RTF update
Rather to my surprise, only three people have used the experimental RTF submission system in the week since I mentioned it here.
I can think of half a dozen possible reasons for that (such as: not that many authors know about it yet; some of those who do know about it already have a story under consideration with us; most authors who know about it probably don't happen to have a story ready to submit; authors are worried about using a system that's still in beta; etc), but I wanted to ask one specific question just in case: are any of you intentionally avoiding using it? If so, is there anything in particular that's making you avoid it? If so, it would be great if you could drop me a note and let me know.
By the way, in case my previous posting wasn't clear about this, you don't need to do any special formatting before you submit using the RTF form. Standard manuscript format is fine, as is any other format a story is likely to have. The system automatically formats your submission for us, so by the time the story reaches us, it'll be easy for us to read. (And it sends us a copy of the original RTF file, too, so we can check the formatting if we need to.) You can use curly quotation marks, italics, underlining, and/or whatever fonts and paragraph spacing you already happen to use. (Don't go out of your way to format things weirdly; I'm just saying that if you use the RTF system then you don't have to do any reformatting for us.) You just use the Save As command in your word processor to save as RTF (as far as I know, all word processors published in the last ten or fifteen years can do this), then fill out a brief online form and click a button and you're done.
It's certainly fine to continue using the old email-based system; I'm just surprised that so many authors are choosing that, and want to make sure I didn't inadvertently put any roadblocks in the way of using the new system.