Tips for delightful partnership with editors

These tips should be interesting to anyone who are as fresh as me !

I do

• Read the magazine's official author guidelines. It might seem obvious, but many people are surprised that the tone for journals differs from that of magazines when it comes to writing style. Save yourself a lot of headaches and hair follicles by reading the "prenup" so that you're prepared for the first editing round.
• Meet your deadlines. If you're out of town or won't be available, tell your editor. Many editorial types work on multiple publications, and it's critical that they schedule their time. If the deadline is unreasonable, let them know. They're willing to work with you, but they don't know what you don't tell them.
• Use "Track Changes" in Word documents. It's much harder to collaborate on an article when nobody can tell how it's evolved. Editors know when you're trying to slip them a mickey. If you don't like how "Track Changes" looks, don't turn it off—hide it. Turning it off just gives the editor the extra work of using "Compare Documents." And nobody likes that particular "feature."
• Watch your tone in email. Your editor isn't out to get you—his or her goal is to work closely with you to produce a technically accurate, timely, useful, and readable article. Insulting your editor, threatening his or her job, or intimating that a future lawsuit could be in order won't endear you to the editorial staff, and word travels fast around the office. Let's put it this way—the wise diner doesn't berate a waiter before that person brings out the soup.
• Realize that all magazines edit their content. Nobody—but nobody—gets his or her text printed on glossy paper without someone changing it somehow. Use of contractions won't kill you or your career. Just because The New York Times doesn't do it, does that mean you can't? No! If you threaten to take your 2000-word opinion piece over to The Atlantic because its editors won't dare insert headers in your wall of text, you're so very, very wrong.
• Give us high-resolution images. The JPEGs and GIFs that are great for the Web, don't always work for print. Low-resolution images print fuzzy and are unreadable; no one wants that.
• Give us a recent, decent picture of yourself. No one looks like they did in their college yearbook picture 20 years later. You look great just the way you are—nobody needs or wants to see a picture of you dancing in a chef's hat, swimming in a pool shirtless, or sitting there drunk in your $40-a-night hotel room ordering room service in a dirty Hawaiian shirt. One author noted that he didn't know how to get a recent picture. His 10-year-old son, however, did. Kids can be useful sometimes.