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.