Posted on - No Comments on So what does standard format look like, anyway?

So what does standard format look like, anyway?

Hello, campers –

Has everyone recovered from this weekend’s inoculation of professional formatting? It may have left a bit of a sore place, but much better a quick sting than engendering years of rejection without knowing why, I always say. Once you’ve gotten exposed to the correct way to format a book manuscript, chances are that you’ll be immune to formatting problems in the future.

In fact, once you get used to how a professional manuscript looks, any other formatting is going to look downright strange to you.

Stop laughing — I’m quite serious about this. And to prove it to you, I’m going to spend the next few days re-running a series of posts designed to let you see precisely HOW different standard format appears to the pros.

The usual caveats: if the agent of your dreams (or the agent with whom you are currently signed, if they don’t happen to be the same person) has expressed a strong preference for his clients formatting in a manner opposed to what you see here, run with that — but only for submission to that particular agent. Yes, deviations from this format are uncommon, but you’re not going to get anywhere telling an established agent that no one else’s clients are using 18-point Copperplate Gothic Bold, I assure you, and part of working with an agent entails trusting that he knows more about marketing books than you do.

If he doesn’t, you wouldn’t WANT to be working with him, right?

And before my last statement sends anyone out there into that time-honored I’ve-just-signed-but-what-if-I-chose-the-wrong-one? panic, remember this: if you’ve done your homework before you signed, and thus are certain that he has a solid recent track record selling books in your category, you have every reason to have faith in your representative.

The other caveat — and it’s a big one — is that the format I am showing here is for BOOK manuscripts, not articles or short stories. All too often, advice-givers to aspiring writers will conflate the format for one with the other, resulting in a first page that will look incorrect to either. (Although, generally speaking, such guidelines tend to stick closer to the short story format than to the book.)

Let’s hear it for visual aids! Enjoy!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been quiet for the last few days, having recently returned from giving a completely different talk: a species of my favorite class to teach to writers, a blow-by-blow on how VERY different a professional manuscript looks from, well, any other stack of paper an agent or editor might receive in the mail. I love teaching it.

Admittedly, it’s a trifle depressing to watch the inevitable cloud of gloom descend upon my students as they begin to realize just how many small mistakes there are that can result in a manuscript’s getting rejected — but it’s a pure joy to watch those brows unfurrow and those shoulders unclench as their owners learn that there is something they can DO about improving their books’ chances of success.

Over the next few days, I am going to attempt a similar trick at a distance and, like the Flying Wallendas, without a safety net. Drum roll, please: in the spirit of that old chestnut, SHOW, DON’T TELL, I shall demonstrate just how different a manuscript that follows the rules looks from one that doesn’t.

Hold on tight.

Writers often overlook odd formatting as a reason that a manuscript might have been rejected. Certainly, other reasons get a lot more airplay, particularly at writers’ conferences. If you want to take a long, hard look at some of the better-discussed reasons, I would urge you to gird your loins and plunge into the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE category at right. For those of you who missed it, last autumn, I went over list of instant-response rejection reasons given by a group of agents going over a stack of actual submissions at a conference, one by painful one.

Yet surprisingly little conference time seems to be devoted to the most common mistakes of them all, deviations from standard format for manuscripts.

Not to be confused with what is correct for published books.

In answer to all of the cries of “Huh?” that elicited from readers new to this site, a professional manuscript SHOULD differ from the published version of the same book in a number of subtle but important ways. All too few aspiring writers realize this, a fact that is unfortunately quite obvious to an agent, editor, contest judge, etc., from practically the moment their eyes light upon a submission.

Why is it so very apparent? Because much of the time, writers new to the business clearly go out of their way to format their submissions to resemble published books, in the mistaken belief that this will make their work seem more professional.

The opposite is generally true — and often, it’s apparent in a professional reader’s first glance at the first page of a submission.

(If the implications of that last assertion made you dizzy — if, for instance, you found yourself picturing our old pal Millicent the agency screener pulling a submitted manuscript out of its envelope, casting a critical eye over the first page, hooting, and stuffing the whole thing into the handy SASE — try placing your head between your knees and breathing deeply. I’ll wait until you recover.)

And then follow up with a hard truth: the VAST majority of submissions are rejected not only on page 1, but within the first few lines of page 1. Clearly, Millicent arrives at her conclusions rather quickly.

How can she? Because, unfortunately, aspiring writers so often render rejection very, very easy by submitting manuscripts that simply scream out, “Here’s someone who would benefit from a better knowledge of how publishing works.”

The most common initial signal is the absence of any title page whatsoever. Many submitters, for reasons best known to themselves, omit the title page altogether — often, I suspect, because they are unaware that a professional book-length manuscript ALWAYS has a title page.

For one very, very simple reason: a properly-formatted title page tells an agent PRECISELY how to contact the brilliant author who wrote it — and tells an editor PRECISELY how to contact the agent who represents her. But of that, more below.

To set your minds at ease, forgetting to include a title page almost certainly won’t prevent Millicent from reading your submission at all; she tends to read even the most bizarrely-formatted submissions for at least a line or two. But that initial impression of an author’s lack of professionalism — or, to call it by a kinder name, of having a lot to learn about how the publishing industry works — does often translate into a rather jaundiced reading eye for what comes next.

Why? Well, let’s take a peek through her reading glasses, shall we? The first thing Millicent sees when she opens the average requested materials package is something like this:

Or like this:

Or, heaven help us, like this:

So tell me: why might Millicent take one look at these and conclude that their respective submitters could use a good class on manuscript formatting?

I see all of you long-term blog readers out there with your hands in the air, jumping up and down, eager to tell everyone what’s wrong with this as a first page of text — and you’re absolutely right, of course. We’re going to be talking about precisely those points in the days to come.

For now, however, I want you to concentrate upon how this example has failed as both a title page and a first page of text: by not including the information that Millicent would expect to see on either.

What makes me so sure she would find this discovery, at best, disappointing? Because what she (or her boss agent, or an editor, or a contest judge) would have expected to see on top of that pile of paper was this:

This is a standard manuscript title page for the same book — rather different, isn’t it? Visibly different, in fact, from several paces away, even if Millicent isn’t wearing her reading glasses.

Again, submitting the first example rather than the second would not necessarily be instantly and automatically fatal to a manuscript’s chances, of course. Most of the time, Millicent will go ahead and plunge into that first paragraph of text anyway.

However, human nature and her blistering reading schedule being what they are (for those of you new to this screener’s always-rushed ways, she has a stack of manuscripts up to her chin to screen — and that’s at the end of a long day of screening queries; manuscript submission is in addition to that), if she has already decided that a submission is flawed, just how charitable an eye do you think she is likely to cast upon the NEXT problem on the page?

Uh-huh. To use her favorite word: next!

To be fair to Millicent, while it may well be uncharitable of her to leap to the conclusion that Faux Pas’ or Ridiculous’ manuscript is likely to be unpolished because they did not include a proper title page, agencies do have a vested interest in signing writers who present themselves professionally. For one thing, they’re cheaper to represent, in practical terms: the agent doesn’t have to spend as much time working with them, getting their manuscripts ready to submit to editors.

And no agent in his right mind would send out a manuscript that didn’t include a standard title page. It serves a number of important — nay, vital — marketing functions.

Let’s take another look at the professional version, shall we? So you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down the page, here it is again:

How is this sheet of paper a better piece of marketing material than Faux Pas or Ridiculous’ first page?

Well, right off the bat, it tells a prospective agent or editor what kind of book it is, as well as its approximate length. (If you do not know how to estimate the number of words in a manuscript, or why you should use an estimate rather than relying upon your word processor’s count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.) Both of these are pieces of information that will tell Millicent instantly whether the submission in her hand would meet the requirements of the editors to whom her agency tends to sell.

For instance, if her boss had decided not to represent Action/Adventure anymore, or if editors at the major houses had started saying that they were only interested in seeing Action/Adventure books longer than 90,000 words, Rightly Stepped would be out of luck.

But then, being a savvy submitter, ol’ Rightly would also want his work to be represented by an agent who just ADORES very long Action/Adventure novels — and regularly goes to lunch with scads and scads of editors who feel precisely the same way, right?

The standard title page also tells Millicent precisely how to contact the author to offer representation — and that’s a very, very good thing for everyone concerned. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s ALWAYS in an aspiring writer’s interest to make it easy for an agent to help her.

I might be wrong, of course, but I suspect that NOT forcing Millicent to forage through the mountain of paper on her desk to find a misplaced cover letter with your phone number on it MIGHT be a good start.

By contrast, Faux Pas’ first page doesn’t really do anything but announce the title of the book and leap right into the story. That’s one underachieving piece of paper.

Some writers attempt to consolidate the proper functions of the title page and first page of text into a single sheet of paper. This format is particularly common for contest entries, for some reason. Let’s take another look at Ridiculous and Faux Pas’ submissions:


While such a top page does indeed include the requisite information Millicent or her boss would need to contact the author (although Faux Pas’ does it better, by including more means of contact), cramming it onto the first page of text doesn’t really achieve anything but saving a piece of paper. It doesn’t even shorten the manuscript or contest entry, technically speaking: the title page is never included in a page count; that’s why pagination begins on the first page of text.

I shall go into what DOES belong on the first page of text tomorrow, with accompanying visual aids. For today, let’s keep it simple: all I ask is that you would look at the proper title and the unprofessional examples side by side.

Got all of those images firmly in your mind? Good. Now weigh the probability that someone who reads as many manuscripts per day as Millicent — or her boss, or the editor to whom her boss likes to sell books — would NOT notice a fairly substantial difference in the presentation. Assess the probability of that perception’s coloring any subsequent reading of the manuscript in question.

Kind of obvious, once you know the difference, isn’t it?

Before I sign off for today, and while you’ve got R.Q. Snafu’ sexample still in the front of your mind, let me briefly address the still surprisingly common writerly belief that the industry will automatically take a submission by a woman more seriously if the author submits it under her initials, rather than under her given first name. J.K. Rowling aside, this just isn’t true, at least in fiction circles.

So unless you have always hated your parents for christening you Susan, you won’t really gain anything professionally by using initials in your nom de plume instead. And even if you did, why not publish under a name you actually like instead?

That’ll show your Susan-loving parents.

I just ruffled a few feathers out there, didn’t I? “But Anne,” I hear an initialed purist exclaim, “I don’t want to be judged as a FEMALE writer — I want to be judged as a WRITER. What’s wrong with removing gender markers altogether?”

Well, there’s nothing wrong with it per se, Susan, except that these days, it almost invariably results in Millicent’s seeing such initials and thinking, “Oh, this is a female writer who doesn’t want to be identified as one,” rather than “Gee, I wonder who this mystery person without a first name is. I’m just going to leap right into this manuscript with no gender-based expectations at all.”

Why will Millie have this reaction, you ask? Because female writers — and only female writers — have been submitting this way for a couple of hundred years now. It’s not all that hard a code to crack.

