How to format a manuscript: the standard submission format

The word "manuscript" has narrowed across a century of publishing machinery: Wikipedia's article on the manuscript defines it today as "any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as opposed to the printed version". Standard manuscript format is the set of conventions governing how that copy looks when it goes to a publisher, which Wikipedia's format article describes as "a formatting style for manuscripts of short stories, novels, poems and other literary works submitted by authors to publishers".

Two caveats come with that definition, both from the format article itself. There is "no single set of guidelines": the standard is "considered to be generally acceptable" rather than official, and any agent's or publisher's submission guidelines override every style guide, this page included. And the format has a famous modern instance, the guide Wikipedia's article itself cites as a reference: William Shunn's Proper Manuscript Format.

What the standard says

Collected from the sources, the conventions of the classic submission format:

• Font. Courier "or a similar monospaced serif font", 12-point, per Wikipedia's article; Reedsy's contemporary guide gives the now-common alternative, "12-pt Times New Roman (or similar) font". The two sources agree on what does not change: 12-point, black, one typeface throughout.
• Spacing. Double-spaced lines, 24 or 25 lines of text to a page in the classic arithmetic, with no extra blank line between paragraphs.
• Margins and indents. Wikipedia's article allows 1, 1.25 or 1.5 inch margins with half-inch paragraph indentation; Reedsy's instruction is one inch on all four sides with 0.5-inch indents. The indent marks the paragraph, so the blank line is not needed.
• Page and file. Letter or A4 paper, "printed one-sided with black ink" in the article's classic form; Reedsy's current version expects a word-processor file, a .docx, same conventions, no paper at all.

The first page, and the header after it

The first page carries identifying information in fixed places. Per Wikipedia's article, "the author's name and contact information appears in the top left corner", and in the top right the word count appears. Reedsy's fuller title page centers the title in capitals with the author's name two lines below and the book's category and genre at the bottom, and it warns that a submission "should not feature most of the things found in a book's front matter": no dedication, no copyright page, no contents list.

Every subsequent page carries a one-line header, top right: "the author's name, a slash, an abbreviated title, another slash, and the page number", per Wikipedia's article. Reedsy renders it SURNAME/TITLE/PAGE #, in capitals, long titles abbreviated; in its file version the title page is not counted as page one.

The word count in the corner has its own arithmetic. Publishers, per the article, have estimated by "counting every character in the manuscript, including spaces, and dividing by 6", which at 25 lines a page works out to roughly 250 words per page. The expected form is rounded, "to the nearest thousand" in Reedsy's phrasing. Nobody wants the exact number, because everyone is estimating.

Why the format exists

None of this is typography for its own sake; it is handling for a working document that several people process. Wikipedia's article records the logic: editors, copy editors and typesetters may handle the manuscript in sections at a time, so it goes unstapled, and because the name, title and page number sit on every page, a dropped or shuffled stack "can easily be reassembled". Uniformity, in Reedsy's summary, makes a manuscript easy to read, search and assess, and standard margins keep the true length honest: disguise it and "professionals can spot this straight away". The format is a courtesy to the people whose job is to read fast and mark what they find.

Scene breaks and chapters

For everything inside the running text, Reedsy's conventions are the contemporary reference. Each chapter starts on a fresh page, its number in capitals about a third of the way down. A scene break inside a chapter is marked with a hash sign (#) or three spaced asterisks, never a bare blank line, because an unmarked jump in time or place "can often confuse the reader". And the manuscript ends with "The End". These are craft conventions rather than law, and the override from the top of this guide applies to them too: the guidelines you were sent are the format.

Submission formatting is not book layout

The double-spaced Courier or Times file is an assessment format, not a book. When you self-publish, the layout is produced fresh: Reedsy's guide is explicit that self-publishers skip the submission format entirely and typeset the final book file, and print and ebook are different outputs with different conventions (how to self-publish a book walks the production steps). The submission format exists so professionals can evaluate plain text quickly; the published format exists so readers buy something designed. Confusing the two produces the classic indie mistake, a double-spaced, manuscript-styled interior pushed straight onto a store page.

The serial contrast

Web serial platforms want none of it. A chapter on Royal Road, Wattpad or Scribble Hub is written or pasted into a text editor and rendered by the site's own reader: font, spacing and margins are the platform's decision, and no agent or typesetter sits in the loop (the serial platform landscape maps those ecosystems). The only formatting decisions that matter there are the ones that survive plain text, conventions like the bracketed system speech of LitRPG formatting.

The manuscript format returns at one specific moment: when a finished serial becomes a submission. If you query agents with the completed work, the letter (how to write a query letter) and the synopsis (how to write a synopsis) travel with pages expected in this shape, on the traditional route of publishing paths. Applying the conventions to a finished file takes minutes. Their message to the professional who opens it is the point: this writer knows how the industry reads.