Scrivener's Error

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Scrivener's Error	Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

20 June 2007

09:04 [GMT-6]

The Mysteries of Manuscript Formatting

On his LiveJournal, the always amusing Jay Lake (and he's even more amusing than his selection of shirts) sort of equivocates about manuscript formatting. I'm afraid he's missing the bigger picture, here, as are almost all manuscript-formatting "gurus." Form follows function. In short, there is no universally correct format for manuscripts submitted for publication.

When in doubt, follow the guidelines for the publication/publisher to which you're submitting. See? That wasn't so hard! If the editor at Fantastic Stories of Furry Bondage insists on triple-spaced manuscripts in Arial 14pt with 0.8" margins, so be it. Because...
One of the purposes of computers is to automate mindless repetitive tasks like formatting. Your market wants underlines instead of italics? A global search-and-replace will do the trick. Same for two spaces after a period (versus one space), proportional fonts (such as the inexcusable Times New Roman, Arial/Helvetica/Univers, Bookman, Century Schoolbook, etc.) versus monospaced (such as the barely excusable Courier, Andale Mono/Consolas, Prestige, and other fonts that look like they came off a manual typewriter), and other minutiae that authors spend waaaaaaay too much time worrying about when they should be asking "Is my writing crap?"
Aside on computers: Never, never, never send a document as an attachment in a proprietary format. Send it, instead, as either plain text (if appropriate) or RTF (if formatting matters at all). You cannot know in advance whether the machine at the other end even shares your operating system, let alone version of software... and given the continued pathetic attachment of the graphic arts community to Cupertino toys, there's a decent chance of a translation error. Just try translating "smart quotes" between Macintosh and Windows word processors... especially if the file has ever been edited by either WordPerfect or any of the "free with the machine" word processors shipped on lower-end Macs...
Just about the only universal rule of manuscript submission is to print on only one side of the page, in black ink, using a serifed Roman (that is, upright and non-connected) typeface for the body of the text. Different markets and purposes have vastly different formats for manuscript submissions, and they continue to evolve. For example, Jay's piece includes a quote from Dr Stan Schmidt, the editor of the science fiction periodical Analog, claiming that "Computers also make it easy to do actual italics instead of underlining, but most [editors] would rather you didn't, and continue underlining instead." As Dr Schmidt, a physicist, should be all too aware, that's true only within certain boundary conditions — most editors of commercial-category fiction, and perhaps then only for shorter works. Anyone who submits book-length serious nonfiction these days had bloody well better be using italics, and using them correctly; "most" editors in that segment of the publishing industry prefer italics, because they mean something different than they do in fiction. As an example of just how strange things can get, consider this fairly vanilla law journal submission format (you'll have to download the PDF) — it's not even double-spaced!
Follow the appropriate documentation conventions. That may seem like a surprising consideration to fiction writers, but the success of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell should give even you pause. Question: Were the footnotes submitted as footnotes; as endnotes; or in some other fashion? (Hint: It was written and first submitted in England, so the answer is... readily apparent only to those of us whose perception of publishing doesn't stop at the edge of the Pond.) There are style guides for each of the major areas of publishing, and remember to check the publisher's guidelines.

Of course, I could have said all of this on Jay's own LiveJournal page if commenting didn't require a LiveJournal "account." And that's a subject for another time... except to note that I don't have one, I won't be getting one any time soon, and phhhhhhhht to those who think it an absolute necessity.

Labels: publishing

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Links of Interest

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Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Larry Ribstein (University of Illinois Law)
- Professor Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Tom Ulen (University of Illinois Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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