Also, it’s logic that historically, male authors have virtually never used — except, of course, that hugely prolific and apparently immortal author, Anonymous. Even during periods when the most popular and respected novelists have been women (and there have been quite a few in the history of English prose, contrary to what your high school English textbook probably implied), when someone named Stanley Smith wrote a novel, the title page has generally said so.

Because, you see, even back then, readers would have assumed S. Smith the novelist was a nice lady named Susan.

Something else for initial-favoring fiction writers to consider: in North America, women buy the overwhelming majority of novels — and not just women’s fiction, either. Literary fiction readers (and agents, and editors) tend to have two X chromosomes — and some of them have been known to prefer reading books by Susans rather than Roberts. I just mention.

All that being said, the choice to initial or not is entirely up to you — or, more accurately, to you and your agent. Some sets of initials look cool in print, just as some names look better than others on book jackets. Or so claimed my father, the intrepid fellow who demanded that the maternity ward nurse convey him to a typewriter to see how my name looked in print before committing to filling out my birth certificate. (And yes, for those of you who have wondered Anne Mini IS in fact my given name; it just happens to look great in print, thanks to a little forethought.)

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Standard format, part III: RIP, Aleksandr Isaevich.

Standard format, part III: RIP, Aleksandr Isaevich.

Hello, campers –

Yes, I’m still dictating my posts — or, to be precise, my commentaries on my posts — and my poor, loyal volunteer typist du jour has been listening to me complain about the press coverage of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent death. My primary criticism: if you weren’t already familiar with his work, I don’t think most of the obituaries out there would give you much incentive to start reading him. Which honestly is a shame; he was an intriguing writer.

Think I’m over-reacting? Okay, here’s a test: read, watch, or listen to any of the standard obits out today, and tell me if they give you enough information to answer the truly basic question Did this man write fiction or nonfiction?

Actually, this issue has dogged his work since THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO first came out: it’s a novel, clearly billed as such, yet reviewers, readers, and even academic Sovietologists have a fascinating tendency to respond to the book as if it were a memoir.

Fascinating, considering how much ACTUAL nonfiction he published on the subject.

Think I’m over-reacting again? Check out all of those obituaries that simply describe this truly remarkable book as the story of Solzhenitsyn’s struggle to stay alive during his eight years in a prison camp. Which it is based upon, of course — but if memory serves, a heck of a lot of the novel follows other characters, often on the other side of a rather large country.

So how are we to account for all of those academic articles and books that cite THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO as the NONFICTION source of, say, private conversations between Stalin and his cronies, chats that historically took place (if they took place) when the author was by all accounts firmly locked up over a thousand miles away?

As both a memoirist and a novelist, it fascinates me how frequently readers seem to want to believe that books written as fiction are in fact true stories and books written as memoir are false — a desire that historically dates back practically to the advent of the novel as an art form. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, for instance, was ROUTINELY asked after the publication of FRANKENSTEIN whether her late husband and Lord Byron REALLY raised a corpse from the dead, and one has only to look at the current hyper-critical memoir market to see the great suspicion with which real-life accounts are treated in the post-A MILLION LITTLE PIECES world.

How much of Solzhenitsyn’s novels were autobiographical? Only he can answer that, of course, and now, he’s probably past caring much about his press. But now that we can’t ask him directly, shouldn’t we respect the labels that he placed upon his own work, rather than simply overruling him now that he’s not around to defend his choices?

Enough social criticism. Back to practicalities.

I’ve been revisiting the strictures of standard format for manuscripts, and like many visits from old cronies from childhood, it’s been going on BIT too long. Oh, yes, I said childhood: picture me as a ten-year-old, saying, “But WHY do I have to type my book report when no one else does? And who cares if the margins are precisely 1-inch?” Or as a junior high schooler, shaking my head over a short story upon which my teacher had simply written “Good!” but whose margins were now filled with professional advice from kith and kin how to render it publishable in The New Yorker.

Years of therapy, of course, but I do I ever know how to format a manuscript!

Because I love you people, I’m not going to share just how young I was when my father started urging me to read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. Years of therapy, indeed.

After a while, the impulse to conform to the rules of standard format becomes second nature, you’ll be happy to hear, a learned instinct quite useful once one begins writing on deadline. To a writer for whom proper formatting has become second nature, there is no last-minute scramble to change the text. It came into the world correct – which, in turn, saves time.

Believe me, there will be times in your career when you don’t have the time to proofread as closely as you would like, when that half an hour it would take to reformat is the difference between making and missing your deadline. The more successful you are as a writer – ANY kind of writer — the more often you will be in a hurry, generally speaking. No one has more last-minute deadlines than a writer with a book contract.

The down side, though, is that once people — like, say, the average agent, editor, or Millicent — have spent enough time staring at professionally-formatted manuscripts, anything else starts to look, well, unprofessional. From that view, it’s a short hop to the industry’s pervasive belief that heck, every writer knows that printed books and manuscripts are supposed to look different.

Although how an aspiring writer who reads a lot but has never seen a professional manuscript is supposed to find that out, I do not know.

So back to the rules. To recap from the last two days:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier.

(5) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same font and size.

(6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, necessarily.

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page.

(8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page.

(9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.

(11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts.

Everyone clear on all that? Good. Let’s move on.

(12) The beginning of EVERY paragraph should be indented five spaces. No exceptions, EVER.

To put it another way: NOTHING you send to anyone in the industry should EVER be in block-style business format. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if you have been submitting manuscripts with block-formatted paragraphs, they probably have been being rejected unread.

I know: maddening. I also know that I mentioned this in passing a couple of days ago, so I suspect that you’re not entirely shocked by this development. Here’s a bit more explanation of this odd phenomenon.

To publishing types, any document with no indentations, skipping a line between paragraphs, and the whole shebang left-justified carries the stigma of (ugh) business correspondence — and that’s definitely not good. Despite the fact that everyone from CEOs to the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena have been known to use block format from time to time(and blogs are set up to use nothing else), technically, non-indented paragraphs are not proper for English prose.

Do you really want the person you’re trying to impress with your literary genius to wonder about your literacy? I thought not.

And which do you think is going to strike format-minded industry professionals as more literate, a query letter in business format or one in correspondence format (indented paragraphs, date and signature halfway across the page, no skipped line between paragraphs)?

Uh-huh. And don’t you wish that someone had told you THAT before you sent out your first query letter?

Trust me on this one: indent your paragraphs in any document that’s ever going to pass under the nose of anyone even remotely affiliated with the publishing industry.

Including the first paragraph of every chapter. Yes, published books — particularly mysteries, I notice — often begin chapters and sections without indentation. But again, that lack of indentation was the editor’s choice, not the author’s, and copying it in a submission, no matter to whom it is intended as an homage, might get your work knocked out of consideration.

(13) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.

The ONLY exception: you may skip an extra line to indicate a section break in the text. The * * * section break is more or less obsolete; no one will fault you for using it, but still, it’s no longer necessary in a submission to an agency or publishing house. (But do check contest rules carefully, because many competitions still require them.)

Really, this rule is just common sense — so it’s a continual surprise to professional readers how often we see manuscripts that are single-spaced with a line skipped between paragraphs (much like blog format, seen here).

Why surprising? Well, since the entire manuscript should be double-spaced with indented paragraphs, there is no need to skip a line to indicate a paragraph break. (Which is, in case you were not aware of it, what a skipped line between paragraph means in a single-spaced or non-indented document.) In a double-spaced document, a skipped line means a section break, period.

Also — and this is far from insignificant, from a professional reader’s point of view — it’s COMPLETELY impossible to edit a single-spaced document, either in hard copy or on screen. The eye skips between lines too easily, and in hard copy, there’s nowhere to scrawl comments like Mr. Dickens, was it the best of times or was it the worst of times? It could hardly have been both!

So why do aspiring writers so often blithely send off manuscripts with skipped lines, single-spaced or otherwise? My guess would be for one of two reasons: either they think business format is proper English formatting (which it isn’t) or they’re used to seeing skipped lines in print. Magazine articles, mostly.

But — feel free to shout it along with me now; you know the words — A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD NOT RESEMBLE A PUBLISHED PIECE OF WRITING.

(14) NOTHING in a manuscript should be underlined. Titles of songs and publications, as well as words in foreign languages and those you wish to emphasize, should be italicized.

Fair warning: if you consult an old style manual (or a website that is relying upon an old style manual), you may be urged to underline these words. And just so you know, anyone who follows AP style will tell you to underline these. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TEMPTERS: AP style is for journalism, not book publishing. They are different fields, and have different standards.

Again, DO NOT BE TEMPTED. In a submission for the book industry, NOTHING should be underlined.

Professional readers are AMAZED at how often otherwise perfectly-formatted manuscripts get this backwards — seriously, we’ve been known to sit around and talk about it at the bar that’s never more than 100 years from any writers’ conference in North America. An aspiring writer would have to be consulting a very, very outdated list of formatting restrictions to believe that underlining is ever acceptable.

At this point in submission history, it just isn’t for book submissions. Since your future agent is going to make you change all of that underlining to italics anyway, you might as well get out of the habit of underlining now.

Italics are one of the few concessions manuscript format has made to the computer age – again, for practical reasons: underlining uses more ink than italics in the book production process. Thus, italics are cheaper.

The logic behind italicizing foreign words is very straightforward: you don’t want the agent of your dreams to think you’ve made a typo, do you?

Some authors like to use italics to indicate thought, and others for emphasis. There is no hard-and-fast rule on this, but do be aware that many agents and editors dislike this practice. (Their logic: a good writer should be able to make it clear that a character is thinking something, or indicate inflection, without resorting to funny type.)

However, there are many other agents and editors who think it is perfectly fine – but you are unlikely to learn which is which until after you have sent in your manuscript, alas. You submit your work, you take your chances.

There is no fail-safe for this choice. Sorry.

(15) All numbers (except for dates) under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25. But numbers over 100 should be written as numbers: 1,243, not one thousand, two hundred and forty-three.

I’m surprised how often otherwise industry-savvy writers are unaware of this one, but the instinct to correct it in a submission is universal in professional readers.

Translation: not doing it will not help you win friends and influence people at agencies and publishing houses.

Like pointing out foreign-language words with special formatting, this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

Again, be warned, those of you who have been taught by teachers who adhere in the AP style: they will tell you to write out only numbers under 10.

Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG in a manuscript.

Did I mention it was wrong? And that my aged eyes have actually seen contest entries knocked out of finalist consideration over this particular issue? More than once?

(16) Dashes should be doubled — rather than using an emdash — with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces at either end, as in self-congratulatory.

Yes, I know: your word-processing program probably changes this automatically, but change it back. Any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible.

