Submission Tip: Word 2007

If you are so lucky as to be asked to submit a partial to a literary agent and you use Word 2007, I’ve got a tip for you.

Awhile back, after receiving a request from a literary agent, I whipped up my partial in Word. I added a nice little title page/cover page using Word’s templates and saved it as a .doc (not .docx which is the 2007 default file format–unreadable in older versions of Word). I emailed it to the agent who wanted to read it that weekend. I was happy and optimistic as I didn’t hit ‘send’ and then realize I had forgotten to do something stupid like write ‘requested materials’ or include my contact information. I didn’t even cruise through my manuscript and see that I had used the wrong word somewhere.

The following Monday I got an email informing me there was some type of image in my document that made it impossible for her to upload the partial into her Kindle. Therefore, she was unable to read the sample. Please fix and resend. The best I could figure was that the Word title page template has some sort of embedded image (probably one of the nice text boxes or the vertical line that goes to the left of the title) that was messing things up. So, I whipped off the old title page, made a slap-dash, plain as punch title page (remembering to add in the word count) and resent the partial. Then I sat on my hands for about 3 weeks until she had time to read it. While I don’t think I would have been accepted as a client if I had managed to get her to read it right off the bat, I missed the benefit of ‘read it right now’ as well as riding that small wave of agent enthusiasm. I also made a busy agent’s life more difficult and caused her some frustration. You don’t want to do that.

Therefore, boys and girls of the aspiring writer world (or anyone within range of a Kindle), don’t use the Word 2007 title page templates if you think the document might come in contact with a Kindle (or possibly another electronic reader device such as the Sony Reader–it might have the same problems).

Lesson learned? Lesson learned.