Macmillan New Writing submissions

[Crone]

Macmillan accepts unsolicited manuscrips in their New Writing Program. ( http://www.macmillannewwriting.com if you want to check it out.) The text of a completed novel (first time novelists only) is submitted as an attachment to an email - one file. They prefer 12 point, Times New Roman, double spaced, 'preferably microsoft word'.

I've got a Mac. I've got Microsoft Word for the Mac on it, but submitting files in Times New Roman has always resulted in messes - leaving out all the italics, substituting thetas for " and the like.

I'm not a technophobe; I can follow simple directions. That's about it. I think I'd be better off submitting in RTF, Times, 12 point. I know that's readable. My husband hates Microsoft with the passion of a Mac user. He could make the thing work. He would not be pleasant but he'd do it. They say 'preferred' not obligatory - and I'd rather do it myself.

Any Advice?

 

[thaddeus6th]

I'm not the most technically minded person myself, so can offer only a luddite solution: how about e-mailing the organisation and asking if you can use a different font?

Sorry I can't be of more/any help.

 

[Ursa major]

I've only ever used Word under Windows, but I'm surprised you cannot change the font without altering the text. I'm more surprised that a font (Times, you said) does not follow the various standards, such as the ISO/IEC 8859 ones, which define character encoding.

Hang on, I've just had a look at Wiki (I'm not a wikipaedophile, honest), and in the article on Latin-1 it mentions that Apple came up with its own encoding scheme in 1984 which is "often a source of trouble when editing text on websites using older Macintosh browsers (including the last version of Internet Explorer for Mac). However the extra characters that Windows-1252 has in the C1 codepoint range are all supported in MacRoman and except for the few missing ISO-8859-1 characters a Macintosh can send/receive files (and email) that are encoded/marked as ISO-8859-1 (with the C1 Control Characters) and Windows-1252 by remapping the glyph's codepoint numbers."

That might explain the thetas (although there's no mention of Word here), but I still find the problem with italics baffling. Then again, my background is Telecoms, where the control software is meant to work 24x7x365 and interfaces are supposed to be defined in standards (and even then, all is not perfect, before anyone asks!). It's a wonder any of this IT software works at all.

*Wanders off, muttering under his breath.*

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

If they say preferred, rather than obligatory, just send them what you have in the nearest format you can and explain your problem.

 

[Havlen]

I doubt any publisher would think twice about you sending it in with courier font or sending in it as an .rtf file.

 

[Anne Lyle]

If they say preferred, rather than obligatory, just send them what you have in the nearest format you can and explain your problem.

Same here - send it as .rtf but with the other features as requested, and just mention that you use a Mac and have had problems with .doc files in the past. I'm going to be in the same position when the time comes (except I don't even have Word for Mac), so let us know how you get on!

Time was, the whole publishing industry was on Macs, so hopefully they'll be totally sympathetic. I remember back when I worked in the electronic publishing section of a science journal company; it was weird, being the only team in the office on Windows (some of the specialized SGML utilities we needed had been written for Windows only)...

 

[Simon Haynes]

Alternatively, what happens if you install OpenOffice on the mac, read in your Word file, set the font to Times and then export back to a Word 97 file?

I know exporting and importing can create more problems than they solve, but it might create a cleaner file.

 

[Crone]

Thanks for the advice.

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Hi, everyone.

Is there a thread or a section on this board in which the Macmillan New Writing initiative is discussed?

I read some criticism about the non-negociable contract they propose, but, at the same time, other affirm on the Internet that this is an opening for young writers.

Can you share your thoughts about it?

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

That they don't pay advances is a bit troubling, but the royalties are not at all bad. I don't know what else is in their non-negotiable contract, but it's a large, well-established, and respectable company. As such, their boilerplate is going to be full of clauses that are unfavorable to the writer -- on the other hand, it's not going to have some of the more horrifying clauses you can get from a small press publisher.

And you get the name and reputation of this old, international firm behind your book, and your book is handled by a staff of professionals from the editing to the printing to the marketing. All these things you will never get by self-publishing or small press publishing or vanity publishing.

But if your book is so good that they would choose it for their program ... well, your chances of getting an agent (eventually) and selling to some other large publisher with a standard contract instead (eventually) are not so bad. In which case you'd have the advance and a chance for your agent to negotiate the contract.

As an alternative to looking for an agent or submitting to one of the few large houses that will still look at unagented submissions, this is maybe not such a great idea unless you're already weary of the search for an agent, or don't have the patience to look for one in the first place. But as an alternative to self-publishing or any of the other non "traditional" routes, this looks very good indeed.

So I think it depends on what you were already planning to do before you heard of this program.

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Thank you, Teresa.

That was the general impression I got from my surfing the net.

Someone said, “They received 5 000 typescripts and published 12. Isn’t that the usual rate?”

And others said, as you do here, that if a publisher thinks that she can make money publishing your novel, she will buy it anyway.

One anonymous NY publishing editor’s states (with just a tad of exaggeration),

“If you can't ally yourself with one of the ten bazillion agents who currently exist, there is something really wrong with you. Also, most publishing houses have ironclad no-unsolicited-submissions policies. So get an agent. It's not that hard! (to get a crappy one). It is hard to get a good one […]”

The blog is called "UNSOLICITED".

 

[Ru Pringle]

I went through literally years merrily submitting to publishers, not understanding that they weren't even reading the manuscript because I didn't have an agent. Ah, the gift of hindsight...

Apparently if anyone including an agent reads past the first page, you're already in the top five percent. Not sure if that's comforting or scary!

 

[DominicTook]

If this wasn't solved. Try and find Adobe Acrobat Distiller (Can't remember the newest version)

I'm guessing that works on a mac seeing as its Adobe software. Then i would export it out of that other program on the mac into a pdf formatted file.

Then send that.

Dominic