How to Format Your Manuscript to Industry Standards
These are general guidelines for the industry. While these standards might vary slightly within the industry due to individual preference, this is the preferred format for your freelance editor. As a suggestion, read through this full guide before starting on the steps. Note that some steps can be done simultaneously to save time.
Once you’ve followed this checklist, then congratulations! You now have a manuscript formatted to industry standards! Check out the images after the checklist for an example of what a correctly formatted manuscript looks like, including specifics of each of the instructions below. Read the pages for additional instructions.
For a PDF of these instructions, CLICK HERE.
Title Page
The first page of the manuscript will be the title page, which should be single spaced with no headers.
Your title page should include the following in 12-point Times New Roman:
On the next pages, you can add the front matter before the first chapter (such as dedication, table of contents, copyright page, epigrams, song lyrics, poetry excerpt). This will come right after the Title Page, though these pages are optional. Start your first chapter next (as seen in the example below).
NOTE: For authors seeking traditional publication, agents want to read your words, so don’t add a dedication or other matter before your first chapter when querying. That will come later.
Manuscript Checklist
Optional Formatting
You can see examples of this type of formatting in the images following this page. (Please note: Following this style is strongly encouraged and will really help the editor.)
Optional Manuscript Formatting
Or things to do as an indie author to make your typesetter love you
Be Consistent with your Punctuation
Publishers have their own in-house style guides, but most American publishers (if not all) will use the Chicago Manual of Style, and only deviate their own style guide with slight variances or where there are gray areas.
Ellipses ( . . . )
The Chicago Manual of Style‘s preferred option: three periods with five spaces (d . . . b).
Why is this so important? The problem with CMOS’s preferred option is that those internal spaces need to be non-breaking spaces, otherwise if the ellipses falls at the end of the line, it might look like this .
Or this . .
. . . which is really horrible typography.
Our advice: It’s best to get in the habit of just putting the space between your ellipses as you are writing.
How to change it: Search for each of these and replace it with the proper (d . . . b).
Em-Dashes
Your editor will keep track of em-dash and en-dash and when to use each one, but knowing the basics of when to use which will help you as a writer.
The Chicago Manual of Style‘s preferred option: either two hyphens or one em-dash, no spaces.
How to change it: Search for each of these and replace it with the proper (d—b).
Changing Inch Marks ” to Smart Quotes “ ”
The Chicago Manual of Style‘s preferred option: The smart quote (or curly quote) is used.
How to change it: If you already have all the quotation marks typed, you can simply do a find/replace all automatically by typing ” into both the find and replace boxes and selecting “Use wild cards” before hitting “REPLACE ALL.” Some might format awkwardly, but your copy editor/proofreader will catch any of those issues.
Repeat the process for foot marks ‘ and prime ′ to turn them into apostrophes ’ or single quotes ‛ and ’.
You cannot fix the quotations marks automatically, then you’ll have to do several find/replace searches. You will first need to search for all soft returns/line breaks/carriage returns (see below) in your document and replace them with paragraph breaks.
Once you are sure all of our paragraph breaks are consistent, follow the find/replace searches below to manually fix all of your quotation marks:
