11/14/2022 0 Comments Manuscript examples![]() Those guys read a lot of new manuscript submissions, so if you make their life harder, you are – even if just in a small way – acting against your own best interests. You probably want to set out your manuscript in a way that is most helpful to a literary agent. That said, there’s a follow-up quasi-rule, which can be expressed as: If you obey that one single rule, you’ll be just fine. #MANUSCRIPT EXAMPLES PROFESSIONAL#Your manuscript should look like a clean, professional document. So the only real rule of manuscript presentation is a simple, ordinary one: No required novel template that you have to follow, or else. and even then, you need to realise that there are no rules, exactly. So manuscript formatting rules only apply when you’re ready to go out to agents. If he sent out his work out like that, it would make a terrible first impression on anyone reading it. So he types in a huge font size – Arial, size 16, often all bold – and just ignores the spelling errors. I know one (really good) literary author who has poor eyesight and weirdly bad spelling. While the manuscript remains on your laptop and nowhere else, then you can format it just as you please. So your manuscript is basically just a computer file that lives (for now) on your home computer only, but may in time come to sit on the e-reader of your literary agent and (you hope) a whole bunch of editors too. Title pages should also include your name, contact info, and wordcount.Don’t overuse the ellipsis… Or, exclamation marks!.Chapter breaks should be marked by page breaks.(As a matter of fact, I think some of the kudos that still attaches to trad publishing as opposed to self-publishing has to do with the way it marks out that transition.) Format Your Manuscript Professionally: It’s referred to as a manuscript though: it’ll only become an actual book once it’s been typeset and bound (and becomes an actual hard copy, dead-tree book), or once it’s been formatted and packaged up as an ebook. When the thing is ready to go out to publishers, it’ll go as a computer file, only. Any editorial work will be conducted by email and an e-copy of your manuscript. Quite likely, you will work away at your manuscript on a laptop. These days, your manuscript may well never be printed off at all, anywhere. Over 600 pages of printed paper, as I recall. When I sent my first manuscript out to literary agents, the damn thing ran to more than 180,000 words and it was enormous. In the old days, when the industry still worked with paper, the manuscript was literally the stuff you printed off on your home printer. The same thing is basically true of manuscripts / books, so a reasonable definition of the word ‘manuscript’ would be:Ī manuscript is the text of your novel (or work of nonfiction),īefore that text has been turned into the finished book. An author is a writer whose work has been published. There’s a difference between a manuscript and a book, and it’s much the same as the difference between a writer and an author. Follow the tips below and you’ll be fine. So the lousy presentation of your book’s cover page can screw up your chances of success before your book has really given itself a chance. They’re looking for early warning signs that say this author hasn’t taken enough care to be worth reading further. but getting an agent is hard, so you may as well make sure that first impression is a good one.Īnd of course remember this: literary agents aren’t mostly looking to accept a manuscript. Yes, sure, agents are looking for wonderful writing above all, so in that sense the way you format your manuscript is secondary. Manuscript presentation makes a big difference to the way literary agents receive your work. The Art And Craft Of Beautiful Manuscript Presentation ![]()
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