• Email and Cover Letters
• Submission Formatting
• In the Body of the Email
• As an RTF Attachment

Submissions

PUBLISHING SCHEDULE

FORMATTING GUIDELINES

This is proving to be a recurring problem, so we're putting it up front. Please, for all our sakes, read this next part carefully.

All submissions should be sent by e-mail (no letters or telephone calls please) in either text or RTF (Rich Text Format) to submissions@allegoryezine.com. Below are some formatting rules to help us process your submission more quickly.

Email and Cover Letters

All email should be sent to us in text format only. If your email program is set to send HTML mail by default, turn it off before you start the submission process. We will no longer accept HTML formatted email at all.

When submitting, please put this in the subject line:

Submission: (Title) - (First and Last name)

Include the following in the body of the email and in the RTF file (if submitting an attachment):

Your name
Name to use on the story (byline), if different
Your preferred email address
Your mailing address
The story's title
The story's word count

You may also include a cover letter in the body of the email. We get a lot of strange stuff in cover letters, so if you're unsure of what goes in them (and especially what doesn't) please refer to these cover letter tips:

How to write a cover letter | What not to put in a cover letter by Jed Hartman

Submission Formatting

In the Body of the Email

If you're sending a story to us in the body of the email, please be sure that you're not sending it HTML formatted. Use plain text, also known as ASCII text. No bold or italics. To indicate italics, you may use _underscores_; for bold, use *asterisks*.

Use two line breaks to indicate paragraph breaks. (In Microsoft Word, you can insert double line breaks between paragraphs by doing a search-and-replace, replacing ^p with ^p^p.) If you don't indicate paragraph breaks, we won't be able to tell where paragraphs begin and end. You do not have to double space submissions when sent in the body of the email, just put an extra line between the paragraphs.

You don't need to turn on line wrap (which inserts a line break at the end of every line of text) for your email message. However, if you do use line wrap (or if your emailer automatically wraps lines), be sure to set wrapping to 75 characters/columns or fewer; otherwise we receive the story as a series of alternating long and short lines.

It doesn't matter what font your email software uses; there is no font associated with a plain text message. If you send using plain text, we'll see the story in our preferred fonts in our own mail software.

If you don't know how to convert your story from a word processing document to a text file, please see our Detailed Text Formatting Instructions.

As an RTF attachment

All stories submitted as an attachment must follow standard manuscript formatting. We will no longer read any story not properly formatted. (And we much prefer Courier New to Times New Roman) For explanations and tips on what SMF is and how to do it with word processing programs, please see this article.

If you are sending your submission as an attachment, please make sure to convert it to an RTF (Rich Text format) file only. (Word, Works, WordPerfect and other formats often prove difficult to open!) To convert to RTF:

• Open your story file in your word processor. Next, go to File -> Save As. Near the bottom of the Save window there should be a small text field with a drop-down arrow by it.
• Click on the arrow and you should see a list of the various file types that your program can convert files to.
• Find Rich Text File and click on that. The extension at the end of the file should change automatically to .rtf. Save the file.
• Changing the extension yourself without following these steps will not automatically convert the file and may, in fact, corrupt it. If you're having trouble, please refer to your program's help file.

• Open the copy of your document in Microsoft Word or other word processor.
• In Word, choose Edit > Replace. Find "^p" (first type a caret character, then type the letter P) (no quotation marks), and replace it with "^p^p".
  This puts a blank line between paragraphs. Other word processors may provide other methods of replacing a single line break with two line breaks.
• Change underlining to underscores. Here's how:
  • Choose Edit > Replace.
  • If there's any text inside the Find what text box, delete that text.
  • Click the expander arrow in the Find and Replace dialog box if necessary to view the extra options.
  • In the Format option, choose Font.
  • In the Find Font dialog box, under Font style, choose Italic.
  • Click OK.
  • In the Replace with text box, enter "_^&_" (underscore, caret, ampersand, underscore) (no quotation marks).
  • Click Replace All.
    All italicized text should now have underscores placed around it.
  • Repeat the above process to change boldface terms so they're surrounded by asterisks. (Use "*^&*" In the Replace with text box.)
• Choose Edit > Select All to select the entire text of the story.
• Choose Edit > Copy.
• Open your email program. (If you usually send mail formatted as HTML, turn off the HTML formatting option.) Create a new, blank email message. On the "To" line, type submissions@allegoryezine.com.
• On the subject line, type Submission: (Your Story Title) - (First and Last name) Note: do not type the literal phrase "Your story title" or "First and Last name" in the Subject line; instead, type the title of your story. Don't use parentheses around the title, and don't put the title in all-caps. Also, please do not put anything else (your pen name,
  word count, etc) on the Subject line.In the body of the message, put the other information asked for in the formatting guidelines.
• Type a cover letter. (Optional.) Press Enter or Return a few times to create a few blank lines.
• Choose Edit > Paste to paste the text of your story into the body of the email.
• Look through the story to make sure that it's formatted correctly and that the entire story appears in the email.
• At the end of the story, type END on a line by itself.