Sunday 19 September 2010

Why make it harder? 20th September 2010.

I want you to think about something for a minute. When you submit a manuscript to an agent or a publisher (yep – I’m back on that horse again) – you are taking the position of supplicant. You want them to accept your manuscript as worthy of publication, and although an actual begging letter isn’t in any way good from, you are begging them to find something g in your work that stands out head and shoulders above the others.

So surely, it’s reasonable to suppose that you’ve followed the publisher’s submission instructions to the letter (I’ve already covered that in earlier blogs), but isn’t it also beholden on you, the author, to ensure the internal consistency of the manuscript as well.

Hopefully, by following the submission guidelines it’s in the correct font, correctly spaced, and where applicable with (or without) page numbers, page headings etc. etc.

That’s reasonable – but have you checked everything else?

Have you stripped out your working cover, unless they’re already asking for that – which would be unusual, the pretty margin graphics, the fake parchment background and the “Draft” watermark.

You have? – Good! Second set of brownie points – the first was for following the explicit submission instructions.

Now for the one I bet you haven’t thought about – the embedded metadata.

You know - the author, title etc, which is embedded in the document. I bet some of you didn’t even realise it’s there, but it can create havoc for the publisher later in the process.

About from having an author name as your real name (when you want to use a pen name) or a title for the document which is actually the opening sentence there are worse effects still – the corporate ones.

Word, is an absolute menace in that respect. Let’s say you’ve been taking your manuscript in to work and using your company desktop to edit the manuscript during your lunch hour. As far as I’m concerned there’s no harm in that – but Word has a couple of tricks and your company system administrator has probably, and correctly, utilised them. Some companies have a policy to stamp the company name into the author metadata field, or you inherited the machine from your predecessor and their name gets inserted when you save. Companies can set their systems to automatically stamp any document processed on their system with additional metadata fields, identifying company department etc. etc.

For commercial purposes this is perfectly acceptable behaviour – but you don’t want them in your manuscript and you don’t want to force me to remove them either. If I have to remove them, or edit or alter them at any point in the process – believe me you just wasted my time and that is a serious mistake – remember you are the one who needs this, not us. You’re the supplicant.

Where is this metadata, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you for Word 2007 – because I’m nice like that, although exactly where to find it in other systems or older versions – I can’t help you.

Click on the big start button, scroll down the New, Open Save menu until you reach Prepare. The second pane of the menu should now open up and the top option is Properties – a.k.a. Document Properties.

You should be able to follow your nose from there.

The next manuscript I find with corrupted properties is going to get a “reject, try again” notice immediately. You have been warned....

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