3 Tips For Formatting Your Manuscript (So Editors Won't Want to Stab You)

Writing isn't easy. It's a long, winding road that takes a combination of guts, perseverance, and no small amount of luck, in order to reach that shining plateau of professional success. You'll meet a lot of people along the way, and some of those people are going to be editors. In order to make a good impression on your editors, here are some basic formatting rules you should follow, regardless of what your manuscript happens to be about.

Trust me, you'd rather have them as friends than enemies.

Rule #1: The Tab Key Is Now Dead To You

Never say its name again. Ever.

The tab key has likely been your friend for years now. When you first started writing papers, you were told in no uncertain terms that you hit the tab key in order to indent your text. Well, that was true then. However, you're not printing out a book to turn in for a grade. You're going to send it off to be published. And that means your old friend tab is just going to drag you down.

Why is that? Because in the age of the ebook, and digital publishing in general, the tab key is persona non grata as far as your software is concerned. If you're trying to publish a manuscript into multiple formats, then the first thing you'll notice is your hundreds of tabs have completely screwed up your page appearance. Either you get a page covered in bizarre spacing, or you get a page with no spacing at all, making it impossible to tell where one part ends, and another begins.

What You Should Do Instead

Go to the options in your word processor. Click Format, and then click Paragraph. Once you're in this screen, you set the first line indent to .5, and check the box that says Automatic. After you've completed that simple step, boom, your manuscript will automatically format your paragraphs in a way that will transfer over easily, regardless of whether you're using an Amazon, Smashwords, or Adobe format for your finished project.

Rule #2: Stop Putting Two Spaces After Your Period

Seriously. Stop that shit.

This one is a little less cut-and-dry than the tab issue, but it's still something that irks the living shit out of a lot of editors. You see, the whole reason that people have been taught to put two spaces after a period was that during the days of typewriters and real, physical newspapers, that was how publications in New York did it. The problem was that typewriters weren't universal, and when you were inking the day's happenings you didn't want your page to look too crowded. Some American papers used two spaces, some used one.

However, you're not writing your manuscript on a typewriter. You're writing it digitally, and you can assume there's a uniform number of spaces both in ebook and physical format.

What You Should Do Instead

Just stop. Really, it's that simple. Not only that, but if you're writing a 100,000 word manuscript, you'll cut out entire blank pages that were otherwise spread throughout your work.

Rule #3: Stop Thinking Page Count, Start Thinking Word Count

Seriously, it doesn't matter what page you're on.

This is another one of those changes that came about thanks to publishing, as an industry, going digital. The reason that page count doesn't matter is because you could take the same story, publish it in a dozen different formats, and get a different page count every time. In .epub you have 25 pages, in the physical anthology you have 20, in .pdf you have 16, etc.

You know what doesn't change? Your word count. That's why publishers use word count as the basis for the heft of a manuscript instead of page count. Because a 100-page novel may be thick or thin depending on spacing, but 50,000 words is 50,000 words no matter how you cut it.

What You Should Do Instead

The best way to achieve this mindset is to write projects that fill a certain word count. Anthology calls will typically ask for short stories in 3,000, 5,000, and 10,000-word increments (but 20,000-word novellas are not unheard of). If you participate in calls like these, even if your stories aren't chosen for inclusion, you begin to get a sense for how many words it takes to tell a story of a certain size. That sense of story will allow you to lengthen or shorten a project during the plotting/brainstorming phase, ensuring that you don't end up shooting for a novel, and winding up 30,000 words short of where you wanted it to be.

This concludes my introduction to formatting. If you are an author, or an editor, and there are other habits you find lurking in the slush pile which you feel deserve extra attention, then please use the form on this page to send me an email.

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