Well, there's certainly a non-trivial amount of work to get stories up on the site, but by and large the format it's delivered in is the least of my problems. I pretty much strip out most formatting and pare it down to simple, clean HTML. Italic and bold is preserved, everything else, indentation, double spacing, etc. gets taken out, deliberately. So you could deliver a plain text file, or raw text in an email, and it ends up looking pretty much the same as someone who's sent a Microsoft Word document. After they're emailed to me, they all end up in Google Docs, but that's the easy part of the process! When the editing is done, I convert them using a capable converter that generates most of the final HTML, but that part takes only a minute or so to copy/paste around.
The overwhelming proportion of the time spent on a story is the editing. I'm in the midst of writing up the process of what I do, including the readability rules I hold the text to, as a guide for potential volunteer editors to help me out with the workload. I'll make that public, in the hope that it acts as a guide to the authors too, because the biggest time saving for me would be if the submitted work already adhered to those basic rules. Some authors submit really clean, well-formatted text, and all it takes is a quick skim through to a) check it's not breaching a submission guideline, b) get a sense of the story so I can put the right codes on it. Those sorts of submissions can send me a 10,000 word story chapter and I can get it converted to nice clean HTML with story codes in 5-10 minutes.
Other authors send me text which is all over the place, missing or broken punctuation, weirdly formatted, big wall of text paragraphs that need to be broken up to be readable, sentences that run on for line after line, random capitalisation, parentheses everywhere, and many other issue. If I were to publish it verbatim, the readers would be left scratching their heads, or re-reading the same paragraph over and over again trying to figure out who did what to whom and what got stuck into where. Those can make a 2,000 word story take 30-45 minutes to edit, and are the main reason why publishing moves at the pace it does. Some are bad enough I'm forced to send them back to the authors and ask them to try and tackle the worst things, but most I simply take on the work myself. Because the ideas behind the stories are fun, and interesting, and technical issues really shouldn't get in the way of these things finding their way to the readers. I really love that you all submit your work here, I do appreciate it, and I'm not trying to hold people to professional writer standards, but there's a middle ground.
In the absence of a more complete guide though, the following would be a great start:
- Put it in Google Docs or a similar modern editor. Don't fuss about the formatting, just make sure the text is all in there in proper paragraphs.
- Turn on both spelling and grammar check. Fix every single one of the things that get underlined, or if you really, really know what you're doing, mark the things it complains about as ignored.
- Make sure your story adheres to the rules of dialogue punctuation. All of them. There's only eight, they're really simple, and all of them are there for a reason. They are not a style choice, they are how English is written.
- Split your paragraphs sensibly. Not just a new paragraph for each speaker, but no 50 line paragraphs, and no 1 line paragraphs. Both extremes are a sign that something has gone wrong.
- Don't Just capitalise Random words. Capitalise names like Sheila, China, RubberTech Incorporated, and the DildoMaster 3000 fucking machine. Don't capitalise words just because you think they're Important. That's what bold is for.
Exceptions to the above apply, of course, if you know what you're doing. Be sure you do.
Do all those things, and you've cut out like 90% of the effort I'll have to put in to edit your story. Submitting in a sensible format saves me like 2%. Unless you save it in WordPerfect format. Seriously. The 90s called and they want their word processor back. Don't use WordPerfect.
