apostrophe, replacing it with a straight up-and-down apostrophe.
h) If you use single-quotes anywhere in the story, repeat again with a curved opening single-quote mark.
i) Replace all occurrences of the em dash character (the long dash) with "-"
j) Replace all occurrences of the ellipsis character (which looks like three periods) with "..." (three periods) (no quotation marks). (Note: by default, Microsoft Word on Windows computers changes "..." to the ellipsis character, which will inevitably screw up on LJ. So make sure that your dot-dot-dots are three characters, not just one. You can turn off that option in Word if you want to avoid this step in the future.)
(Source: Strange Horizons).
3. Paragraph breaks: Please leave a blank line between paragraphs. Don't just use indentations with no line breaks. Leave THREE blank lines between sections, or denote with a row of dashes. Unless you ask for it specially, the editors will remove any fancy section dividers you add anyway.
4. If you need to bold or italicise words, include the HTML tags:
+ or + for ITALICS
+ or + for BOLD
Type them directly into the text. So for italics, you'll type italics, so on and so forth. You should not need any other HTML tags, unless your story formatting is... pretty exotic, in which case... please discuss this with the editors. XD
For illustrations, we'll insert the image/code ourselves, so no worries. At the most, just mark out where you need each image to go, or tell us in an email.
5. Please make sure there are no hard line breaks in your story, by which I mean paragraphs that look like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis
nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi
ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis
aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in
voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat
nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat
cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui
officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum
Basically, paragraphs that have been chopped into short, individual lines. We're... really not up to removing all these line breaks by hand, guys. XD
-------
To sum it up, your submission should be LJ-POST READY. This means if we copy-paste your story into an LJ entry and post it, it should post correctly without any additional formatting on our parts. Adding in HTML tags and combing out an occasional story to remove smart quotes is one thing if we have less than 10 stories an issue, but if we get more than 10/up to 20... well, hara-kiri suddenly looks like a really good idea. XD
If you want to play it safe or don't understand what we're talking about, take your story, paste it into an LJ entry and post it as a locked private post. Take a look at the entry. If anything looks weird, or isn't coming out the way it does in your text editor, you need to correct it so that it does turn up right in LJ. Then send us that version.
We don't want to be tyrannical, but the time spent ripping out hair/gnashing teeth over formatting is really better spent weeding out the embarrassing typos and grammatical errors we inevitably miss in every issue (BTW, if you spot any, please point 'em out XD)
Failure to follow these rules will get your story sent back with a request that you read the rules again and resubmit following them. If the editors are swamped/cranky enough, this is also valid grounds for us to reject your submission.
ART SUBMISSIONS
Since we can't sic editors on you, you get an easier life. XD
1. Deadline: You get an extended deadline of ONE WEEK BEFORE the issue's release date.
2. You may host the image on your own server and send us the link, or you may send us your image as an attachment and we will upload it to our space. Either way works great for us (so long as you promise us that your image will stay up on your server anyway. If you take it down, warn us so we can get it up on our own webspace.)
3. Acceptable image formats: .jpg, .gif and .png
4. We would prefer if you sent us the image in print resolution/300dpi, if that's possible. This isn't a compulsory rule though. File size should preferably be less than 500kb, to spare viewers' connections.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Okay, so we're still figuring out how illustrations can work. We prefer to be hands-off about it and leave it to the artists and writers since hey, less work for us! However, given that not everyone who signs up for an issue submits in the end, there's a distinct possibility that illustrators might find themselves story-less at deadline.
This is not a perfect solution, but what I can suggest for now is that if you find that your writer can't meet the submission deadline/is unable to give you a story by whatever time frame you're comfortable with, approach us and we'll try to hook you up with someone who has submitted. This is dependent on your own timeline - if you're comfortable with having a little less than 3 weeks to churn out an illustration, that's great. If you need more time, you're going to have to chase your writer a little harder, or hit us up early and hope for early submissions. XD
Like art, you also get an extended deadline - just get your illustrations to us 2 or 3 days before the release date, at latest. Format-wise, you get the same rules as art.
You can send in illustrations together with the story, or send them in seperately if the illustrations are only completed after the story submission deadline. It'll also be be a good idea to indicate where in the story the pictures should go, otherwise you'll be leaving it up to my dubious judgement. XD
If you have any questions or problems, feel free to ask in the comments, or drop us a line at thebookofimaginary@gmail.com
(And as a PS. to all contributors, if you spot any problems or mistakes with your submissions as we posted them, hit us up at the email and let us know what's wrong so we can fix it. Thanks. XD)
ALL SUBMISSIONS
1. For ease of organization and because the editor-in-chief has a secret paranoia that she will lose/leave out an entry due to a tragic inability to count, please label your email subject AND file correctly.
Email subject: [art/story/illustration] [penname/artist name] [story/art title]
File name: name_title.txt/jpg/etc
2. In your email (so maybe I am kind of paranoid about all this), PLEASE also include:
Your name/penname:
Email to be attached:
LJ name to be attached:
Title of piece (whether story, art, or other):
The penname is the name you wanted attached to your story. If you do NOT want your email or LJ-name to be attached, please tell me so that I will know to leave them out.
If you leave out this information I will MAKE SOMETHING UP and I accidentally post you under the wrong name/lj name/give out information you wanted to withhold - well, this would not have been the editor's fault.
STORY SUBMISIONS
1. All stories are to be submitted in .txt format only.
2. Please turn off autoformat - by which we mean NO SMART QUOTES/ELLIPSES
This means that if you are using Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, etc, you will have to figure out a way to turn the curly quotation marks into straight quotation marks ("), the curled apostrophes into regular apostrophes (') and the single quotation marks into regular quotation marks(').