Microsoft may actually have a point here: doubling the dashes is a monumental pain (thanks in large part to their auto formatter’s preferences), and the practice IS archaic. Books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy; many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this, however, they are wrong, at least as far as manuscripts are concerned. Standard format is invariable upon this point. And yes, it is a common enough pet peeve that the pros will complain to one another about how often submitters do it.

And heck, MS Word’s grammar checker has more than once told me to replace the correct form of there, their, or they’re with an incorrect one, and it won’t commit to whether to capitalize the first word after a colon (as journalists now do) or not (as book writers do, with the notable exception of JK Rowling).

So who are you gonna believe, me or Bill Gates?

(17) Adhere to the standard rules of punctuation, not what it being done in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet. Especially the rule calling for TWO spaces after every period and colon.

In other words, do as Strunk & White say, not what others do.

I haven’t mentioned this one before, but in recent months, I’ve seen enough deviations from standard punctuation (I’m looking at YOU, JKR!) to believe this rule deserves inclusion on the list.

The primary deviation I’ve been seeing in the last couple of years is leaving only one space, rather than the standard two, after a period. Yes, printed books often do this, to save paper (the fewer the spaces on a page, the more words can be crammed onto it, right?). A number of writing-advice websites, I notice, and even some writing teachers have been telling people that this is the wave of the future — and that adhering to the two-space norm makes a manuscript look obsolete.

At the risk of sounding harsh (and, apparently, contradicting Miss Snark), poppycock.

There is a very, very practical reason to preserve that extra space after each sentence: ease of reading and thus editing. As anyone who has ever edited a long piece of writing can tell you, the white space on the page is where the comments — grammatical changes, pointing out flow problems, asking, “Does the brother really need to die here?” — go. Less white space, less room to comment.

Translation: until everyone in the industry makes the transition editing in soft copy — which is, as I have noted before, both harder and less efficient — the two-space rule is highly unlikely to change.

There you have it: the rules. Practice them until they are imbedded into your very bones, my friends: literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the synopsis) for the rest of your professional life should be in standard format.

Oh, and it’s a good idea to make sure everything is spelled correctly, too, and turn off the widow/orphan control; it makes pages be an uneven number of lines. Keep up the good work!

PS: if you’re having trouble visualizing how some of these rules might look on the printed page, don’t worry — I’m going to be giving you visual aids in my next few posts.

Posted on - 13 Comments on The single most important thing you can do to get your manuscript taken seriously, part II, or, do I have your attention yet?

The single most important thing you can do to get your manuscript taken seriously, part II, or, do I have your attention yet?

Hello again, campers –

Welcome back to my series on standard format for manuscripts. If you were previously unaware that there IS a professional standard for presenting a book, well. now you know. Kindly raise your right hand (if you have one) and repeat after me: from this day forth, as long as I shall live, I will submit my writing ONLY in standard format.

Yes, it really is that important — and that simple. If you want your submission treated professionally, it needs to look like the manuscripts already-published authors produce.

And yes, yes, I know: I harp on this quite a lot on Author! Author!, but honestly, it breaks my heart to see good writers, even great ones, making the same formatting mistakes year in and year out, getting rejected for reasons that are apparent to professional readers from halfway across the room. Obviously, competition to land an agent and get published is very intense, but I say, if you’re going to get rejected, let it be because an agent or editor legitimately disagreed with your writing choices, not because you didn’t follow the rules.

So there.

Frankly, it’s bad for writers everywhere that these rules are not more widely known. Okay, so it keeps freelance editors like me in business, but it has created a submission environment where poor formatting is generally considered a warning sign of poor WRITING to come.

By Millicent and her ilk, in any case.

And that drives conscientious aspiring writers, the ones who — like you, perhaps — have invested considerable time and sweat in learning something about the trade, completely batty. Because, like so much generalized criticism, the fine folks who take the advice most seriously tend to be the ones who need it least, I know that there are thousands of you out there who stay up nights, compulsively going over their manuscripts for the 147th time, trying to ferret out that one last bit of less-than-professional presentation.

Bless your heart, if you’re one of those. You’re helping raise aspiring writers’ collective reputation within the industry.

One quick caveat before we get started today: the standard format restrictions I’m listing here are for BOOK submissions, not for short stories, poetry, journalistic articles, academic articles, or indeed any other form of writing. For the guidelines for these, you may — and should — seek elsewhere.

Which is a gentle way of saying that the formatting and grammatical choices you see in newspapers will not necessarily work in manuscripts. AP style is different from standard format in several important respects, not the least being that in standard format (as in other formal presentations in the English language), the first letter of the first word after a colon should NOT be capitalized, since technically, it’s not the beginning of a new sentence.

I don’t know who introduced the convention of post-colon capitalization, but believe me, those of us who read the submissions of aspiring book writers for a living have mentally consigned that language subversive to a pit of hell that would make even Dante avert his eyes.

But enough about my fevered fantasies. Let’s get down to the proverbial brass tacks, shall we?

Yesterday, while scores of my long-time readers flung their hands over their eyes and screamed, “No! Not again!”, I started going over the rigors of standard formatting for manuscripts again. Please, even if you are morally certain that you know what you’re doing, take a few minutes for a refresher course.

Why? Because while submitting pages that deviate from standard format MIGHT not result in automatic rejection of otherwise fine writing, it does indeed happen – and often. And not just because our old friend Millicent the agency screener is having a bad day.

Professional-level critique is HARSH; it’s like having your unmade-up face examined under a very, very bright light by someone who isn’t afraid to hurt your feelings by pointing out flaws. In the industry, this level of scrutiny is not considered even remotely mean.

Actually, if your work generates tell-it-like-it-is feedback from a pro, you should be a bit flattered – it’s how they habitually treat professional authors.

Yet the vast majority of submitting writers seem to assume that agents and their staffs will be hugely sympathetic readers of their submissions, willing to overlook technical problems because of the quality of the writing or the strength of the story. Every so often, there is the odd exception that justifies this belief. If the writing is absolutely beautiful, or the story is drool-worthy, but the formatting is all akimbo and the spelling is lousy, there’s an outside chance that someone at an agency might be in a saintly enough mood to overlook the problems and take a chance on the writer.

You could also have a Horatio Alger moment where you find a billionaire’s wallet, return it to him still stuffed with thousand-dollar bills, and he adopts you as his new-found son or daughter.

Anything is possible, of course. But it’s probably prudent to assume, when your writing’s at stake, that yours is not going to be the one in 10,000,000 exception.

Virtually all of the time, an agent, editor, contest judge, or screener’s first reaction to an improperly-formatted manuscript is the same as to one that is dull but technically perfect: speedy rejection.

The trouble is, submitters rejected for this reason are almost never aware of it. With few exceptions, the rejecters will not even take the time to scrawl, “Take a formatting class!” or “Next time, spell-check!” on the returned manuscript. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she’ll mend her ways and try again.

Call me zany, but I think that the way-mending might go a TRIFLE faster if the writer knew that the manuscript was broken.

I’d like to speed up that learning curve. It’s not as though the strictures of standard format are state secrets, after all. To recap from yesterday:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New — unless you’re writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier.

One last word on point #4 before I move on: if you want a specific font for your finished book that ISN’T one of these, you should NOT use it in your manuscript. No, not even if you found a very cool way to make your Elvin characters’ dialogue show up in Runic.

Like choices about italicization, bolding, and whether to use a medieval-style fancy first letter at the beginning of each chapter, the typeface ultimately used in the published book is a matter of discussion between you and your future editor — or, even more frequently, a decision made by the publishing house without any authorial input at all.

Oops, I guess I didn’t need to leap on this point yesterday. Oh, well, it bears repeating, since so few aspiring writers seem to be aware of it.

If you try to illustrate the fabulousness of your desired typeface now, you run the risk of your manuscript being dismissed as unprofessional. Don’t. Save it for later discussion.

(5) No matter how cool your desired typeface looks, or how great the title page looks with 14-point type, keep the ENTIRE manuscript in the same font and size.

Industry standard is 12-point. Again, no exceptions, INCLUDING YOUR TITLE PAGE, where almost everyone gets a little wacky the first time out. No pictures or symbols here, either, please. Just the facts.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s a term in the industry for title pages with 24-point fonts, fancy typefaces, and illustrations.

It’s “high school book report.”

(6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page — and not even there, necessarily.

Yes, you read that correctly: you may place your title in boldface on the title page, if you like, but that’s it. Nothing else in the manuscript should be in bold.

This is a throwback to the old typewriter days, where only very fancy machines indeed could darken selected type. Historically, using bold in-text is considered a bit tacky for the same reason that wearing white shoes before Memorial Day is in certain circles: it’s a subtle display of wealth.

(You didn’t think all of those white shoes the Victorians wore cleaned themselves, did you? Shiny white shoes equaled scads of busily-polishing staff.)

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page.

Violating of this rule will result in instantaneous rejection virtually everywhere. Number those pages if it’s the last thing you do.

Few non-felonious offenses irk the professional manuscript reader (including yours truly, if I’m honest about it) more than an unnumbered submission — it ranks right up there on their rudeness scale with assault, arson, and beginning a query letter with, “Dear Agent.”

Why? Gravity, my friends, gravity. What goes up tends to come down — and if the object in question happens to be an unbound stack of paper…

Picture, if you will, two manuscript-bearing interns colliding in an agency hallway. (You may giggle, but anyone who has ever worked with submissions has first-hand experience of this.) After the blizzard of flying papers dies down, and the two combatants rehash that old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial’s dialogue (“You got romance novel in my literary fiction!” “You got literary fiction in my romance novel!”), what needs to happen?

Yup. Some luckless soul has to put all of those pages back in the proper order. Just how much more irksome is that task going to be if the pages are not numbered?

Trust me, it is far, far, FAR easier to toss the entire thing into the reject pile than to spend the hours required to guess which bite-sized piece of storyline belongs before which. Number your pages.

The first page of the text proper, incidentally, is page 1 of the text, not the title page, and should be numbered as such. If your opus has an introduction or preface, the first page of THAT is page 1, not the first page of chapter 1.

Why, you ask? Long-time readers, chant it with me now, please: BECAUSE A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD NOT LOOK IDENTICAL TO A PUBLISHED BOOK.

To run over the other most popular choices for pages to mislabel as page 1: manuscripts do not contain tables of contents, so there should be no question of pagination for that. Also, epigraphs — those quotations from other authors’ books so dear to the hearts of writers everywhere — should not appear on their own page in a manuscript, as they sometimes do in published books; if you feel you must include one (considering that 99.9999% of the time, Millicent will just skip over it), include it between the chapter title and text on page 1.

If that last sentence left your head in a whirl, don’t worry — I’ll show you how to format epigraphs properly later in this series. Yes, including some discussion of that cryptic comment about Millicent.

(8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page.

Most writing handbooks and courses tend to be a trifle vague about this particular requirement, so allow me to clarify: a well-constructed slug line includes the author’s last name, book title, and page number, to deal with that intern-collision problem I mentioned earlier. And the header, for those of you who have not yet surrendered to Microsoft Word’s lexicon, is the 1-inch margin at the top of each page.

