Friday, September 05, 2008

links

I know there are dozens of links out there. I know that some of this is context specific. With that out of the way, for those of you who are preparing manuscripts, looking for agents, publishers, etc, here's Ursula k le Guin on Manuscript Preparation and Contracts.

Irregular visitors to her site will be happy to know that it's more navigable now. Earthsea now has maps!*

*I meant that figuratively, but as it happens there are maps there.

3 comments:

Falstaff said...

Now you tell me.

Though that tip about planning where you're going to send the manuscript next so that you don't have to deal with the self-doubt is really useful.

Space Bar said...

:D You mean there was stuff you did wrong and you're realising it only now?

Falstaff said...

SB: Ya totally. The whole best time to look for an agent is when you have an unsigned contract in hand thing, for instance.

On the other hand, now I can blame my long list of rejections on the way my manuscripts were formatted. Clearly, the actual quality of my poems had much less to do with their not getting accepted than the fact that my headers must have annoyed the compositors.

The one thing I found surprising was that UKL seems to entirely ignore the fact that many journals have submission guidelines with fairly explicit directions on how they want the document formatted, what they want in the header, etc. I would think the first step in preparing a manuscript is to go read the submission guidelines of the journal you're sending to and then format accordingly.