An Appeal to Authors

Hi folks,

This is basically an appeal to authors to take a little more care when submitting material to us for loading. For whatever reason, we are having to spend more and more time each week resolving issues with submitted material, the majority of which could be avoided just by taking a little bit more time when sending stuff in.

I thought, therefore, it might be helpful to draw attention to some of the more common issues that we come up against every week:

SUBMISSION TITLE
Please include the title of your submission in the subject field of the email. Simply putting "New story" or words to that effect is particularly unhelpful and likely to result in your submission being delayed or rejected. Please also remember to correctly identify submissions that are part of a serial, e.g. A Spanking For Mary - Part 1, or if multiple parts, A Spanking For Mary - Parts 4-8.

SUBMISSION TYPE
Please make sure that we clearly understand what it is that you're submitting, i.e. story, serial, ordered/unordered series etc. This is particularly important where a 2 part story is being submitted. For a description of what constitutes ordered and unordered series see the site Author Guide (which can be found under the Info sub-menu).

COMPLETED SERIALS
Please let us know when submitting the final part of a serial so we can mark it as "completed".

SUBMISSION FORMAT
Please do not submit attachments in Microsoft Word .docx format as it causes us problems (for technical reasons I'd be happy to explain if anyone is interested). For those that have shelled out for a version of Word that defaults to .docx, all you need to so is select 'Save As' and choose the .doc format.

USE OF ENGLISH/ATTENTION TO DETAIL
Please take the time to check spelling and use of English. Although we will make corrections up to a point we at least need people to take some pride in what they're submitting. Authors who need help with grammar and/or punctuation can always request assistance by posting on the forum. Unfortunately, a lot of what has to be corrected is down to simple sloppiness and basic lack of attention to detail rather than a lack of understanding of the English language.

GENERAL CIVILITY
Lastly, when submitting, please remember that this isn't an automated process in which whatever we receive is someone magically processed and ends up on the site. Every submission is personally received and reviewed by us individually and a little civility when communicating is always appreciated.

Thanks!

Good advice and quite helpful, I would think. And, after all, civility on this forum is a must (and likely much appreciated).

Thanks, Febs...

I realise that all my WORD documents default to docx format, I thought this was something you had to choose! What would be preferable from my alternatives - "plain text" or "WORD 97-2003" or something else?

The Microsoft .docx format, although supposedly offering advantages, was not compatible with those using earlier versions of Word and in addition, caused issues when being imported into other non-Microsoft word processors. Flopsy and I both use the Linux operating system (rather than Microsoft) and tend to use LibreOffice or, where unavoidable, I run an old version of Windows with an old version of Word as a virtual machine.

All you need to do, however, if using a recent version of Word which defaults to .docx is to select "Save As" instead of Save and select Word 97-2003 or whatever else shows as having a .doc extension (assuming this information isn't hidden in the latest version of Windows). You can of course keep your own version in .docx, it's just the version for us that we need in .doc.

We do, of course, also accept documents in rtf (rich text format), odt (open document text) and plain text too.

Shameful confession time..... I am guilty of not noticing the difference between a .docx and a .doc version of a story and sending the wrong one in! I learned my lesson, but I think all of us authors could do with checking the author guide and this post from time to time to remind ourselves so that we can prevent future mistakes.
thereader0987/nswitch

Or you can usually, with a newer version of Word (I use Word 2010), set the .doc format as the default setting for saving files. It's entirely backwards compatible with older versions. Insofar as the .docx format, I've never even used it so I couldn't say whether it's worth the extra trouble. Some of the formatting options in the newer versions are a little different but I think Word has become overly complicated and bloated anyway.

I am in favor of civil and polite.

Oops, I realise I don't actually send attachments of stories, I just copy and paste into the box on the "Contact Us" option under the "Info" header. I presume that is the best way and the content is accessible irrespective of what format it is stored in on ones own system.

Sending stuff in this way is absolutely fine. The only issue is that you'd need to remember to indicate italicised text if there was any as pasting plain text into the 'Contact Us' form would lose it.

Personally, I either save as Text or paste the story into notepad. Everything can read .TXT files.

Goodgulf