This means, in effect, that every page of the manuscript has the author’s name on it — a great idea, should you, say, want an agent or editor to be able to contact you after s/he’s fallen in love with it.

The slug line should appear in the upper left-hand margin (although no one will sue you if you put it in the upper right-hand margin, left is the time-honored location) of every page of the text EXCEPT the title page (which should have nothing in the header or footer at all).

Traditionally, the slug line appears all in capital letters, but it’s not strictly necessary. Being something of a traditionalist, the third page of my memoir has a slug line that looks like this:

MINI/A FAMILY DARKLY/3

Since the ONLY place a page number should appear on a page of text is in the slug line, if you are in the habit of placing numbers wacky places like the middle of the footer, do be aware that it does not look strictly professional to, well, professionals. Double-check that your word processing program is not automatically adding extraneous page markers.

Do not, I beg of you, yield like so many aspiring writers to the insidious temptation add little stylistic bells and whistles to the slug line, to tart it up. Page numbers should not have dashes on either side of them, be in italics or bold, or be preceded by the word “page.” The point here is not to make your slug line stand out for its innovative style, but for your manuscript’s pages to look exactly like every other professional writer’s.

If you have a very long title, feel free to abbreviate, to keep the slug line from running all the way across the top of the page. (Technically, a slug line should be 30 spaces or less, but there’s no need to stress about that in the computer age. A slug, you see, is the old-fashioned printer’s term for a pre-set chunk of, you guessed it, 30 spaces of type.) For example, my agent is currently circulating a novel of mine entitled THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB — 26 characters, counting spaces. Since my last name is quite short, I could get away with putting it all in the slug line, to look like this:

MINI/THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB/1

If, however, my last name were something more complicated, such as Montenegro-Copperfield — 22 characters all by itself, including dash — I might well feel compelled to abbreviate:

MONTENEGRO-COPPERFIELD/BUDDHA/1

(9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins.

That’s twelve single-spaced lines, incidentally. The chapter name (or merely “Chapter One”) may appear on the FIRST line of the first page — not on the last line before the text, as so many writers mistakenly do. The chapter title or number should be centered, and it should NOT be in boldface or underlined. Don’t panic if you’re having trouble visualizing this — I’ll be giving concrete examples of what the first page of a chapter should look like later in this series.

Why shouldn’t the title appear immediately above the text, as one so often sees? Because that’s where the title of a SHORT STORY lives. I’ve literally never seen a professional book manuscript formatted this way.

Very frequently, agents, editors and contest judges are presented with improperly-formatted first pages that include the title of the book, “by Author’s Name,” and/or the writer’s contact information in the space above the text. This is classic rookie mistake. To professional eyes, a manuscript that includes any of this information on the first page of the manuscript (other than in the slug line, of course) seems term paper-is.

So where does all of that necessary contact information go, you ask? Read on.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.

This is one of the main differences between a short story submission (say, to a literary journal) and a novel submission. To submit a manuscript — or contest entry, for that matter — with this information on page 1 is roughly the equivalent of taking a great big red marker and scrawling, “I don’t know much about the business of publishing,” across it. Just don’t do it.

“But wait,” I hear some of you out there murmuring, “I need a title page? Since when?”

Funny you should mention that, because…

(11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts.

This one seems to come as a surprise to a LOT of aspiring writers. You should ALWAYS include a title page with ANY submission of ANY length, including contest entries and the chapters you send after the agent has fallen in love with your first 50 pages.

It is genuinely unheard-of for a professional manuscript not to have a title page: literally every manuscript that any agent in North America sends to any editor will include one. Yet, astonishingly, 95% of writers submitting to agencies seem to be unaware that including it is industry standard.

On the bright side, this means that if you are industry-savvy enough to include a professionally-formatted title page with your work, your submission automatically looks like a top percentile ranker to professional eyes from the moment it’s pulled out of the envelope. It’s never too early to make a good first impression, right?

If you do not know how to format a proper title page (and yes, Virginia, there IS a special format for it, too), please see the Your Title Page category at right. Or wait a few days until I cover it later in this series. Up to you.

Before anyone says it: omitting a title page is too common a mistake to be an automatic deal-breaker — and yes, one does occasionally meet an agent at a conference or one blogging online who says she doesn’t care one way or the other about whether a submission has a title page resting on top. Bully for them for being so open-minded, but even these are not going to toss out a submission BECAUSE it has a properly-formatted title page.

As I point out roughly 127,342 times per year in this forum, how can you be sure that the person deciding whether to pass your submission upstairs or reject it ISN’T a stickler for professionalism?

I’m going to sign off for today, but I hope to finish up the rules of standard format next time, so we may move on to practical examples of what a professional manuscript looks like. Believe me, as tedious as it is to change these things in your manuscript now, by the time you’re on your third or fourth book, it will be second nature to you.

Why, I’ll bet that the next time you sit down to begin a new project, you will automatically format it correctly.

And, more importantly, any submissions you might happen to send out in the near future will look like the work of a pro. Again, call me zany, but I would rather see an agent or editor evaluate your book on the basis of your writing and your story, not your formatting knowledge.

I’m funny that way. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on A topic that just can’t wait, or, I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since I last went over this

A topic that just can’t wait, or, I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since I last went over this

Hello, campers –

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with good wishes after my last post — I’m feeling a touch better, thanks. I’m still coughing up a storm, but I couldn’t stand another minute of not filling you in on standard format. Because — and I can hardly believe this myself — it’s been ALMOST A YEAR since I last went over the rules point by point.

I know: time flies when you’re having fun, eh?

Admittedly, my nearest and dearest/medical practitioners/pretty much everyone sane to whom I have spoken about it have suggested that I might want to wait until my temperature normalizes a bit more before I get back to full-tilt blogging again. They are probably right. They also probably didn’t realize that having suggested this renders them prime candidates for being dictation victims indentured servants unpaid labor kind volunteers until my chipper fingers are up to speed again.

In order to render surrogate blogger duty as painless as possible, I’m going to be re-running some older posts on standard format with (I hope) italicized new comments interspersed. Today, I’m starting with a post that not only goes over the hows and whys of professional manuscript format, but does so in a context that illustrates why people like me professional readers tend to focus so very much on technical details when scanning the work of a new writer: evidently, our brains are wired differently than other people’s.

This is a really, really good thing to know BEFORE you submit to an agent or editor: 99.9% of the format isn’t right, it WILL distract any professional reader from even the most beautiful writing.

And that’s not merely a matter of being obsessive-compulsive (although truth compels me to say that in this line of work, OCD is hardly an occupational drawback) — as I shall be showing you later on in this series, to someone who reads manuscripts for a living, deviations from standard format might as well be printed in blood-red ink. Because all professional manuscripts are formatted identically, it’s INCREDIBLY obvious when one isn’t.

So while it may seem tedious, annoying, or just a whole lot of work to go through your submissions with the proverbial fine-toothed comb in order to weed out this kind of distraction.

Remember, too, that IF AN AGENT OR EDITOR REQUESTED YOU TO SEND PAGES, S/HE IS EXPECTING THEM TO BE IN STANDARD FORMAT, unless s/he SPECIFICALLY tells you otherwise.

Indeed, it’s so much assumed that s/he probably won’t even mention it, because most agents and editors believe that these rules are already part of every serious book-writer’s MO. So much so, in fact, that agents who’ve read my blog sometimes ask me why I go over these rules so often. Doesn’t everyone already know them? Isn’t this information already widely available?

I’ll leave you to answer those for yourselves. Suffice it to say that our old pal Millicent the agency screener believes the answers to be: because I like it, yes, and yes.

And please, those of you who have been through this material with me before: don’t just skip these posts, I beg of you. I see manuscripts all the time by experienced writers that contain standard format violations. Until a writer has worked closely with an editor or agent long enough for these rules to become second nature, it’s just too easy to let an exception or two slip by.

My patient dictation-taker du jour is scowling at me, so I’m going to let us get on with the show. Keep up the good work!

I’ve been typing WAY too much lately — not a particularly good idea, for someone who spent nearly two years of the late 1990s doctor-banned from a keyboard. (And trust me, voice-recognition programs at the time were not designed for first sopranos.) The first sign of overuse: lack of grip strength.

After first a water glass, then a teacup shattered on the floor, I betook myself to the safely unbreakable couch to curl up with the equally shatter-proof new Harry Potter for half a day. I’d been saving my copy until all the hype died down, so I could form an unfettered opinion, but I had made a point of paying full price for it, rather than getting it at Costco, because typically, the author’s royalty percentage is lower in a bulk market.

Call me zany, but even if an author can afford a different tiara for every day of the week (“Should I go with the emerald today? Or the star sapphire with ruby clusters?”), I believe it’s important to buy the works of living writers in order to create a world where — brace yourselves — there’s a market for the work of living writers.

I know in my heart of hearts that it’s wrong to give away a book’s big secret before people have had a chance to read it, but spoiler alert: apparently, no one, but no one, proofed the galleys for this book.

Where are all the commas that should inhabit Harry’s world? Did Voldemort wave a wand and spirit them all away? Did the Ministry of Magic legalize run-on sentences? Are sentences featuring colons the new black? Or does JK Rowling have enough money now to buy off the world’s English professors to the extent of changing the rule about the first word after those ubiquitous colons NOT being capitalized?

Naturally, this didn’t stop me from staying up all night to finish the book; she’s an amazing pacer and plotter. But it’s evil magic, indeed, when Scholastic teaches our children that there are four periods in an ellipse, rather than three.

Branded with the Dark Mark, indeed.

My editorial peevishness is well-timed, because yesterday, I threatened — no, make that promised — to revisit the rules of standard format for submissions. Because, you see, I am far from the only professional reader who takes umbrage (not Dolores Umbridge-style umbrage, but close), when manuscripts deviate from certain time-honored restrictions.

To put it bluntly, improperly-formatted manuscripts are often shoved into the reject pile on sight.

Which means that while, yes, this may well be most spectacularly unsexy topic of them all, and perhaps the single most necessary for any aspiring writer to know. At least for anyone who ever intends to submit a manuscript — a group that I have some reason to suspect includes one or two of you.

To begin with the basics: for those of you who do not already know. standard format for manuscripts is NOT the same as standard format for published books. I asked to make this sentence bold this time around, because I’m constantly meeting aspiring writers who are not aware of this fact. Heck, my dictation-taker du jour apparently was not aware of this fact until she read this paragraph.

Nor is it identical to what your word processor’s grammar checker will ask you to do – nor, heaven help us, business format. None of these will look correct to an agent or editor.

It is VERY much to your advantage to be aware of this salient fact.

