Preparing to Submit [a writing sample]

The title was sounding far more suggestive than the topic deserved. I'm preparing to submit the first 20 pages of my book to She Writes Press.

I've submitted pitches to agent before but this is a little different. They don't ask for a pitch or any sort of introduction. Having gone to the trouble of writing such an intro and pitch, I feel kind of exposed without one. So I wrote them asking if there was a way I could send them the pitch first.

Also, I have to understand that these really are traditional book publishing folks. They want to see the first 20 pages in a normal font like Georgia or Times and it has to be double-spaced. Both of this things make me cringe. I just loath serifed fonts even though there is no shortage of research saying that they really are easier to read. And double-spaced means that they are only reading 10 pages of my work, not 20.

So I did the prep and of course it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I chose Times New Roman which is a very compact font and even with double-spacing there is a lot of the story in the proposal.

Now do a wait for an answer to my question or not? I picked a holiday weekend to send the question and it's unlikely I'll be patient enough to wait.

But let's hear it for last minute snags to slow down the impulsiveness. I need to have page numbers turned on. I use Google Docs and they're already on there, but I downloaded it as an Open Office word document, so I have to learn enough about Open Office to figure out how to turn them on.

Not too terrible. I had to Insert: Footer->Default.
Then click in the footer and Insert->Fields->Page Number.
I also chose to center it.

Of course, things were going too smoothly. Even with those changes it doesn't save them. I repeated the whole thing and when I reopen the document the page numbers are gone again.

Ok maybe it's time to update Open Office since I've been putting that off for a long time.
So I download the newer version, futz with my security preferences to allow me to install it, and then I realize that when I resaved it with the page numbers it had changed it from the ".docx" format to an ".odt" file, so I was actually looking at the old file. I resaved the ".odt" as a ".doc" and the page numbers are there.

Now I get to figure out when to submit it. Time for the dog's nighttime walk while I consider.

[later] 
I should have guessed. On the submission page they give you a chance to submit a pitch, a cover letter, and a bio.

And they will accept .doc or .pdf. I'm much more comfortable about pdf because it works in a consistent way for the most part, so I'm going to re-download it as pdf. Of course, the page numbers disappear but the viewer shows them.

They use a service called "submittable" that I see that I've used before since they recognize me, but I don't remember what it was.

Ok, I did it. I'm trying not to worry about it.