The Manuscript

©2001 by Richard Parks

This article is about how to prepare a manuscript for submission to an editor. This makes no assumptions about what to write or how to write it, but it does concentrate on fiction and does assume that you want other human beings to read your work. You feel the human impulse to communicate, to connect. You want your work to find and capture those rare creatures, the Readers, like field naturalists stalking the wilds with butterfly net and camera.

In short, you want an audience.

Now, if what you're really after is self-expression or to be a "published author," then you don't need any of this, you lucky person you. Just format the work in whatever form appeals to you and upload it to the World Wide Web and you're done. Easy. Or maybe you're old-fashioned and want to have an actual printed book with your name on it? That's easy too. Just pay one of the dozens of Print on Demand (PoD) publishers springing up like weeds to archive your work in Adobe Document Format (PDF). Through the magic of PoD you can then have a real live book, fully orderable through B&N or Amazon.Com just like the latest Stephen King thriller. Do either of these things and you're an author, along with the millions of other faceless and nameless souls who do the same thing every year. Feels good, huh? Order copies for friends and family and rub their noses in it on every occasion, until of course they do the same thing to you. They can, you know. Any literate person can write a book. Anyone with a manuscript and some money can publish it. This has always been the case. The only things the Internet changed were the scale and the price. Getting published, as I say, is easy.

Getting an audience, getting readers - that's the hard part.

Sadly, if you want a readership it's not enough to publish. You've got to publish in a format and venue that has a chance of gathering readers to your work and, even in these days of on-line magazines and books, that usually means a traditional print publisher with an established readership in place. There are exceptions, but so few as to make no practical difference. You simply have to find a publisher who thinks enough of your work to pay you to print it, on the assumption that your work, properly launched and distributed, will in fact appeal to that elusive readership and be widely read and, incidentally, make money for the both of you. And that means you have to submit your work to an editor who acts as the gatekeeper between the publisher and the masses of hopeful writers out there. That in turn means that you have to know how to format your work to have the best chance of getting the editor's favorable attention.

All right, are we all clear on why we're here? Good. Here follows the basics of what you need to know.

The Mechanics:

1. Paper: 20 lb. white bond. Lighter is too flimsy. Heavier just makes it more expensive to mail. Don't even think of using any other color but plain white.

2. Typeface: Courier 12 pt. Do Not right-justify the text. Use one side of the page only.

3. Line Spacing: Double space all lines except your address. That means there's a blank

line between any two lines of text. Like here, for instance.

4. Indenting: Indent five (5) spaces from the left margin to indicate a new paragraph.

5. Scene Breaks: Center an asterisk (*) or pound sign (#) on an otherwise blank line to indicate either scene or time shifts. Like so:

Jake went to bed, dreaming of a Chocolate Empire.

#

Next week at the cookie factory, Jake put his plan into motion.

6. Margins: At least an inch on all sides.

7. Italics. Don't. Use an underline like this to indicate italics. If you must use boldface, indicate that with a double underline and write /bf/ in the margin.

8. Staples, covers, etc. Don't. Use a paperclip or binder clip for short fiction. For a novel manuscript, use a rubber band to hold the pages together.

9. Copyright Notices (©). Again: Don't. Your work is copyrighted at the time you create it. The published version will and should have your copyright notice on it (witness this article), but not the manuscript. Editors know the work is yours and won't try to steal it. Only beginners worry about legitimate editors stealing from them, so all the copyright notice does is mark you as an amateur. This is not the image you want to project.

The Process:

Put all contact information in the upper left corner of the first manuscript page (your real name, your address, plus phone number and email address). This should be a no-brainer but you'd be amazed at how often editors get submissions from people who have neglected to tell them how to get in touch. On the rare occasions when the editor wants to buy the work in question the comedy quickly crosses the line to tragedy. Don't laugh -- it's happened. Now put an approximate word count on the upper right on the same level as the address. Round this to the nearest hundred words for short fiction or articles, and to the nearest thousand words for book manuscripts.

Drop about halfway down the first page and center the work's title. Drop down one double-spaced line after that and put 'By' followed by your name or pen name, also centered on the line and directly under the title. If this is a short story, drop down four double-spaced lines and start the text. If this is a novel cover page, start the text on the next page. If you're using chapter headings, just drop halfway down the first page and center the text (Chapter 1, or whatever) as you would the title, and leave off the byline. Start the actual text four double spaced lines below that.

Number your pages consecutively in the upper right hand corner, starting either on the first or second page (which, if you start there, is still page 2). Include beside the page number something that identifies your manuscript specifically. It can be part of the title or just your last name followed by the page number. "Writer/2" or "Writer/Work/2" or some variation of that is fine. The reason for this is simple: editors deal with a lot of manuscripts, and sometimes they or assistants have to carry copies of several to one place or another, and sometimes they get dropped and, in the process, shuffled like a deck of cards. This way the editors can separate your fine prose from someone else's garbage, since otherwise one person's page 27 looks a lot like another's.

The End. Don't make the editor guess whether she's really got all your manuscript or managed to lose the last page with your brilliant coda. Put -The End- or ##### or ***** on the final line of the manuscript, just to make sure everyone's clear. If you're talking about non-fiction then the old teletype sign off ( -30- ) is perfectly acceptable. Otherwise just write -The End-. No one can misinterpret that.

The Justification:

I don't mean justified as in text. I mean justified as in "I'm going to explain why this is standard manuscript format." You might be thinking it's because publishing has "always done it this way and by gum you will too!" Nope. There are good reasons for each and every facet of proper manuscript formatting. Let's start with the one I most often hear complaints about: the typeface. That is to say, Courier.

