Format Pretty and Share Like Crazy with Rich Text Format

Writers often need to send things around. To your betas or CPs, if you're still working on that first draft; to an agent (and sometimes copied into an email), if you're querying; and to your agent and editor if you're at the publishing stage. You may have a PC running Windows 7, and need to send to a Mac running Lion, or an old Mac running SnowLeopard, or from GMail to someone on Outlook—the list goes on and on. And maybe you write in Word 2013, but they work in Open Office, or you're writing in Pages, and they're reading on a Kindle...

...you see where I'm going here.

I run into a surprisingly large number of people who don't know that there's a file format that solves 99.9% of the problems you run into sharing a file from machine to machine and device to device. It's called Rich Text Format, and has the extension .rtf.  It's a .txt file with just the bare bones of formatting: like .txt files, it's cross-platform, but unlike .txt, you can retain your basic formatting, like em-dashes, italics, and underline. You can dump its results into an e-mail program, and most will parse it easily, keeping your paragraph breaks and line spacing intact. And your critique partners can even make margin comments and text corrections, and they'll show up in your program (presuming both of you are using software that allows for commenting).

To use it, when you're saving your file in your word processor, look for the dropdown box below the filename. Usually, you can change it from whatever the default is for your word processor to an .rtf, and boom! Totally shareable file. 

It's a great "in-between" from a .docx Word 2007+ file that gets garbled on your friend's machine and a .txt file that kills all the prettiness you put into your document, and a great way to make sure that everyone who reads your manuscript can focus on your brilliant words, instead of whether or not they can open your file.

This month I'm participating in the A-Z blog challenge. My theme is "writer hacks," or 26 shortcuts you can do as a writer to get the most out of writing and the journey toward and through publication. Find out more about it at a-to-zchallenge.com, and hop around to read the other cool blogs that are part of the challenge!