dancinghorse | A PSA of Sorts: Formatting Weirdness

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.