Why? Well, Since standard manuscript format differs in a number of significant ways from ALL of the above, agency screeners, agents, editors, and contest judges tend to regard submissions formatted in any other way as either unpolished (if they’re feeling generous) or unprofessional (if they’re not). And unfortunately for writers unaware of the rules, a non-standard manuscript is child’s play to spot from the moment a professional reader lays eyes upon it.

Spoiler alert: being identified as not professionally formatted renders a submission FAR more likely to be rejected than any writing-related problem.

Why? Long-time readers, shout it with me now: agencies and publishing houses get so many submissions that a screener’s PRIMARY goal is to weed out the one he is reading at the moment. The faster he can do that, the better, to move through that mountain of paper on his desk.

By logical extension, the more professional your manuscript looks, the more likely it is to be read with interest by a screener in a hurry.

Period. And I don’t know about you, but I’m all for anything that helps a good writer’s work get taken more seriously, especially in the current super-tight submission environment, which is more rejection happy than I’ve ever seen it — and I’ve been listening to writers, agents, and editors complain about the state of the literary market since I was in my cradle.

A couple of disclaimers before I begin. I fully realize that many of the tiny-but-pervasive changes I am about to suggest that you make to your manuscript are going to be irksome to implement. Reformatting a manuscript is time-consuming and tedious – and I would be the first to admit that some of these rules are pretty absurd.

At least on their faces, that is. Speaking as someone who reads manuscripts for a living, I can let you in on a little secret: quite a few of these restrictions remain beloved of the industry even in the age of electronic submissions because they render a manuscript a heck of a lot easier to edit in hard copy — still the norm, incidentally. As I will show later in this series, a lot of these rules are designed to maximize white space in which the editor may scrawl trenchant comments like, “Wait, wasn’t the protagonist’s sister named Maeve in the last chapter? Why is she Belinda here?”

As I said above, this is one line of work where a touch of compulsiveness is a positive boon. Treat it with the respect it deserves.

As I believe I may have mentioned once or twice before, I do not run the universe, and thus do not make the rules. Sorry. No matter how much I would like to absolve you from some of them, it is outside my power.

Take it up with the fairy godmother who neglected to endow me with that gift at birth.

Also, every time I run a series of posts on standard format, I am inundated with comments pointing out that website X advises something different, that this agent said at a conference she doesn’t care what typeface you use, or that a certain manual said that standards have changed from the traditional guidelines I set out here.

I have no doubt that all of these comments are indeed pointing out legitimate differences in advice, but it is not my purpose here to police the net for standardization of advice. If you like guidelines you find elsewhere better, by all means follow them.

All I claim for these rules – and it is not an insubstantial claim – is that nothing I advise here will EVER strike an agent or editor as unprofessional. Adhering to them will mean that your writing is going to be judged on your writing, not your formatting.

And that, my friends, is nothing at which to sneeze. Or cough, although I seem to be managing it.

Here are the rules of standard format — and no, NONE of them are negotiable. Harry Houdini himself would have extreme difficulty sneaking a non-standard manuscript past an agency screener, even though he undoubtedly has the world’s best platform to write a book on extricating oneself from tight situations.

If that last quip didn’t make you groan, if not chuckle, it’s time to brush up on your agent-speak. On to the rules:

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

No exceptions, unless someone in the industry (or a contest’s rules) SPECIFICALLY asks you to do otherwise.

No ecru paper, no off-white, no Dr. Seuss-type stripes. Yes, buff or parchment can look very nice, but there’s a strategic reason to use bright white paper: very sharp black-white contrast is strongly preferred by virtually every professional reader out there, probably as a legacy of having read so many dim photocopies over the course of their lifetimes.

The ONLY colored paper that should ever go anywhere near a manuscript is the single sheet that separates one copy of a submission or book proposal from the next, so it is easy for an agent to see where to break the stack. (But you don’t need to know about that until your agent asks you to send 15 copies of your book for submitting to editors. Put it out of your mind for now.)

And do spring for a new printer cartridge, and skip the trip to the copy center. Badly-photocopied work is almost never read. Actually, you’d be amazed (at least, I hope you would) at how poor the printing quality is on some submissions; it’s as though the author dunked in a swiftly-flowing river several times before popping it in the mail.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way (again, unless you are specifically asked to do otherwise).

Yes, this IS criminally wasteful of paper, especially when you consider the literally millions of pages of submissions that go flying into the agencies and publishing houses every month. Most agencies do not even recycle; the vast majority of agencies did not even consider accepting e-mailed queries at all until the anthrax-in-envelopes scare. (I swear I’m not making that up.)

I assure you, if I ran the universe, paper conservation would be the norm, and recycling mandatory. Also, writers would all be granted an extra month a year in which to write, excellent and inexpensive child care while writing, a cedar-lined cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan in which to do it, and a pineapple upside-down cake on Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday. Perhaps some hard candies on Agatha Christie’s birthday as well, in affluent years, and dancing on Mme. de Staël’s.

But since the unhappy reality is that I do NOT run the universe (see disclaimer above), we shall all have to live with the status quo.

Which is to say: the publishing industry is one vast paper-wasting enterprise. Sorry.

You’d be surprised at how often writers violate the thou-shalt-not-bind rule, including paper clips, rubber bands, or even binders with their submissions. Since agents always circulate manuscripts without any sort of binding, these doohickies just scream, “I’m unfamiliar with the industry.” SASE, here we come.

The ONLY exception to this rule is a nonfiction book proposal — not the manuscript, just the proposal — which is typically presented UNBOUND in a black folder, the kind with horizontal pockets. (For tips on how a book proposal should be presented, please see the aptly-titled BOOK PROPOSALS category on the list at right.)

To forestall the comment beloved reader Dave usually posts when I bring this up, if you wish to make double-sided, 3-hole-punched, be-bindered drafts for circulating to your first readers for ease of toting around, be my guest. But NEVER submit in that manner to a professional reader.

I’m serious about this. Don’t make me crawl out of this bed to stop you.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified, as published books, e-mails, business letters, and online writing tend to be.

Yes, books feature text that runs in straight vertical lines along both side margins, and yes, your word processing program can replicate that practically effortlessly, if you ask it nicely to do so.

But don’t: the straight margin should be the left one; the right should be ragged, as if you had produced the manuscript on a typewriter.

Many writers find this one nearly impossible to accept, because it is one of the most visually obvious ways in which a professional manuscript differs from a printed book. They believe, wrongly, that anything that makes their submission look more like what’s on the shelves at Barnes & Noble is inherently professional.

Trust me, quite the opposite is true.

And NEVER format a query or cover letter to someone in the industry in business format: indent those paragraphs. More on that later in this series.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New.

Personally, I would never dream of allowing a client of mine to submit a manuscript in anything but Times New Roman, nor would I ever submit any of my work in anything else. It is the standard typeface of the industry.

It’s one of the bizarre facts of publishing life that manuscripts in these fonts tend to be taken far more seriously, and with good reason: these are the typefaces upon which the most commonly-used word count estimations are based. (Psst: if you don’t know why you should be estimating the length of your manuscript rather than using actual word count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

There are advocates of Courier, too, so you may use it, but I implore you, do not get any wackier than that. If you write screenplays, you may ONLY use Courier. Most screenplay agents will not read even the first page of a script in another typeface — which means that most contest judges will follow suit.

There are a few agents out there who have their own font preferences, so do check their websites and/or listings in the standard agency guides. As ever, the golden rule of dealing with an agent you want to represent you is GIVE ‘EM PRECISELY WHAT THEY ASK TO SEE, not what you would like them to see.

If you are a writer who likes to have different voices presented in different typefaces, or who chooses boldface for emphasis, a submission is not a forum where you can express those preferences freely. Yes, one sees this in a published book occasionally, but I assure you, the choice to indulge in these formatting differences was the editor’s, not the author’s.

Sorry. (See my earlier disclaimer about proprietorship of the universe.)

To forestall the usual question someone brings up at this point: yes, most published books ARE in typefaces other than Times or Courier, but at the risk of repeating myself, MANUSCRIPTS AND PUBLISHED BOOKS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO LOOK THE SAME. Typeface decisions for published books are made by the publishing house, not the author.

Although if you’re very nice, they may listen to your suggestions. They might giggle a little, but they might listen. Ditto with the cover and the title, which are — brace yourselves — almost never under the author’s control.

Why? Good question — because these are considered matters of packaging and marketing, not content.

All of which begs the question, of course: why do they give us so many typefaces from which to choose, if we’re not supposed to use them? Answer: because the people who make word processing programs are not the same people who decide what books get published in North America. Which is why, in case you’re wondering, what Microsoft Word means by word count and what the average agent or editor does are not typically the same thing.

All right, I’ve run very long indeed today, so I’m going to stop here for the nonce. More rules follow tomorrow or whenever I can next blandish someone to take my dictation. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on The one text every literary contest entrant absolutely MUST read — and no, it’s not this blog post (but thanks for asking)

The one text every literary contest entrant absolutely MUST read — and no, it’s not this blog post (but thanks for asking)

Wouldn’t you know it? I spend days and days of blog time on how to do a synopsis for a contest entry, and I leave out the answer to one of the most basic possible questions: how does one number the pages?

That does it — today’s post is going to be on formatting contest entries.

Let me begin by answering the synopsis question before any of us get even a single minute older: it varies from contest to contest.

Most of the time, contests will simply specify that all pages of the entry should be numbered; some request that the synopsis or other support materials be numbered separately. If the rules say to number the synopsis sequentially with the rest of manuscript, by all means do so: if an entry consists of (in the order they appear) a title page, 24 pages of text, and a 3-page synopsis, the title page would be neither numbered nor counted, the text would be pp. 1-24, and the synopsis would be pp. 25-28. If they call for separate numbering, the title page and text would be the same, but the synopsis would start over at page 1.

Yes, you read that first part of the answer correctly: there is no standard answer to this, nor is there any substitute for going over the contest’s rules with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. In fact, I would HIGHLY recommend going through them with a fine-toothed comb, a nit-pick — and then making a checklist of ALL of the requirements, so you may check them off as you fulfill them.

Actually, if it were my entry, I would go a few steps farther: making the list, checking it twice for accuracy (à la the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver) — then photocopying it a couple of times, and not only checking off each item as you complete it on List #1, but going back just before sealing the envelope with List #2, to make sure that you didn’t miss anything in the rush to get the entry envelope-ready.

And perhaps — this was clever reader Tad’s excellent suggestion from a while back — handing List #3 to your significant other, flat mate, tennis partner, or some other sharp-eyed soul who either loves you enough to do you an unpleasantly tedious favor or is otherwise too polite to say no, and ask him/her/them/it to go through and check your entry for required elements.

I’m not just talking about making sure that you actually INCLUDE that synopsis you slaved over for so long, either. I’m also referring to adhering to formatting requirements.

So if you were entering a contest that required a synopsis, your first stop should be to consult the rules, to see if there are special ways they would like to see it formatted. If they do, follow them to the letter.

