Cover for Issue Twenty-Five, August 2026
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Formatting

Below are our guidelines for formatting your submissions to Haven Spec Magazine. We used to recommend using the classic Shunn guidelines, but some people reported that they had trouble accessing the site. These are of course just guidelines, and not following them won't impact our decision regarding your submission. But following these guidelines will make our process run much more smoothly.

Formatting Guidelines for All submissions

  • Page headers.
    • Placed on the right side of the file header so that it appears on every page. Page headers should include keywords from title, author surname, and page numbers.
  • Contact info.
    • Placed in the upper left corner of the first page. It's okay to include address/phone number, but we don't require anything but name and email address. Also feel free to include any professional affiliations here.
  • Emphasis.
    • Indicated using italics and not underlining.
  • Font.
    • Courier New or Times New Roman, 12 points, black.
  • Justification.
    • Left margin alignment only (not justified!).
  • Line Spacing.
    • Double-spaced.
  • Margins.
    • 1 inch margins all around.
  • Smart quotes.
    • Doesn't actually matter, but on is better than off.

Fiction Specific Guidelines

  • Word count.
    • Placed in the upper right corner of the first page. You can round it to the nearest ten (or hundred) if you'd like, but it isn't necessary.
  • Title and byline.
    • Centered about one-third of the way down the first page. Where you place the title and byline isn't mission critical, but including both is.
  • Paragraph Indentation.
    • 0.5 inch indentations for each paragraph. Fixing indentations on stories we accept is very time consuming if you don't follow this guideline!

Poetry Specific Guidelines

  • Title and byline.
    • Indicate the start of each poem in your submission packet by centering the poem's title and including your byline. It isn't necessary to start a new page for each new poem, but you can if you'd like. Most important is that it's clear where each poem starts and ends.
  • Stanza breaks.
    • Indicate breaks between stanzas with a line break (and not Word's build in "Space Before/After Paragraph" feature).
  • Long poems.
    • As long as stanza breaks are marked with a line break, it isn't necessary to add a new header to longer poems that stretch to more than one page (as suggest in Shunn formatting).