Most manuscripts are done on computer these days, and computers have fonts. Lots and lots of fonts. Pretty fonts. Courier isn't pretty. I've even heard it called disgustingly ugly, and wouldn't the editor prefer a nice Letter Gothic? Tell you what: write in whatever font and point size you like: Letter Gothic 8pt. Helvetica 14pt. Elvish 20pt Bold. Suit yourself, play, have fun, but when that manuscript comes to the editor it better be in Courier 12pt. and here's why: editors read. A lot. More than you do, no matter how much you read. They have to. It's their job. Courier is ugly, but it's clear and readable and prevents eyestrain. Editors don't like eyestrain.

Another point, and this ties in to why you don't right-justify text: editors need to know how much room your story is going take up in their magazine, so they'll know how many stories they need to fill out the issue. Likewise a book editor needs to know how many pages your book will require to print and therefore how much it will cost to produce. When the manuscript is submitted in 12 pt. Courier with one inch margins and no right justification, the editor knows that it will roughly test out at 250 words per manuscript page. This is the typesetter's count, which rounds to 10 words per line and 25 lines per page. This will not match the word count your computer gives you, but that doesn't matter. The typesetter's word count tells the editor how much space the story will require, which is far more important. This is also why you don't use a proportional font, because those take up varying space on the line depending on what words you're using and makes the typesetter's count harder to judge. Sure, you can get away with another non-proportional serif font of the same size as Courier, but why? Editors expect Courier, and most even like it. Make the editor happy.

Double spacing, one side of the paper only, and starting halfway down the first page. Doesn't that waste a lot of paper? Maybe, but if the point of this exercise was to save paper you could save a lot more by leaving your story in the computer in the first place. No, the point is to get your submission taken seriously by an editor, and that space is there for the editor's convenience. Even in cases where editors will accept electronic submissions, double spaced manuscripts are easier to read. Also, when a story is bought it is usually passed on to a copyeditor or typesetter. The editor jots down anything he or she thinks that person might need to know(A title change, how much room to leave for the illustrator, that sort of thing), and the space at the top of the first page is what they use for that. Likewise for margins and double spaced lines; copyeditors write their corrections and questions in the margins and on the blank lines near the text they're referring to. They need room for that. If you get the chance to proof the final copy, you'll need space for your corrections. Hence double spacing and generous margins. You use one side of the paper so that there's no chance of overlooking text.

The asterisk (*) or pound sign (#) to indicate a scene break: this is mostly for the typesetter. It's easy for a typesetter to miss the extra blank line intended to show a scene break; the extra character is to draw his or her attention to that line, and make it harder to miss.

Indenting: Again, blank lines can confuse the typesetter, who of necessity has to read very fast. A five space indent shows clearly where a paragraph begins without using extra blank lines that the typesetter may not see. All this applies, even though typesetters usually work with electronic versions of the manuscript these days. Formatting codes still have to be inserted in the proper places, and for that the typesetter has to be able to interpret what he or she is seeing quickly and accurately. That's also why you don't italicize text -- it's easy for the typesetter to miss. Using the underline to indicate where italics go draws the typesetter's attention.

Staples and covers. They're not needed and make your manuscript harder to work with. Consider: if you were making notes on a book, which would you rather work with: a bound book or loose manuscript pages? Plus it's not uncommon for an editor to need multiple copies of a purchased manuscript. Don't make the editor have to tear your pages apart in order to make a photocopy.

Standard manuscript format makes everyone's job easier, including yours. If you doubt that, let me drop a clue on you: One of the top fiction magazines in my field normally gets at least 800 manuscript submissions in a month, and that's fairly typical. Right: Eight Hundred. A thousand or more is not unusual. Do you know how many stories the magazine needs for a monthly issue? Depending on the length of the individual stories (see above) it's about eight (8). When we do the math, we see that this translates to a buy percentage of only 1 %. Another more specialized magazine may get more like 400 submissions monthly, but publishes bi-monthly and uses less fiction, so only needs about 32 in an entire year! The percentage is even lower there(0.66%). That is, all things being equal, your chances of having your story bought and published are at best one in a hundred. Not good, right? Don't despair -- here's the clue I promised:

All Things Are Not Equal.

It's true. The editors freely admit that, of whatever ridiculously high number of submissions they get every month, only about fifty matter. Those are the ones that are presented professionally, in proper format, with a minimum of spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors. The rest may get glanced at on the off chance the editor is missing something brilliant, but no more than that. Why? Because the editors know from long experience that manuscripts from writers who haven't taken the time to learn their craft generally come from rank beginners or -- far worse - the hopeless writers who submit the same stories year after year and never get any better. The downside to this is that those statistics I quoted above are misleading. With a badly formatted submission your chances aren't really one in a hundred -- they're a lot closer to zero. Non-zero, perhaps, but barely. The upside is that, by taking this one simple step, you've improved your chances of selling to a whopping 16% and 5.3 % respectively.

Ok, so the odds are still long, but if this was easy anyone could do it. The hard truth is that not everyone can. Know what you're up against. You have to tell a better story than 84 to 95% of everyone else that month to make the sale, but the odds have improved considerably and, above all, your work's fate is now within your control! Tell the best story you can, and present it the best way you can, and you're far ahead of the game. Maybe even far enough to one day make the cut and get a shot at the elusive Reader, which is what this is really all about.

The End


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