Do this even if what they are asking is silly, unheard-of, or downright obsolete. Like, for instance, the Organization-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named’s yearly insistence that section breaks should be denoted by at least three centered asterisks, like this:

asterisk.jpg

Now, those asterisks are not entirely without reason: back in the days of typewriters, they were indeed how a writer alerted the manual typesetter to a section break. Now that publishing houses expect writers to turn manuscripts over to them after contract signing in both hard and soft copy, the asterisked section break has gone the way of the horse and buggy: it’s still POSSIBLE to get around that way, but folks on the highway are going to get a might annoyed with you.

So if you were submitting the same page to an agent or editor, you would be best served by its looking like this:

non-asterisk.jpg

Which only goes to reiterate the point that I keep banging upon, drum-like, every time I bring up the topic of contest entries: contrary to popular belief amongst writers, the sheets of paper you submit to a contest and to an agent or editor should not necessarily be identical.

Yes, you’re going to want to adhere to standard manuscript format, where the rules do not specifically call for something different; since standard format is in fact industry standard (thus the name), contest judges expect to see it. In fact, if an entry is NOT in standard format (other than the little tweaks the contest’s organizers have amused themselves by adding to the rules), it usually loses either presentation or marketability points.

Remember, the judges want the finalists’ work to be market-ready — which means in the format that agents and editors prefer.

Do I hear some disgruntled shifting of feet out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you mutter, “if they’re so hot on marketability, why don’t they just set up the rules so they’re identical with standard format and call it good?”

Ooh, good question, disgusted mutterers. If contest rules were set afresh every year, or even every decade, that would make abundant sense. Because, you see, contest organizers will frequently insist (in feedback, anyway) that the contest’s rules ARE standard format, even when — as in the case of the asterisks — that’s no longer true.

But the fact is, contest rules are NOT revised every year, generally speaking: in the vast majority of cases, the same rules have been used since the contest began, with additions as contest organizers thought of them, entrants objected, logical problems were noticed, and so forth. This is often true, incidentally, even of organizations who update their websites frequently.

I single out no PARTICULAR contest here, of course — but suffice it to say that if I were again entering a Contest-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named whose deadline is next week (on the 22nd, to be precise), I would not only go over the Rules and Guidelines section of their website with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, but also double-check the Category Definitions for EVERY category you intend to enter AND the entry form for minute differences.

I’m not saying that there’s a problem THIS year, of course. But still, it would be an excellent idea to triple-check, as there’s one less judge hanging around those parts who is aware of the problem to point it out to the others, if you catch my drift.

Because, realistically, if a contest judge duns you for not following a regulation that was not prominently displayed in the official rules, there’s not much you can do about it in retrospect. Think of it as the difference between the laws on the books and how a judge interprets them from the bench: you may be right in your interpretation, but the judge is the person in the room with the power to throw others in jail for contempt.

For all practical purposes, while you’re in his courtroom, his interpretation IS the law. This is why we have appellate courts.

Literary contests, however, do not have a Supreme Court to which writers may appeal. (Although it’s an interesting idea.) Unless a contest gives entrants feedback, it’s unlikely that you’d even find out what the particular charges against your entry were.

So read the rules (and all other relevant documents) CAREFULLY, follow them to the letter, and follow standard format where the rules do not specifically tell you what to do. (If you need a refresher on how manuscripts should be formatted, please see the rule-based STANDARD FORMAT BASICS and the more visually-based STANDARD FORMAT ILLUSTRATED categories at right. And please, if you have questions, ask — I’d much rather that you bring it up here than lose points on an entry.)

For those of you who are more conversant with standard format, let’s play a little game to show how differently an author, a regular reader, and a contest judge might view the same page of text. Here’s that first contest entry page again, an excerpt from EF Benson’s Mapp & Lucia: what’s wrong with it, from a judge’s point of view?

asterisk.jpg

Spot anything? Spot many things? (If you’re having trouble seeing the details of the text, try right-clicking on the image and saving it to your desktop.)

This is quite hard; I’ve set a multi-level test for you here. A few hints:

1) There’s an error that would be a disqualification-level offense for almost any contest,

2) a fairly universal pet peeve,

3) a common causer of knee-jerk reactions,

4) a couple of matters of style that would probably have lost Benson a crucial point or two, and

5) a more subtle problem that almost any professional reader would have caught, but most writers would not unless they were reading their own work out loud.

Here’s what the page would look like to a contest judge. The colored bits are the problems, one color per gaffe; I’ve backed up in the text a little, to make the more elusive problem clearer, so now it’s on two pages. (All the better to see standard format in action, my dear.) The one that would get the entry booted is in red.

page-one-jpeg.jpg

page-2-jpeg.jpg

See ‘em more clearly now? Let’s go through the problems one by one:

1) In an entry, ANY reproduction of the author’s name usually results in instant disqualification. (Yes, even in a memoir.) So quadruple-check that slug line.

2) As the notes in orange point out, these paragraphs are pretty long, and do not necessarily break where the underlying thought does. Also, some of these sentences are pretty lengthy — okay, let’s just go ahead and use that dreaded term from English class, run-on sentence.

Contrary to popular opinion, run-on sentences do NOT make a narrative seem more conversational in tone, at least to your garden-variety contest judge: most of the time, they just look LONG. As do paragraphs more than half a page long. The average contest judge’s heart sinks at the first glimpse of either.

3) Notice the underlined bits in teal — there, the text has fallen into passive constructions. Like many Millicents, most contest judges respond to the passive voice with a negativity that most people reserve for rattlesnake bites, fender-benders, and telemarketing calls. In their minds, the passive voice is pretty much synonymous with poor writing.

It’s not fair, of course; plenty of good writers use the passive voice occasionally, because it can be darned useful. But that’s not an argument you’re going to win in a contest entry. Purge the passivity.

4) If you’re going to use semicolons (pink), make sure that you are using them correctly. In English, ; and is technically redundant, because a semicolon is an abbreviated form of comma + and. So a list should read: Jessamyn gathered armfuls of lavender; bushels of poppies; two thousand puppies, and a bottle of Spray-and-Wash.

Were you surprised to see then show up in color? Most contest entries overuse this word — which isn’t hard to do, as in print, if action A appears in the text prior to action B, it is always assumed that B followed A, unless the text gives some specific reason to believe otherwise. So then is almost always unnecessary, particularly in a list of actions.

5) See all of that blue? It looks like a sapphire inkwell came here to die — and that’s precisely what that much repetition of and looks like to a contest judge. It’s annoying to read, because it is so easy for the eye to stray accidentally from one line to the next. (For an explanation of why this phenomenon is so tiring to the eye, please see my former post on the subject.)

It’s not a bad idea to go through your contest entry with a highlighter, marking all of the ands, for where more than one appears per sentence, you will usually find run-ons. Had I mentioned that people who sign up to judge contests are usually sticklers for grammar?

I know, I know: people do use connective ands instead of periods in spoken English. That doesn’t mean it will work on the page. Trust me on this one — it DOES bug most professional readers and contest judges.

Did that vicious little run-down make you want to shove your contest entry back into the drawer to hide from human eyes? That would be understandable, but I choose rather to view this little exercise as empowering for a writer: your chances of polishing your work to contest-winning shininess is much, much higher if you know BEFORE you seal that envelope just how close a scrutiny the judges are likely to give it.

Is it shallow of me to like it when my readers win, place, and make the finals in contests? Possibly. But if judges react so strongly to textual problems like #2-5, how much more negatively are they likely to respond to an entry that breaks one of the contest’s rules?

Do not assume that your entry will be read by the laid-back, in other words. Read the rules, reread the rules, and FOLLOW THE RULES as if your life depended upon it. If you don’t find yourself waking in the night, muttering that under your breath, the night before you’re planning to drop your entry in the nearest mailbox, I can only advise that your first action the next morning should be to go back and DOUBLE-CHECK THAT YOU HAVE FOLLOWED THE RULES.

And then read the whole darned thing out loud, to weed out possible knee-jerk reaction-triggers. Like, for instance, the first two words of the previous sentence.

More tips to follow, of course. But a quick reminder to those of you who are planning to enter that contest with a deadline next week: my ruminations on entries will in fact be going on past that deadline, as I’m trying not to promote any individual contest this year. All of my trenchant observations on that particular contest from last year, when I was writing directly about it, are still available for your perusal under the CONTEST ENTRY PREP category at right.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on That pesky contest synopsis, part IV: hold the phone!

That pesky contest synopsis, part IV: hold the phone!

phone-3-1.gif phone-3-1.gif phone-3-1.gif

What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in! No, it’s not almost like being in love — it’s exactly like living in a caucus state the day before the big event. My telephone hasn’t rung this much since the days when my phone number was one digit off from my hometown’s most popular bar.

Why all the ringing? Why, so the recorded voices of people I have heard of and the live voices of people I haven’t may urge me to spend half a day tomorrow arguing with my neighbors at my local caucus, of course. All of a sudden, everyone in the other Washington can find Seattle on a map unassisted.

Heck, representatives from both major campaigns offered not only to give me directions to the elementary school where I will be caucusing; they offered to DRIVE me there.

To be fair, a certain amount of nagging is warranted in my neck of the woods — to attend my caucus is to take one’s life, and certainly one’s blood sugar, into one’s hands. Unlike a primary, where all the voter is asked to do is fill in a few bubbles, drop a form into a box, and go, caucus goers are expected to spend several HOURS holding forth on the relative merits of their chosen candidates.

While actual fisticuffs seldom occur, bullying often does; the last time I attended, my views on environmental preservation were challenged by a 6’5″, 400-pound ex-Marine willing — indeed, eager — to throw his considerable bulk in the direction of anyone who contradicted the views of the party leadership.

Since he was of the opinion that the merest discussion of any plank of the state’s platform, however minor, was tantamount to treason, a certain amount of physical intimidation was inevitable. I’ve seen him send entire salmon preservation leagues scurrying to the other side of the elementary school auditorium.

All the while, party volunteers proffer cookies, coffee, candy, coffee, hot dogs, coffee, Danish, coffee, brownies, coffee, and sometimes, in my neighborhood, a gigantic cake emblazoned with the iced likeness of our local baking maven’s choice for president. You should have seen it the year she went for Jesse Jackson.

Oh, heavens, there goes the phone again.

I’m back — now back to work.

It may seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday about the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning, but you would be astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t actually being evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs and families and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute.

Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — it’s the writing in the chapter that counts, right? — it’s tempting just to throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it. Many a fine entry has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis.

I won’t go so far as to say, of course, that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically enjoy an edge toward winning.

I have a few more tips on how to increase that edge, of course — but while that darned phone keeps ringing every few minutes, I think my powers of concentration will be best spent on issues of format, rather than content.

I hadn’t realized it until reader Sheri asked a question about synopses the other day, but back in December, when I was posting examples of standard format, I somehow managed to neglect to include what a synopsis should look like. Today, I’m going to rectify that, for both contest and submission synopses.

