This is one of those things which makes you go hmmm…

A while back an email with a link to this arrived. Yes, the only thing you need to do is create a Web site for a book you’ve published and put on it an email address you look at once in a while and you too will suddenly get lots of unwanted email offering you publishing services and to help you spend that inheritance that Nigerian Prince wants you to help them recover. Occasionally, something useful shows up. This particular link was useful, or so I thought.

I mean, even if there wasn’t any payment, some offshoot of “WIRED” magazine should generate great publicity, right? I mean they are supposedly the “tech gurus Wired into the world of technology,” right?

Weeeeelllll

Then I saw the submission rules

  • Microsoft Word document file
  • 12 point Times Roman font

Hmmm . . .

Professionals don’t use Microsoft products. Shouldn’t Wired know this?

Microsoft Word? Why are they using a Grandfather’s word processor? I mean if they are going to insist on a Grandfather’s Word processor, why not insist on Word Perfect and require all fonts be embedded in the document? (Yes, Word Perfect could do that before the world quit using Windows. Now, unless you are loading Word Perfect under Wine, it doesn’t matter.) It appears Word got that ability some time prior to this article in 2015.

I politely pointed out the fact that Wired Magazine was living in the 1990s with my submission. Honestly, I didn’t bother to think of it much after that.

The rest of the inbound email is just the description of the book and author BIO. They had a few requests about not wanting the content to be published elsewhere, etc.

“If you didn’t think much about it after that, why are you writing this post?” you ask.

Today I got a bit of a snip in a reply. No I’m not going to finger who did it. I’m not that much of an unwashed rectal sphincter.

Yeah . . . If you were “Better Homes & Gardens,” “Popular Science,” or any of the old industry magazines, you could say that and be forgiven. They don’t claim to be “Wired.” They can be forgiven for having a dusty old curmudgeonly bit of tech to put out their magazine. “WIRED” can’t.

That’s why you are reading this post and that’s why I withdrew my submission.

floppy disksNow that I think about it, I guess I should be glad they didn’t have us mail in 1.44 Meg floppies.

You would think a magazine covering the field of technology would have a hosted limited functionality word processor where submitors could request an account, then write or paste in their submission using only the limited set of fonts and features available in the hosted word processor, wouldn’t you? Maybe they could read this article to get some ideas about word processing technology as we approach 2020?

Btw. If you want to read what I was submitting to them you can do so on Quora.