Reading Guidelines and Beyond
Reading through submissions received so far we note that submitting authors not always bother with guidelines. That’s too bad, because GLs are provided to help you and us save time and effort. So if our minimum length is 2,500 words what’s the point of submitting flash fiction of less than 500? We won’t read it, but it’ll take you and us an exchange of e-mails to find that out. And since we ask for submissions as attachments, please don’t forward to us an e-mail with 4,000 words embedded in it, which you previously sent to another editor whose guidelines you did bother to read. We may or may not take the time to copy-paste it into a proper MSWord document, but that’s no way to improve your chances of being read.
And then there is the matter of standard manuscript format. Your story is processed and the file is saved separately from the e-mail with which it arrived. If you don’t put your name and contact information on the first page we may never know how to get back to you (yes, we can search through the pile of e-mails and try to pair the title with a message, but probably won’t have the time to do it).
And please do provide a word count on the first page. I know that we can use MSWord to recount it for us, but we receive many submissions and want to give each story the time it deserves, so any little added hurdle makes our life more difficult. Besides, that’s standard manuscript format. And yes, also a simple courtesy toward the editor who reads your work.