"Can we fix it?" "Well, I fucking hope so!"
Bob the Builder reference, anyone? anyone? ah, oh well.
Formatting your writing to submit to literary magazines is a hassle. Want to know a secret? I don't know why it exists. Somebody knows, I'm sure. That somebody is not me. If it were up to me, we'd all be pasting our work into text boxes to submit. But that doesn't change the reality. Lots of editors care.
The basics of it are straightforward. Usually, people want Times New Roman, one-inch margins, double-spaced (bare minimum). Others add a word count to the top right-hand corner, name in the top left, headers, page numbers, title halfway down the page, and so on.
I do not write my work into documents formatted this way. I write my work in snippets through sixteen drafts on Apple Notes, all saved as "MOST RECENT DRAFT" and at the bottom of weekly to-do lists. Then, twice a year, I muster up the motivation to organize them to submit. It's fun.
Not properly formatting a submission is a shit way to get rejected. So, we have created an automatic prose formatter to make this headache a thing of the past.
First, we developed a Submitter's Passport for writers to save their identifying information to be included at the top of properly formatted submissions. This was the easy part.
As the cheerleader of this whole operation, I understand nothing about the complexity of coding things. When I have an idea for something, I have no clue whether Karina will say, "Oh, I can do that in 30 seconds," or, "That takes six years and a team of trained goats to create." In the case of the formatter, this was somewhere in between. So, we enlisted the help of Art, a fellow developer, designer, and writer, and we got to work seeing how we might build this thing.
The first step was setting a standard. There are magazines that request Ariel font. Others want a bio pasted into the document, and others want your identifying information in the header of every page. It would be impossible to account for every outlier's specifications. So, we had to figure out a "most of the time" format. Lucky for us, we have a database of 3000 magazines and years of experience submitting our work. We quickly determined the best, most detailed, "most of the time" format out there was laid out by William Shunn. It says right there at the top, "Welcome to the manuscript formatting guide that more users trust—and more editors recommend—than any other."
He's not wrong. (Though we are still having an anxious debate about whether to tab the first line in a story)
Okay, so we needed to create a user-friendly portal to get the writer's work from a jumbled mess to a cleanly formatted submission-ready doc in as few steps as possible.
I'll turn this over to Karina to talk about all the troubles and dev nonsense on this journey.
[KARINA TALK] <- (actual note from the draft of this doc)
The initial version of the formatter was created around late spring when I randomly decided to secretly code a user cabinet prototype in one day to surprise Ben. Surprise went well, for about two days he only spoke in “OOOOOO”s and “FUUUUUUCK”s.
After we learned to speak normally again, we got to work.
That first version of it managed to spit out a document with all the contact and story details in place, but this definitely wasn’t a ready to submit document yet, it was more like “OOO OKAY THIS COULD ACTUALLY WORK”. And then Art helped us make it into something that almost worked and we released a beta!
Still, a lot was wrong with it. Mainly, it didn’t support bold, italics, and indentation. For this, we needed to add a normal editor, but this is only half the problem. The output of these kinds of editors is in the HTML format, and the library that we’re using for formatting provides only plain text formatting for free. To format HTML content, you need to buy a module for $500 a year. Ok, we thought this was worth it (look at us being rich like that). Reached out to the company, got a trial for two months.
Got to work again.
Then we thought it was almost ready for the real release before we realized it absolutely wasn’t. The document had weird empty lines, some blocks looked different from how a writer would normally create them, our address input wasn’t exactly right, and like a dozen other small things.
And then Art had an emergency and had to step away and I had the absolute pleasure of finishing this! When I mean pleasure, I mean stuff like this:
Oh wow, goosebumps.
And so, after another month of tweaking, asking people we know to try it out and paying $500 - we’re finally here! We really hope you like it, please like it. It’s actually really useful. It’s magic! Except created by very real humans (us)
[NIKITA TALK] <- (and again!)
We started with a simple form—basic bricks with labels. Users entered their info, pasted text, and downloaded. However, the process lacked clarity; the interface didn't show what the final result would be. It felt like working without a clear view. Then Art suggested a solution: masking the interface to resemble the final product. It's akin to typing in a Google Doc while formatting seamlessly happens. We've made strides with what we have, and your feedback can help us improve further!
Calm down, Nikita.
(Clearly Nikita and Karina have the same personalities…)
You know, before working with dev & design, as a regular old internet user, I used to think stuff on the internet just happened. Like, a tool like this popped into existence and was just…there. You know, like how houses just appear or cars drive themselves off the assembly line. But no. At the end of the day, this thing took 5 months to build. That’s like…more than half a baby.
We learned a lot from this process. It’s given us perspective on the real scope of what it takes to create a fully functioning tool. It takes butt loads of time, testing, design, dev, and MONEY. God, fuck money.
When we started, we were like, “OK, formatting sucks. How has nobody made a tool to help writers with this?” And now we know. In this day and age, spending five months solving a small problem for a limited number of people is simply not financially viable.
But we’re doing it anyway.
Because, fuck it.
If you want to support us in this tragic comedy that we love so very much, you can sign up as a premium member on our website to use this formatter. If you sign up as a supporter ($10/m) you can use our beta tools which is really-really cool when paired with the formatter because you can save your work to your drive. Then on the formatter just select a piece and click download.
I cannot wait for this to be a fully released feature sometime in the next 2-13 months!
Calm down, Nikita
Needs more cowbell