Category: formatting

What are the specific manuscript formatting guidelines I should follow?

Published on by Michael McCandlessLeave a comment

You can save yourself a lot of time, hassle, and potentially money if you clean up your manuscript prior to editing or review by a professional or friend. Here are some manuscript formatting guidelines to follow as you get your book ready for publishing.

Use these standard manuscript formatting (SMF) guidelines to create a cleaner manuscript that will make you or someone helping you more productive. SMF helps authors produce ready-to-edit manuscripts without unnecessary characters, spacing, and formatting that only needs to be deleted and re-done later. Professional editors or formatters you may use will spend less time and save you money. A manuscript created using SMF leaves formatting to the formatting phase, where tools such as Word, Adobe InDesign, Atticus, or Kindle Create can do what they do more efficiently.

SMF formatting specifically in a Microsoft Word file format (.doc or .docx) is required by many publishers including Touchwood Press as a pre-requisite for accepting a manuscript for review and evaluation. The best way for you to implement these guidelines in your manuscript is to make use of Styles in Word. If you don’t know how to use Styles, ask someone, take a course, or proceed without Styles until you learn how. This is a really key way to up your authoring game.

SMF Guidelines

  • Times New Roman, 12-point throughout.
  • Double spaced lines, but DO NOT double-space with carriage returns. Just proceed with default line-spacing until you can learn how to double space automatically in Word.
  • Paragraphs indented 1/2″, no lines between. Use tabs, not spaces, if you must. Again, learn how to automate this and include in a Style.
  • Margins = 1″ on all sides.
  • Scene breaks: Use 3 #s, 3 *s, or 3 ~s only with a space between each one. A “scene break” is often used in fiction within a chapter to change the setting or break to a new scene like in a movie.
  • Chapter titles: Begin 1/3 of the way down the page, flush left. Then, leave a blank line between the chapter title and the body of the chapter. Make the CHAPTER TITLE all upper case.
  • Headers & Footers: Author last name / BOOK TITLE—all flush left. Page numbers: top right.

These guidelines will dramatically improve the usability of your manuscript for an editor or designer.

AVOID

  • Adding spaces or lines between paragraphs or around scene breaks
  • Adding extra indent at left or right margins.
  • Using spaces or tabs to indent or center text.
  • Using other fonts for titles, chapter titles, or in body
  • Using Enter to go to next page. Use INSERT PAGE, Ctrl/Command Enter to insert a page break.

As always, contact us here at Touchwood Press for more information.

What is formatting and why do I keep hearing authors complaining about it?

Published on by Michael McCandlessLeave a comment

If you’ve spent much time around personal computing over the past 40 years, you have never stop hearing about formatting. Formatting floppies, formatting hard disks, formatting pictures, formatting documents, formatting books.

What is formatting?

Consider the cupcake. A cupcake is formatted batter. I bet you didn’t see that coming. Stick with me here. You’re consulting your favorite cookbook or recipe blog looking for something to make as a snack and you come across a recipe that sounds delicious and will only use ingredients you already have, including some fresh blueberries that need to be used up soon or, you know. The recipe is for a blueberry quick bread or a loaf pan cake. But you had your heart set on cupcakes. Solution? You re-format the recipe and just spoon the batter into cupcake molds instead of pouring it all into a loaf pan. Reformatting. Changing the way you package the goodness.

Your writing goodness starts out in a word processor. Formatted so it looks the way you think it should look so you can read it comfortably, like the way a book should look — or to print it out to read or for someone else to read. Like a book. Except on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Except for a one-page-at-a-time screen reader rather than a 2-page spread like a book. Different from a book. This means your writing needs to be re-formatted to make it look like a book, or actually, become a book.

Formatted for a word processor, and depending on your skill level with that word processor, you may have used tabs for indents, tabs and/or spaces for centering, carriage return characters to provide spacing between paragraphs and to start a new page, etc. To re-format a document so it will be print-ready can take you hours, or many hours, of learning, trial and error, and frustration. I know.

Why You Should Care about formatting

Formatting is really important and may make the difference between getting your book published at all. And you thought it was only about the writing. Some publishers will not accept a manuscript for consideration unless it conforms to their version how a document must be formatted—their own Standard Document Format. I’m going to talk about SDFs in a separate post, but understand that there isn’t just one standard.

Most writers are self-publishing these days. Many, after fooling around with formatting themselves and failing repeatedly to get their manuscript uploads accepted by a print-on-demand vendor’s quality checks, decide that maintaining their sanity is the better part of self-publishing, will hire a professional designer/formatter to help. Professional book designers are graphic artists who’ve been to book design school. They are skilled in the art and craft of book design. They can make a beautiful book out of your document—one that will pass the quality checks that Amazon KDP or any other print-on-demand service will require. In the scheme of things, it’s not expensive to hire a pro. Search “freelance book designers” to start searching.

So, yes, you should care about formatting because it is part of making a quality book that will make you proud. Sort of like those cupcakes.

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