![]() ![]() ![]() As we’ve already discussed in this series, this effort generally causes Millicent readers to regard a submission as less professional - and often, it’s apparent in her first glance at the first page of a submission. Seriously, many aspiring writers clearly go out of their way to format their submissions to resemble published books, in the mistaken belief that this will make their work seem more professional. ![]() Why is it so very apparent, you ask? Because much of the time, submitting writers will work overtime to make it apparent. Why shouldn’t conference speakers take thirty seconds of their speaking gigs to pointing out, for instance, that the ways in which a professional manuscript does not resemble a published book - ways that are unfortunately quite obvious to an agent, editor, contest judge, etc., from practically the moment their bloodshot eyes light upon a submission? Yet surprisingly little conference time seems to be devoted to deviations from standard format for manuscripts. Like, say, the kind of major formatting snafu that a quick glance at that handy reference guide in my last post would lead a savvy submitter to avoid. Oh, not all by itself, generally speaking, unless the violation was truly egregious by industry standards, something along the lines of submitting unnumbered pages or not indenting paragraphs, for instance, the kind of faux pas that might actually cause Millicent to cast the entire submission aside unread. Yet, surprisingly often, aspiring writers overlook odd formatting as a possible reason that an otherwise well-written manuscript might have been rejected. As the clich?goes - and you’re keeping an eye out for those while you’re reading those pages the pro requested you send IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and preferably OUT LOUD, right? Almost everyone that reads for a living twitches at the sight of a clich?– you get only one chance to make a first impression. Since it’s the first thing an agent, editor, or our old pal and nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, will see in your manuscript, it’s important to get it right. Given how detail-oriented he was - his characters can scarcely feel an emotion without the reader’s being treated to it from fourteen different levels of analysis - I’m sure he would also be proud that I am once again reverting to lengthy explanation mode about something as seemingly simple as a professionally-formatted title page. ![]() Why, yes, that it a rather long sentence, now that you mention it. Not so much from exhaustion (although that was an immense amount of practical how-to to cram into such a short space) as from the sense that, having at long last accomplished something that will please the folks that want to believe that no human enterprise cannot be successfully explained to everyone’s satisfaction in a single post - the searchers, in other words, rather than the habitual blog readers - I may return in good conscience to what I believe this blog does best, demonstrating thoughtfully how to avoid the many complex pitfalls that await the talented writer on the notoriously curvy road to publication. I have to admit, campers, that after my last post’s almost purely visual foray into the specifics of professional formatting for book manuscripts and proposals, a single-post summary for which many just-the-facts-ma’am-oriented writers have been clamoring for quite some time, I quite wilted. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |