6. Under no circumstances… don’t make me shout this… under
NO
circumstances use
spaces or tabs or carriage returns to place things on the page. You must submit a file without any double spaces, tabs, or double carriage returns.
Yes, this is the same rule as General Rule 1. above. I don’t care about your “move ‘trenchant’ three pixels to the left”. Not at this stage. There is plenty of time for shifting things on the page when we are reviewing drafts.
If a poem has a particularly complex layout, DO NOT try to format the Word document to show it. We have your initial PDF which shows how you expect to see it on the page. You can make a note in square brackets at the top of the page – [SEE PDF FOR HOW THIS SHOULD APPEAR ON THE PAGE] – and leave the formatting to us.
Anything you try to do to make it easier for us will inevitably make it much more difficult. Do not use tabs, do not use spaces to format the position of words on the page. Why? Because our books are formatted to a different page size with different margins and use a different font and different font size. Your space is not our space. Your tab size is not our tab size.
Now, a word about line length. It is quite possible that some of your lines will not fit in a single line in a book. We do all sorts of clever things to make long lines fit, but sometimes, it simply cannot be done. Be prepared to work with us on this. You can’t fight physics. Sometimes, too long is just too long.