Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
But most writers' Word files don't have the final editing changes in them, because until now there's been little reason to go to that extra work. Plus, there's a whole slew of things that have to be changed from manuscript format to book format: em-dashes, paragraphs tabs, underline to italic, proper centering (which doesn't always hold with conversion), sorting out Word "styles" which can be very useful to a writer but which can screw up the conversion, extra spaces, straight quotes to curly quotes (if you care), etc.
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One of the process changes I brought up in one of my old, buried posts is style guides. Stipulate the format submissions must arrive in. Ideally, publishers would endeavor to agree on the format. If they're using the same kind of tools, likely it would evolve that way. Publishers could even make a Word template and tutorial available to the agents and public.