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Before you begin to submit your work to publishers and agents, you’ll need to spend a little time tailoring it for submittal.
The bad news is that there are a number of variations on how much of your manuscript a given recipient will ask for; some will want just a query letter, some will want a page or two, some will want the first few chapters, and once in a while someone will ask for the whole thing. Be sure to understand the submission guidelines of each individual agent or publisher (usually available on their web sites) and conform to them.
The good news is that the overall formatting of your manuscript is very straightforward, and you generally won’t need to specially tailor it for one agent/publisher or another.
Pull up your manuscript in your word processor and choose “Select All” from wherever it is on your menus. With all your text selected, do the following:
- Set font to Courier or Courier New size 12. Some slight variations on this are acceptable, but a clean, easily readable monospaced, serif font at about 12 points is the standard.
- Set the line spacing to double spaced throughout the document.
- If you haven’t done this already, left justify everything – the left side of your text should be straight down, the right side jagged. If you apply this globally you’ll need to go back through and make sure titles and chapter headings are centered.
- As the above suggests, titles and chapter headings should be centered. Chapters should start about halfway down the page – I hit the enter key 10 times from the top of the page on a double-spaced page to approximate this.
- Set your page margins to 1” top and bottom, and 1” to 1.25” left and right throughout the document.
Now, a few more items to deal with:
- I’ve read advice in a number of places that some editors prefer that all bold or italicized text be changed to underlined to indicate emphasis, titles, etc, but this seems to be a rare and disappearing requirement. You can do this if you want. I’m not gonna… not until I get a rejection letter that says, “We loved your work but are unable to represent you at this time due to bolded chapter names in your manuscript.”
- Create a title page that has the book’s title (duh!) centered horizontally and vertically on the page. Skip a line or two, then enter your name and contact information on subsequent lines. It’s probably a good idea skip another line or two after this and enter the word count of your document (most word processors have a word count function that will provide this information).
- Use the header/footer features of your word processor to create a header that displays all but the first page. This header should contain your last name, the name of your book (abbreviated or shortened if the title is long), and the current page number.
Congratulations! You’re done the easy part of the prepare-for-submission phase.