Jane — Excellent insight! I hadn’t thought about formatting and poetry, but you raise a great point. Places where formatting is important a PDF is the surest way to guarantee that your formatting will look the same no matter what program a person uses to open your document. Thanks for sharing this.

You know, I always used to use the tried-and-true Word doc route, but then, when I was in a poetry workshop and we had to send in work ahead of time, I noticed that my poetry was formatted all wrong on certain of the participants’ computers, although fine on others. Ever since, I have tried if at all possible to use .pdf for poetry (not for fiction–then I stay with Word). It’s incredibly important to most poets that spacing be exactly right. You don’t know, really, what’s happening with those things on the other end of a .docx file. Just my two cents.

Happy to be of help, Anthony! Best of luck with your submissions, and keep us posted if your work gets published so we can all cheer for you.

@DIYMFA

Thank you for the prompt reply. That is good advice! I suppose I always imagined Word documents to be unprofessional inferiors to stylized .pdf’s with fancy formatting and sharp headers. It makes sense to me, though, to keep it simple and stick to the guidelines of whatever magazine I choose to submit to.

Thanks again.

Great question! Most literary magazines are pretty clear on that in their submission guidelines, which is why you want to read those carefully and early on in the process. That way you don’t waste a lot of time formatting a submission one way only to realize that the requirement is totally different. Whatever a magazine requests, do it exactly as they ask.

On the other hand, sometimes magazines don’t specify those details. In that case, I err on the side of simplicity. I submit a Word document, Times New Roman, 12pt double-spaced, with page numbers. Title of piece centered at the top of the first page, author’s full name and email in the header of the first page. On subsequent pages, recommend including author name and title in the header.

I learned the value of using headers when, as a staff member at my MFA program’s literary magazine, I dropped a stack of un-stapled submissions I had just printed. It would have taken all day to collate those pages if I didn’t have author names and story titles in the page headers.

Phew.