From the Strange Horizons website, there's a detailed guideline of how this is possible:
a) Make a copy of the file containing your story.
b) Open the copy of your document in Microsoft Word or other word processor.
c) Select the entire document (Edit > Select All) and change the font to Courier or Times or another font in which curved or slanted quotation marks are visible as such. (In some fonts, such as Arial, curved quotation marks look the same as straight up-and-down ones.)
d) If your word processor has an option called "Smart Quotes" or "Smart Quotation Marks," turn off that option (see your word processor's help system for instructions).
e) Convert curved quotation marks to straight up-and-down ones. Here's how:
- Choose Edit > Replace.
- In the Find what text box, type a curly opening quotation mark. In Windows, press and release Num Lock, hold down the Alt key, and type 0147, then release the Alt key, then press and release Num Lock again. Other curved quotation-mark characters are 0145, 0146, and 0148. On the Macintosh, use Option+[, Shift+Option+[, Option+], and Shift+Option+].
- In the Replace with text box, type a straight up-and-down quotation mark. (If you can't do this, then Cancel out of this dialog box and turn off the Smart Quotes option in your word processor, then repeat this procedure.)
- Click Replace All.
g) Now repeat with a curved apostrophe, replacing it with a straight up-and-down apostrophe.
h) If you use single-quotes anywhere in the story, repeat again with a curved opening single-quote mark.
i) Replace all occurrences of the em dash character (the long dash) with "-"
j) Replace all occurrences of the ellipsis character (which looks like three periods) with "..." (three periods) (no quotation marks). (Note: by default, Microsoft Word on Windows computers changes "..." to the ellipsis character, which will inevitably screw up on LJ. So make sure that your dot-dot-dots are three characters, not just one. You can turn off that option in Word if you want to avoid this step in the future.)
(Source: Strange Horizons).
3. Paragraph breaks: Please leave a blank line between paragraphs. Don't just use indentations with no line breaks. Leave THREE blank lines between sections, or denote with a row of dashes. Unless you ask for it specially, the editors will remove any fancy section dividers you add anyway.
4. If you need to bold or italicise words, include the HTML tags:
+ or + for ITALICS
+ or + for BOLD
Type them directly into the text. So for italics, you'll type italics, so on and so forth. You should not need any other HTML tags, unless your story formatting is... pretty exotic, in which case... please discuss this with the editors. XD
For illustrations, we'll insert the image/code ourselves, so no worries. At the most, just mark out where you need each image to go, or tell us in an email.
5. Please make sure there are no hard line breaks in your story, by which I mean paragraphs that look like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis
nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi
ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis
aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in
voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat
nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat
cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui
officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum
Basically, paragraphs that have been chopped into short, individual lines. We're... really not up to removing all these line breaks by hand, guys. XD
-------
To sum it up, your submission should be LJ-POST READY. This means if we copy-paste your story into an LJ entry and post it, it should post correctly without any additional formatting on our parts. Adding in HTML tags and combing out an occasional story to remove smart quotes is one thing if we have less than 10 stories an issue, but if we get more than 10/up to 20... well, hara-kiri suddenly looks like a really good idea. XD
If you want to play it safe or don't understand what we're talking about, take your story, paste it into an LJ entry and post it as a locked private post. Take a look at the entry. If anything looks weird, or isn't coming out the way it does in your text editor, you need to correct it so that it does turn up right in LJ. Then send us that version.
We don't want to be tyrannical, but the time spent ripping out hair/gnashing teeth over formatting is really better spent weeding out the embarrassing typos and grammatical errors we inevitably miss in every issue (BTW, if you spot any, please point 'em out XD)
Failure to follow these rules will get your story sent back with a request that you read the rules again and resubmit following them. If the editors are swamped/cranky enough, this is also valid grounds for us to reject your submission.
ART SUBMISSIONS
Since we can't sic editors on you, you get an easier life. XD
1. Deadline: You get an extended deadline of ONE WEEK BEFORE the issue's release date.
2. You may host the image on your own server and send us the link, or you may send us your image as an attachment and we will upload it to our space. Either way works great for us (so long as you promise us that your image will stay up on your server anyway. If you take it down, warn us so we can get it up on our own webspace.)
3. Acceptable image formats: .jpg, .gif and .png
4. We would prefer if you sent us the image in print resolution/300dpi, if that's possible. This isn't a compulsory rule though. File size should preferably be less than 500kb, to spare viewers' connections.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Okay, so we're still figuring out how illustrations can work. We prefer to be hands-off about it and leave it to the artists and writers since hey, less work for us! However, given that not everyone who signs up for an issue submits in the end, there's a distinct possibility that illustrators might find themselves story-less at deadline.
This is not a perfect solution, but what I can suggest for now is that if you find that your writer can't meet the submission deadline/is unable to give you a story by whatever time frame you're comfortable with, approach us and we'll try to hook you up with someone who has submitted. This is dependent on your own timeline - if you're comfortable with having a little less than 3 weeks to churn out an illustration, that's great. If you need more time, you're going to have to chase your writer a little harder, or hit us up early and hope for early submissions. XD
Like art, you also get an extended deadline - just get your illustrations to us 2 or 3 days before the release date, at latest. Format-wise, you get the same rules as art.
You can send in illustrations together with the story, or send them in seperately if the illustrations are only completed after the story submission deadline. It'll also be be a good idea to indicate where in the story the pictures should go, otherwise you'll be leaving it up to my dubious judgement. XD
If you have any questions or problems, feel free to ask in the comments, or drop us a line at thebookofimaginary@gmail.com
(And as a PS. to all contributors, if you spot any problems or mistakes with your submissions as we posted them, hit us up at the email and let us know what's wrong so we can fix it. Thanks. XD)