A PSA of Sorts: Formatting Weirdness

[dancinghorse]

OK, I just got asked this by the recipient of such a ms. and now I'm curious.

Who is teaching people to format mss. in the following way:

11pt Times New Roman, single-spaced, no indent, extra space between paragraphs. Chapters begin at top of page.

4 of 6 mss. I have received in the past few weeks, all from people who profess to be preparing those mss. for submission to agents or editors, have been in this format. It is not standard ms.-submission format, but I'm seeing it so often it's got to be someone's idea of correct formatting for submission to an agent or a print publisher.

It's not.

It takes a remarkably long time to clean this up and reformat because of the extra spacing--and people are paying me by the hour. (Word to the wise.)

Is this some form of web template? We do something similar in Joomla for BVC, but I use a template for that and feed in a totally stripped Word file.

Correct ms. format for print submission to a major publisher is the following:

12pt. (not 11) Times New Roman OR Courier New. Courier is preferable for submission because it's industry standard for doing page castoffs. Many agents and editors prefer to read in TNR. I don't; it gives me a headache. With a correctly formatted ms. however, it's perfectly easy to Ctrl-A and change the font (versus an incorrectly formatted ms. that requires you to Clear Formatting and then redo the spacing throughout--and Clear Formatting loses all the italics and underscores and any other spiffy things you may have put in).

Double-spaced. Indented first line of paragraph. No extra space between paragraphs. One-inch margins all around. Begin new chapter halfway down a new page.

DO NOT use footers and do not put your page number on the bottom. This will get lost in transit. Use a header that includes your last name, the title of the work, and puts the page number on the right-hand margin. This is where the publisher's staff will look for it. They need it to be there. If it's not, they may not know a page is missing or out of order.

Individual publishers will vary, but as a general rule: Turn off "smart quotes." Use two hyphens for an em dash. Use underline instead of italics. Avoid capitals and boldface for emphasis. Just the underline, please. These particular bits, as I said, may not be invariable, so ask. They are however a safe and standard choice.

The reason for all of this is ease of reading on the agent or editor's part, and ease of access for editing. The double spacing allows room for notes, comments, and corrections, which many editors still do on hard copy. (The line edits I am emailing in tomorrow were based on hardcopy with handwritten notes, and when the copyedits arrive, they will consist of a printout marked all over in, probably, red pencil.) It is also what the typesetter (whether human or digital) is used to seeing, and makes it that much easier for the work to be set in whatever type the book designer chooses. (You don't get to make this decision when you are published by a mainstream print publisher. They have people who do that.) You want your ms. to be as transparent as possible, so that there is no interference between your words and the professional reader's brain. Nonstandard formatting constitutes interference. In a case in which there is a choice between two mss. of equal quality, and one is formatted correctly and one is not, the time-crunched agent or editor will pick the one that doesn't make her lurch to a stop and go, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over?"

You don't have to like it. Yes, it's as boring as hell. You can do your drafts in 14pt Arial Black Bold with 20pt bold headers in red if you want, but when it comes time for that submission, Ctrl-A and reformat, and give the nice agent or editor what she wants.

So now I'm really curious. Who is teaching this single-spaced 11pt. Times New Roman thang? A small press or e-publisher may be demanding this, but the big guys in the city? Are not.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

Actually, with Word, it's even easier (and more consistent) to change the formatting with style sheets and the like. I suspect a) they're using some kind of stock template and don't know how to change the formatting consistently, or b) they're just dorks who didn't research this sort of thing at all.

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

Or they're used to writing for the internet, where that is standard style.

But internet is not submission drafts for publication.

And the reason why publishers prefer Courier to TNR is that Courier (both regular and New) are mono-spaced fonts. TNR is proportional. If you want a good cast-off (or estimate of how many typeset pages this manuscript will be when it becomes a book), you need a mono-spaced font to start out with.

[badkarma-one.livejournal.com]

It sounds like those manuscripts are being prepped by people who are used to posting fanfic on the Internet. I used to get submissions for my zines in that format all the time, and I had to reformat every single one for editing -- then reformat the revised submission for publication.

If you want to reformat those, I can give you an easy search-and-replace that will take no more than 2 minutes to run through. You'll just have to add the extra spacing at the beginning of the chapter manually.

[starfall42.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you don't have worse problems with fonts. I have 311 fonts on my system. It's hard not to use them all.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

311?

Amateur.

;-)

I'm a fontoholic. I write each project in a different font, which makes it easier for me to get into the story. But while I don't think an editor is going to quibble over Times (ugh) vs. Palatino, there are times and places where Jane Austen's handwriting are appropriate... and writing to a stranger is not it.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

What She Said.

Before you submit anything anywhere, READ THE GUIDELINES.

-- Deborah the Editor

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

It's standard fanfic format.

Most fanfic is posted either in blogs like LJ or in online fiction archives. Consequently, you wind up with stories that are formatted like a blog post due to the limitations of html coding. That's also why you'll see things like *this* or _this_ or the dreaded CAPSLOCK OMG done to indicated emphasis.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Plus, if like me you're in another country, you have to remember to adjust the page layout, too, to US standard. That's the bit I tend to forget.

[firle.livejournal.com]

Argh! Thanks for reminding me.

[hippoiathanatoi.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind starting chapters half way down a new page. To leave a space for editors to write lengthier remarks on a per-chapter basis? To make layout a bit easier since chapter headers tend to be larger text or feature particular designs?

I've never seen it before, although that's probably due to limited experience; I've only seen ms. from George R.R. Martin, and he may be an exception.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

As the others have said, it sounds like standard blog, online fiction format, or they're used to formatting business letters/reports that way.

I have a terrible with my creative writing students. I tell them how to do it, I post examples of how to do it, but a lot still submit single-spaced with no indent and a blank line between paragraphs. And some of them do it again for the second assignment when I've told them personally how to do it and reformatted their first story to show them how it should look!

It's not actually that difficult to reformat if you use Find and Replace though. You may already know how to do this, but if you don't, you need to investigate Word's special characters. If you put Find ^p^p and replace with ^p it will get rid of the blank lines in one swell foop. Then you can Ctrl A and adjust the indents and font size/style.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think what you're getting is e-mail formatted text - the two lines add to readability.

I've seen agents become a bit more relaxed about mss format in electronic submissions- it doesn't take very long to reformat to whatever the agent prefers as long as it arrives in a sensible format.

And count me in on people who hate TNR. I hate the shape of the letters, I hate the spacing. Give me Palatino any day, or a long list of other text fonts - but not TNR. Ugh.

[firle.livejournal.com]

I teach this on my writing forum. And that's how I submit, unless the guidelines say something else:

William Shunn - Manuscript Format

Not sure if they listen...

[kelly-yoyo.livejournal.com]

Yup. Manuscript formatting is no place to display your individuality.

[janni.livejournal.com]

I think it's a format that's used for a lot of electronic short fiction submissions.

Double spaced with indents is still standard otherwise.

On the other hand, I think Courier really is on its way out. Been ages since I worked with anyone who was even used to having much submitted in Courier, and I have worked with folks who don't even realize it used to be standard anymore. (I think it was six years ago that I first had someone suggest I ought use a more "professional" font.)

Not sure there is a standard, beyond that it be readable, though. Or maybe this is one of those things that's changed in the kidlit world but not the adult SF/fantasy world -- I get caught between differing expectations for the two every so often.