I Promise We’re Not Just Trying to Be Annoying

Here’s something a lot of authors are put out to discover, once they get to a certain point in the publishing process: a lot of editors (both freelance and in-house), agents, and publishers won’t accept their manuscripts as-is. And it’s because of the software the author used when writing.

This happens to a lot of authors who don’t use Microsoft Word, sooner or later.

You may well have experienced this yourself. Maybe you finally, finally finished your manuscript—got it written, made all of your edits, went through several drafts, and it’s time to put it in front of a professional…

Only to trip over such an annoyingly mundane road block—one you almost certainly didn’t see coming.

Maybe you use Scrivener, with all its extra tools to facilitate book writing. Maybe you use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or WordPerfect. Or maybe you’re like most of the authors in this situation, and you use Google Docs so that you can keep working from any device.

Whatever the case, if you did finally submit your manuscript only to be told, “No, not unless you move your entire four-hundred-page manuscript over to a completely different app and probably redo all of the formatting, too,” you’re probably not happy! You’re probably wondering, “Hey, what the hell?”

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Well, the good news is that those editors, agents, and publishers aren’t just trying to mess with you. The bad news is that, since they do have some real reasons, they’re probably not gonna budge.

There’s a couple different reasons for this, depending on the editor (etc.), but by far the biggest one is this: Using multiple word processors (apps like Microsoft Word) on a project introduces errors. Almost inevitably.

You see, in publishing, it’s really important that everyone is on the same page—both figuratively and literally.

Here’s just a few of the things that can go wrong when you mix applications:

• The page numbers are different in each application.

• Most or all of the bold and italics are gone.

• There’s an extra line space after every. single. paragraph.

• The fonts and font sizes are all the same now.

• Pictures, graphs, and tables break or won’t load.

• Special characters have been replaced by the blank boxes of doom.

• All headers are now formatted just like the regular text.

• All the white space between paragraphs has been deleted.

• Paragraphs have been split up and merged together all over the place.

• Numbered lists break whenever you try to edit them.

• Each punctuation mark is formatted differently depending on which app it was typed on.

• Links are broken or deleted.

• Tracked changes won’t display.

• Comments are pasted right into the middle of the manuscript.

• And much, much more.

And by the way, all of that is leaving out the advanced features of Word entirely. That means things like Word Styles—a lot of writers don’t do much with them, or even know what they are, but editors and publishers use them all the time.

These issues aren’t just annoying, either, as you’ve probably guessed. Because every single one of those things introduces errors, and every single time the file switches between word processors, that’s just more chances for errors to slip in and the file to get corrupted further.

And even if you wanted to take the time and energy to fix all of these issues by hand every single time (which, no, you really don’t)… Every round of fixes is itself a chance to introduce more errors. Typos, inconsistencies, glitches—the whole shebang.

All of this goes against one of the cardinal rules of editing: every editor misses things sometimes, because we’re human, but you should never, ever introduce an error that wasn’t there before. (One the one hand, obvious! On the other hand, actually doing that requires a lot more diligence than you might think.)

And worst of all, however much time you think it would take to solve these problems, it’s often more.

Last time I agreed to work with someone using one of the more common Word alternatives, it turned a two-week project into two months.

It quadrupled the project timeline. Two months, for a document that wasn’t even twenty pages.

Who the heck has time for that?

Certainly not me—and I’m sure you don’t either!

Which is why, as that project was (finally) wrapping up, I made a new rule for myself: no more mixing word processors ever again!

(Actually, I’m still more flexible about this than a lot of editors/agents/publishers, because I’m part of the minority of professionals who will agree to work in Google Docs. At least Docs ensures everyone is on the same page! Or has the same pagination, anyway. Same difference.)

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So, if this is a problem you’re facing—or might have to deal with in the future—I hope it helps to know that there are real reasons behind these policies. And hey, if you’re forewarned before you have to deal with it, all the better.

After all, no one wants a quadrupled timeline. No one.