First, let’s look at the first page of a synopsis one might submit to an agent:

ss-1-jpeg.jpg

For the most part, as you may see, it simply adheres to standard manuscript format: one-inch margins all the way around, slug line in the top left margin, page number in the slug line, indented paragraphs, the works. (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of standard manuscript format, or were unaware that such a thing existed, please see the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category at right.)

Note, too, that the first time a character is introduced to the story, her name appears entirely in capital letters. That makes it easier for skimming eyes to follow — and if that seems like an invitation to screener laziness, bear in mind that Millicent and her compatriots are reading literally hundreds of pages per day. Their eyes are TIRED.

Do you want to be the writer who makes those eyes’ little lives easier or harder?

The title of the work is on the first line of the page, with the information that it is a synopsis on the second double-spaced line. Why state up front that it’s a synopsis? Well, remember a few months back, when I described that catastrophic collision between two interns in an agency hallway? Does “Hey, you got memoir in my thriller!” “No, you got thriller in my memoir!” ring a bell?

Since submitted manuscripts are unbound in any way, individual pieces of them tend to wander off on field trips of their own. Slug lines can go a long way toward allowing those hapless interns to piece the manuscripts back together.

Guess what? So can clearly labeled synopses.

For this reason, I like to label subsequent pages of the synopsis as such as well. It’s not strictly required, but hey, the subsequent pages are every bit as likely to go wandering as the first, right? The result looks like this:

ss-2-jpeg.tiff

All clear on the format for the submission synopsis? May I suggest that this would be a dandy time to bring up questions, if not?

Okay, on to the contest synopsis. The primary difference is — anyone? Anyone?

Yes, that’s right: in a blind-judged contest (i.e., in the respectable ones that are worth your time and money to enter), the writer’s name cannot appear on any page of the entry. Not the first, and certainly not the last.

Obviously, this is going to affect the slug line, but it’s easily resolved. Lookee:

ss-c-jpeg.jpg

See? Very simple. Notice any other differences?

If you are looking for purely cosmetic differences, there aren’t any, other than the slug line. However, on the content level, I did tighten up the synopsis a bit for the benefit of the contest judge.

Why, you ask? Because I happen to know (having read the contest rules as closely as I urge you all to do) that this contest accepts entries up to fifty pages long. Almost everything that happened within the first two pages of the submission synopsis occurs during the first fifty pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

The judge will most likely read the chapters before turning to the synopsis — that way, if the writing in the chapter is not good, they can skip the synopsis altogether. So why recap more than is necessary, especially if including a 4-page contest synopsis will allow Aunt Jane to include another page of text?

Seem rules-lawyerish? Exactly; contests are run by people who just adore rules. Go with the flow.

Next time, phone conditions permitting, I shall polish off the hot topic of contest synopsis-polishing. Happy caucusing, Washingtonians, Louisianans, and Nebraskans, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 15 Comments on See for yourself, part VI: but wait, there’s more!

See for yourself, part VI: but wait, there’s more!

I was all set to clamber onto my moral high horse again and dispense more of yesterday’s philosophy, honest — but then sharp-eyed long-time reader Janet caught, as is her wont, the missing puzzle piece in my illustrated romp through standard format. So I’m sliding elevated ethical questions to the back burner for the nonce and diving right back into practicalities.

As Janet so rightly pointed out, I completely skipped over one of the more common first-page-of-chapter controversies (and yes, in my world, there are many from which to choose), whether to place the title and/or chapter designation at the top of the page, or just above the text.

To place the options before you, should the first page of a chapter look like this:

/snapshot-2007-12-19-20-40-58.tiff

Or like this?

/snapshot-2007-12-19-20-42-20.tiff

Now, I had been under the impression that I had waxed long and eloquent about the side I took in this burning debate, and that quite recently, but apparently, my eloquence has been confined to posts more than a year old, exchanges in the comments (which are not, alas, searchable, but still very worth reading), and my own fevered brain.

So let me clear up my position on the matter: the first version is in standard format; the second is not. No way, no how. And why do they prefer the first?

Chant it with me now: BECAUSE IT LOOKS RIGHT TO THEM.

Yet, if anything, agents and contest judges see more examples of version #2 than #1. Many, many more.

Admittedly, anyone who screens manuscripts is likely to notice that a much higher percentage of them are incorrectly formatted than presented properly, this particular formatting oddity often appears in otherwise perfectly presented manuscripts.

And that fact sets Millicent the agency screener’s little head in a spin. As, I must admit, it does mine and virtually every other professional reader’s. Because at least in my case — and I don’t THINK I’m revealing a trade secret here — I have literally never seen an agent submit a manuscript to a publishing house with format #2. And I have literally never even heard of an agent, editor, or anyone else in the publishing industry’s asking for a chapter heading to be moved from the top of the page to just above the text.

Oh, I’ve heard some pretty strange requests from agents and editors in my time, believe me; I’m not easily shocked anymore. But to hear a pro insist upon placing the chapter heading where you have to skip down a third of a page to read it…well, that would have me reaching for my smelling salts. (Do they even make those anymore?)

But clearly, somebody out there is preaching otherwise, because agents, editors, and contest judges are simply inundated with examples of this formatting anomaly. We see bushels of ’em. Hordes of aspiring writers are apparently absolutely convinced that the sky will fall in if that chapter heading is located anywhere but immediately above the text.

In fact, it’s not all that uncommon for an editor to find that after she has left a couple of subtle hints that the writer should change the formatting…

/snapshot-2007-12-19-20-56-36.tiff

…the subsequent drafts remain unchanged. The writer will have simply ignored the advice.

(Off the record: editors HATE that. So do agents. Contest judges probably wouldn’t be all that fond of it, either, but blind submissions mean that a writer must submit the same chapter two years running to the same contest, have the entry land in the same judge’s pile — in itself rather rare — AND the judge would have to remember having given that feedback.)

This may seem like a rather silly controversy — after all, why should it matter if the white space is above or below the title? — but sheer repetition and writerly tenacity in clinging to version #2 have turned it from a difference of opinion into a vitriol-stained professional reader pet peeve. (See earlier comment about how we tend to react to our advice being ignored; it isn’t pretty.)

Which, unfortunately, tends to mean that in discussions of the issue at conferences degenerate into writing-teacher-says-X, editor-at-Random-House-says-Y: lots of passion demonstrated, but very little rationale beyond each side’s insisting that the other’s way just looks wrong.

However, there is a pretty good reason that moving the chapter heading information to just above the text looks wrong to someone who edits book manuscripts for a living: it’s a formatting tidbit borrowed from short stories, whose first pages look quite different:

/snapshot-2007-12-19-20-58-59.tiff

There, as you may see for yourself, is a mighty fine reason to list the title just above the text: a heck of a lot of information has to come first. But that would not be proper in a book-length manuscript, would it? Let’s see what Noêl’s editor has to say, viewing this as the first page of a book:

/snapshot-2007-12-19-21-02-21.tiff

Ouch. (That last bit would have been funnier if the entire page were readable, by the way, but my camera batteries were running low.) But as Millicent and that angry mob of pitchfork-wielding ignored editors would be only too happy to tell you, short stories don’t HAVE chapters, so who on earth are they to be telling those of us in the book world how to format our manuscripts?

Stick with version #1.

While I’ve got the camera all warmed up, this would probably be a good time to show another ubiquitous agent and editor pet peeve, the bound manuscript. As with other ploys to make a manuscript appear identical to a published book, binding the loose pages of a manuscript for submission will NOT win you friends in the publishing world.

Why? Not only does this not look right (I spared you the chanting this time), but it seems so wrong that Millicent will be positively flabbergasted to see a submitter to do it.

Seriously, this is one of those things that is so engrained in the professional reader’s mind that it seldom even occurs to authors, agents, or editors to mention it as a no-no at writers’ conferences. Heck, I’m not sure that I’ve mentioned it once within the last six months — and by anyone’s standards, I’m unusually communicative about how manuscripts should be presented.

So pay attention, because you’re not going to hear this very often: by definition, manuscripts should NEVER be bound in any way.

Not staples, not spiral binding, not perfect binding. There’s an exceedingly simple reason for this: binding renders it impossible (or at least a major pain in the fingertips) to pull out a chapter, stuff it in one’s bag, and read it on the subway.

Hey, paper is heavy. Would YOU want to lug home ten manuscripts every night on the off chance you’ll read them?

In practice, I’m sorry to report, a bound manuscript will seldom survive long enough in the screening process for the chapter-separation dilemma to arise, because — and it pains me to be the one to break this to those of you who’ve been submitting bound manuscripts, but if I don’t tell you, who will? — those pretty covers tend never to be opened.

Remember that immense pile of submissions Millicent has to screen before going home for the day — and it’s already 6:30? Well, when she slits open an envelope that reads REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside, she fully expects to see something like this lurking between the cover letter and the SASE tucked underneath:

/snapshot-2007-12-11-01-28-43.tiff

But in the case of the bound manuscript, she instead sees something like this:

/snapshot-2007-12-19-21-05-59.tiff

Kind of hard to miss the difference, isn’t it? And unfortunately, nine times out of ten, the next sound a bystander would hear would be all of that nice, expensive binding grating against the inside of the SASE.

Honestly, it’s not that she is too lazy to flip open the cover; she just doesn’t see why she should. Her logic may not be fair or open-minded, but it’s a fairly common argument throughout the industry: if this submitter does not know this very basic rule of manuscripts, how likely is she to know the rules of standard format? And if she does not know either, how likely is she to be producing polished prose?

Yes, this logic often does not hold water when it comes down to an individual case. But from her perspective, that matters less than we writers would like — because, as unpleasant as it is for aspiring writers to realize, her agency is going to see enough technically perfect submissions this week to afford to be able to leap to unwarranted conclusions about this one.

Don’t waste your money on binding.

Now that I have depressed you all into a stupor, let me add a final note about learning to conform to these seemingly arbitrary preconditions for getting your book read: any game has rules. If you saw a batter smack a baseball, then dash for third base instead of first on his way around the diamond, would you expect his home run to count? Would an archer who hit the bulls-eye in her neighbor’s target instead of her own win the grand prize? If you refused to pay the rent on Park Place because you didn’t like the color on the board, would you win the Monopoly game?

I can go on like this for days, you know.

My point is, submitting art to the marketplace has rules, too, and while your fourth-grade P.E. teacher probably did not impart them to you (as, if I ran the universe, s/he would have), you’re still going to be a whole lot better at playing the game if you embrace those rules, rather than fight them.

You’ll also, in the long run, enjoy playing the game more.

And remember, you’re playing this game by choice: you could, after all, make your own rules and publish your book yourself. Weigh the possibilities, and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 6 Comments on See for yourself, part V: appearances for appearances’ sake — and happy birthday, Philip!

See for yourself, part V: appearances for appearances’ sake — and happy birthday, Philip!

