Offputting guidelines

When I first started submitting work to publishers I was naive enough to pretty much send anything to anyone. A few burned fingers later, I'm older and wiser enough to read the guidelines with a magnifying glass, and there are a few 'red flags' that will make me squawk every time. If I see any of them, I'll start having second thoughts. If I see two or more, the publisher goes on the 'no way, Jose' pile and I'll probably never send work to them.

So what are my pet hates when it comes to guidelines and/or a publisher's business practices? Well, here's some of them, in no particular order:

1. Seeing typos or grammatical errors in the guidelines, or elsewhere on the publisher's web page for that matter. These people are going to be editing my manuscript and I'd expect them to be able to copy edit their own site.

2. Any mention of 'no passive writing' in the editing guidelines. As I've mentioned elsewhere, too many editors are mistaking past imperfect ('was doing') for passive and I can't face taking every instance of past imperfect out of every piece of work I submit.

3. A list of editing/formatting dos and don'ts that's longer than the piece of work I'm submitting.

4. Weird formatting requirements that would take me the better part of a week to achieve. I'm always happy to oblige with font, font size, spacing etc, but intricately detailed formatting should really be the publisher's responsibility, not the writer's.

5. Any invitation to send your work to the publisher's in-house editing staff before, during or after submission, especially if there is a fee. This could represent a conflict of interests on the part of the publisher and it's all too easy for them to refuse a writer's story until that writer has paid for their editing services...

6. Lack of information on the eventual product: will it be electronic or print, when is it due out, will it be an anthology or a series of stand-alone books, will it be distributed via book stores and distribution sites or just from the publisher's website? Believe it or not, I've seen calls for submission with none of the above information, which makes it kind of hard to be certain the work will ever appear.

7. Any sign of the publisher 'rallying their troops' in response to reasonable queries about their business practice. This is quite possibly the biggest red flag of all for me; it's desperately unprofessional and leaves such an unpleasant taste in my mouth that I'll usually add a publisher to the 'no' list the minute I see them doing this.

Does anyone else have submission processes that make them see red? I'd love to know!