Email vs. Snail Mail

Here we are, well into the 21st Century, and with all the uproar over saving trees and going green, you would think that everyone, or near everyone would be on board with the electronic communication thing. I'm referring to submissions, of course, since that has been the subject on which I have focused the last few days.

Not only is not everyone on board with electronic submissions, not even near everyone's on board with it. It's true most agents will accept equerries, but even a good portion of them only accept snail mail queries. And when it comes to publishers as I'm full into submitting to them right now, I would say, at this point, it's a little over half of them accept equerries, and the rest are adamant in their refusal to accept any electronic submission.

You better go by the guidelines if you want any chance to get published. You might have written the next American classic, but if you stray from a publisher's submission guidelines, it'll never get reviewed.

Thing is, even those publishers who do accept equerries and electronic submissions, you better be careful. I'm still learning about all the variances in word.doc submissions. I was sure I had, you know, the normal word.doc. And on this latest submission I made, just last night, the guidelines said NOT to attach any word.docx.

Word.docx?? What the heck is that? They said they will accept word.docs and rtf formats. I know about rtf because I ran into that with a prior publisher's submission guidelines.

So, anyway, I attached what I thought was my normal word.doc and sent it. And then I tended to family things, you know, the wife always complaining she wants more attention and the kids need rides here and there. When I got back to the computer a couple hours later, I checked the "SENT" section of my email to double check the emailed submission, and to my horror, I noticed that my attachments were word.docX!!!

Now how my word.docs suddenly became word.docX is beyond me. My only guess is that when I changed back to the latest Microsoft Word 2010 Office Professional recently, it somehow made them word.docx, but I'm just guessing. The thing is, the guidelines of that particular publisher specifically said NOT to attach any word.docx and there it was...plainly labeled as a word.docx attachment. Oh sh...t!!

So I repeated the submission after changing the attachments to rtf, and apologized, hoping that not too many submissions were made in the couple hours between my submissions, that they were close enough so that whoever was reading these things will see the repeated submission with the RTF attachment noted in the subject line.

It's an argument for snail mail because this kind of thing could only happen with electronic submissions. But what the hell. What's the problem with word.docx, anyway? Sheesh. It's always got to be something to make things more complicated. So it goes.