How to format a manuscript for submission

Your manuscript reaches an editor before your story does. Before anyone cares about a character or a turn in the plot, they see the page: the typeface, the spacing, the way you handle dialogue. A messy layout reads with friction and quietly lowers trust in the text; a layout that follows the standard disappears, and leaves nothing but the prose.

The good news is that almost everything below, Akapitly sets for you with one click. The rest is understanding where the rules come from — because then you can break them on purpose, when you actually mean to.

Check the publisher’s guidelines first

Before you set anything, find the submissions or “for authors” page of the agent or publisher you are querying. Most have their own guidelines: a preferred file format, how to send it, sometimes a specific font, often a requirement to include a query letter, a synopsis and a few sample chapters. Where those exist, they outrank any general standard — this article included.

This is not a formality. An editor who sees that you followed their instructions takes the submission more seriously from the first moment, and you avoid the situation where good writing slips down the pile only because it arrived in the wrong shape. Everything that follows is a safe default for the moment a publisher specifies nothing.

Font: Times New Roman, 12 point

Times New Roman at 12 point is the quiet standard, and it is not worth fighting. A serif face reads comfortably across hundreds of pages, stays neutral, draws no attention to itself, and an editor’s eye is used to it. Some markets — screenwriting, and a few science-fiction and fantasy magazines — still expect Courier 12; the guidelines will say so. Skip decorative fonts, color and bold used as “atmosphere.” In a manuscript they look amateur and pull the eye off the only thing that counts, which is the sentences.

Line spacing: double

A submission manuscript is double-spaced. The reason is purely practical: an editor needs room between the lines for a pencilled note, and you need room for your own corrections. Single-spaced text looks like a wall of letters and signals at a glance that the writer does not know the convention.

Margins: one inch — let the page breathe

About one inch on every side is the safe choice on US Letter; on UK A4 the equivalent is roughly 2.5 cm. The margin gives the text air and leaves room for notes; some writers widen the left margin further if they expect comments down the side. Margins that are too narrow tire the eye and, again, read as unprofessional.

Paragraphs: an indent, not a blank line

In prose a new paragraph opens with a first-line indent, not a blank line. The blank line is a habit from email and the web; in a manuscript it reads as a break between scenes, so dropped in without reason it just sows confusion. The exception is the first paragraph of a chapter or a scene: that one traditionally runs flush left, because it has nothing before it to separate from.

Dialogue and punctuation: this is where the eye shows

English dialogue comes in two house styles, American and British, and this is where an editor reads your eye fastest. Curly quotation marks (double for US, single for UK), the comma and period inside the quotes (US) or set logically (UK), the speech verb lowercase in a tag, an em-dash (US) or a spaced en-dash (UK) for a line that breaks off. These are small things, but there are many of them, and fixing them by hand is where people get lost.

So do not do it by hand. That is what the one button is for.

How length is measured: words, not pages

English-language publishing counts a book in words, not characters or pages — because a page is a soft measure that shifts with the font and the margins. A submission gives a rounded figure: “about 90,000 words.” A rough estimate is around 250 words to a double-spaced page, but you submit the word count, not a page count. Word-count expectations vary by category, too (an adult novel often runs roughly 70,000–110,000 words; check your genre and market), and a number far outside the range can sink a query on its own.

Chapters and scenes

Each chapter starts on a fresh page — it keeps the manuscript orderly and lets an editor jump around the text. Scenes inside a chapter are separated by a modest, centered mark, most often a single # (or * * *). That is enough; graphic flourishes are not needed.

Title page, running head and page numbers

A professional submission opens with a title page in the standard (Shunn) style: your name and contact details top-left, the approximate word count top-right, and the title with your byline centered about a third of the way down. Every page after that carries a running head — surname, title and page number — so that a dropped stack of pages can be put back in order. These are quiet signals that you know how a manuscript is assembled.

One caveat on the numbers: programs handle pagination carried in a .docx differently — Word and LibreOffice show it, while Google Docs can fail to display it. If you publish through Google Docs, add the numbers there to be sure.

Export and a final read-through

Once the settings are ready, it is time for the file. Most publishers want .docx; if you happen to be working offline, Akapitly saves RTF instead, which Word also opens. Name the file so it is obvious what it holds — for example Surname_Title.docx

Then one thing you should not skip: open the exported file in Word or LibreOffice and read it through calmly. The target program is where the text breaks into pages and looks the way an editor will see it — the Akapitly preview is continuous, so this is the first place you see the real line breaks. It is also your last chance to add page numbers and catch the typo that slipped past.

And the prose itself?

Formatting is only the packaging. If you want the text not just to look right but to read well, Akapitly has separate tools for it: rhythm highlighting (sentence and paragraph length), repetition and echo detection, a noise meter and a mode that catches machine-sounding style. That is a topic of its own — start with when prose starts to sound like AI, or look in on the rules for dialogue.

The closing rule is the opening one: if a publisher gives its own guidelines, they come first. The standard exists so that you have somewhere to start.