publishers format for print, but the submission needs to be in a specific format too.

this stems from the days where manuscripts were submitted on paper, and not electronically. one could argue that with electronic submission such format requirements are no longer relevant, but we all know that people don't like change.

standard manuscript format looks roughly like this:

lines are double spaced

first line of each paragraph is indented, but there is no space between paragraphs

first page contains contact information and word count.

section headers are centered

each page (except the first) contains a header with: "authors lastname / story title / page #"

These requirements seem to be easily within pandoc’s ability though, as it can use a reference docx file.

indeed, see my other reply above, linking to an article explaining exactly how that works

News to me, but in this case, I'm happy to be wrong.