Many thanks to all of you sweet souls who forwarded me links to the many literary and SF sites out there that commemorated what would have been my good old friend Philip K. Dick’s 79th birthday. This was the first year that I received a whole boatload of these messages, so it was great fun — rather like receiving a flotilla of birthday cards in the mail.

I needed the cheering up, I’m afraid, as usually, I throw a little dinner party on this particular day. Not only out of respect for my first serious writing teacher, but also as a birthday shindig for some of the other great artists born today: Beethoven, Sir Noël Coward, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001 and CHILDHOOD’S END fame), and of course, Author! Author!’s own beloved, wise auntie, Jane Austen.

You could do worse than to raise a glass to that crowd. But this year, I’ve just been too wiped out to allow anyone but the postman to drop by — and some days, I’m not even up to seeing him.

Thus, no dinner party this year, more’s the pity. I did a little too much last week, so this weekend, all I did was sleep and make groggy suggestions about how to maneuver the Christmas tree in order to make it stand up straight. (Which actually is necessary in our household: due to a truly spectacular bracken-and-cat interaction a few years back, we now tie the top of the tree to a ring firmly attached to the ceiling, so the tree does not need to be completely vertical in order to keep from toppling over.)

But enough about me; let’s talk about you.

While I was incapacitated, a group of my wonderful readers was holding down the fort here, trading tips on how to deal with that pesky problem, how to add a second space between sentences if a writer had mistakenly typed the whole thing thinking there should only be one. If you have even a passing interest in this topic, I implore you, check out the comments on the last two days’ posts; it’s well worth it.

We have only few rules of standard format left to cover in this series, so my first instinct was to use the text of one of Philip’s short stories for the examples. (Seemed appropriate, given that he used to mark deviations from standard format on stories I wrote for school and send them back to me for correction. What 11-year-old girl wouldn’t have loved THAT?) But since fair use permits only 50 consecutive words in a quote without explicit permission from the copyright holder, and the copyright holders in his case have a nasty habit of waving $2 million lawsuits in my general direction (and my quondam publisher’s) every time I so much as breathe his name, that didn’t seem entirely wise.

So I thought, in honor of the day, I would use a little something that I am undoubtedly entitled to reproduce here. Here is the first page of Chapter Six of my memoir:

snapshot-2007-12-17-21-59-42.tiff

Every chapter should begin like this: on a fresh page, 12 single lines (or 6 double-spaced) from the top. As with the first page of text, the only reference to the author’s name or the title should appear in the slug line, located in the upper left-hand margin. (And in answer to reader Janet’s intelligent question: the slug line should appear .5 inches from the top of the paper, floating within the 1-inch-deep top margin. I can’t believe I never mentioned that before.) The page number belongs within it, rather than anywhere else on the page.

The slug line confuses a lot of aspiring writers; until you have seen piles and piles of professional manuscripts, it looks kind of funny, doesn’t it? And when you’ve been told over and over again that a manuscript should have a 1-inch margin on all sides, it can seem counterintuitive to add a line of text, even such a short one, IN that margin.

But I assure you, it’s always been done that way. And why? Followers of this series, chant it with me now: BECAUSE IT LOOKS RIGHT.

Yes, that logic IS tautological, now that you mention it. If you have a problem with that, I would suggest taking it up with the powers that rule the universe. I, as I believe the reference above to my memoir’s troubled path makes abundantly clear, apparently do not rule the universe.

If I did, today would be a holiday for every writer on the planet. Especially the ones who are having trouble getting their work published, like, oh, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Jane Austen all did at the beginning of their fiction careers. (I just mention.)

Back to business. Placing the slug line in the header (located in Word under the VIEW menu) also enables the writer to take advantage of one of the true boons of the advent of word processing, pages that number themselves. Every so often, I will receive a manuscript where the author has, with obviously monumental effort, HAND-numbered each page, so it looks like this:

snapshot-2007-12-17-22-04-43.tiff

See how pulling the slug line down into the text messes with the spacing of the page? An entire line of text is sacrificed to it — and let me tell you, that line is not going to go quietly.

Why not? Well, what’s going to happen if new writing is inserted on a page formatted this way? That’s right — the author is going to have to go back and move each and every one of those slug lines to match the NEW pagination.

I’d show you a picture of this, but it’s just too ugly to contemplate. Trust me, it would be a heck of a lot of work.

See any other problems with this page? How about the fact that the slug line includes the word PAGE? Shouldn’t be there; just the numbers will suffice.

Did I just hear some huffs of indignation out there? “But Anne,” I hear the formatting-ambitious cry, “it’s kind of stylish to include PAGE before the page number, isn’t it? It’s just a matter of personal style — who could be hurt by including it, if I like the way it looks?”

Well, you, for starters. And why? (Chanters, ready your lungs.) BECAUSE IT JUST WOULD NOT LOOK RIGHT TO A PROFESSIONAL READER.

I’m quite serious about this; I’ve seen screeners get quite huffy about this one. :Does this writer think I’m STUPID?” Millicent is prone to huff. (Don’t answer that first question; it’s rhetorical.) “Does she think I DON’T know that the numeral that appears on every page refers to the number of pages? Does she think I’m going to go nuts and suddenly decide that it is a statistic, or part of the title?”

Don’t bait her. Do it the standard way.

Okay, do you spot any other problems? What about the fact that the first paragraph of the chapter is not indented, and the first character is in a different typeface?

The odd typeface for the first letter, in imitation of the illuminated texts hand-written by monks in the Middle Ages, doesn’t turn up all that often in manuscripts other than fantasy and YA, for one simple reason: books in that category are more likely to feature this it’s-a-new-chapter signal than others. But once again, what an editor may decide, rightly or wrongly, is appropriate for a published book has no bearing upon what Millicent expects to see in a manuscript.

Save the bells and whistles for someone who will appreciate them. Hop in your time machine and track down a medieval monk to admire your handiwork, if you like, but in this timeframe, keep the entire manuscript in the same typeface and size.

The non-indented first paragraph of a chapter is fairly common in mystery submissions, I have noticed; I’ve been told by many mystery writers that this is an homage to the great early writers in the genre, an echo of their style.

But you know what? Almost without exception, in Edgar Allan Poe’s time all the way down to our own, the EDITOR has determined the formatting that appeared on any given printed page, not the author. To professional eyes, especially peevish ones like Millicent’s, a manuscript that implicitly appropriates this sort of decision as authorial might as well be the first step to the writer’s marching into Random House, yanking off a well-worn riding glove, and striking the editor-in-chief with it.

Yes, you read that correctly: it’s sometimes seen as a challenge to editorial authority. And while we could speculate for the next week about the level of insecurity that would prompt regarding a minor formatting choice as a harbinger of incipient insurrection, is the manuscript of your first book REALLY the right place to engender that discussion?

Exactly.

If you want to make Millicent and her bosses happy — or, at any rate, to keep them reading calmly — indent every paragraph of the text should the expected five spaces. It just looks right that way.

While we’re at it, how about the bolded chapter number and title? Nothing in a manuscript should be in boldface. Nothing, I tell you. Uh-uh. Not ever.

Well, you could get away with the title itself on the tile page, but frankly, I wouldn’t chance it.

Nor should anything be underlined — not even names of books or song titles. Instead, they should be italicized, as should words in foreign tongues that are not proper nouns.

I heard that gigantic intake of breath out there from those of you who remember constructing manuscripts on typewriters: yes, Virginia, back in the day, underlining WAS the norm, for the simple reason that most typewriters did not have italic keys.

If you consult an older list of formatting restrictions, you might conceivably be told that publications, song titles, and/or foreign words (sacre bleu!) should be underlined. But trust me on this one: any agent would tell you to get rid of the underlining, pronto.

And why? All together now: because IT JUST DOESN’T LOOK RIGHT THAT WAY.

All right, campers, do you feel ready to solo? Here are two pages of text, studded with standard format violations for your ferreting-out pleasure. (I wrote these pages, too, in case anyone is worried about copyright violation or is thinking about suing me over it. Hey, stranger things have happened.)

snapshot-2007-12-17-22-11-51.tiff

snapshot-2007-12-17-22-13-22.tiff

How did you do? Are those problems just leaping off the page at you now? To reward you for so much hard work, here are a couple of correctly-formatted pages, to soothe your tired eyes:

snapshot-2007-12-17-22-14-23.tiff

snapshot-2007-12-17-22-15-34.tiff

Whenever you start finding yourself chafing at the rules of standard format, come back and take a side-by-side gander at these last sets of examples — because, I assure you, after a professional reader like Millicent has been at it even a fairly short time, every time she sees the bad example, mentally, she’s picturing the good example right next to it.

And you know what? Manuscripts that look right get taken more seriously than those that don’t. And regardless of how you may feel about Millicent’s literary tastes, isn’t a serious read from her what you want for your book?

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 13 Comments on See for yourself, part IV: yet another great cosmic mystery explained, sort of

See for yourself, part IV: yet another great cosmic mystery explained, sort of

snapshot-2007-12-14-18-37-00.tiff

No, the statue is not a Christmas angel, but rather Nike, the winged goddess of victory, bringing a laurel wreath for reader ACD, who will be famed in song and story forevermore for the comment she posted on yesterday’s blog. Why? Because she, clever soul, wrote in with a method for using Word’s Find and Replace feature to change single spaces between sentences into double spaces within sentences. And if that’s not an achievement worthy of a laurel leaf or two, I should like to know what is.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the artist’s original intent with this particular statue (which comes to us courtesy of FreeFoto.com), but some celebration seemed appropriate, no?

And if THAT isn’t enough to meet whatever standard you may be cherishing for what constitutes a reason to initiate dancing in the streets, long-time reader, prolific commenter, and computer whiz Chris has once again gone far above and beyond the call of duty and written an entire blog post on the subject.

Thanks, Chris and ACD. Laurel leaves all around!

All week, I have been running through the strictures of standard manuscript format and some common deviations from it, to demonstrate just how clearly our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, discerns the differences. And let me tell you, at the end of a long day’s reading, they definitely jump out at her, and with good reason: once a professional reader gets used to seeing the similarities that pretty much all professional manuscripts share, submissions formatted in other ways might as well have UNPROFESSIONAL stamped on them in bright red ink.

And while Millicent may strive valiantly NOT to allow that impression to color her reading of the submission itself, it’s just not a good idea to assume that it won’t. She’s only human, after all.

It’s an even worse idea to assume a charitable reading for a contest entry, by the way. If anything, contest judges tend to be even more sensitive to the beauty of standard format than Millicent, for the simple reason that they’ve usually been reading a whole lot longer. The agency gig may well be Millie’s first job out of college, but the judge handed your entry may well have just retired from a long and fruitful career teaching English composition. Her fingers ache for the red pen of correction.

Then, too, most well-respected contests require some professional credentials from their judges, either as writers, editors, or teachers. Which means, in practice, that judges have often been writing in standard format themselves for years or bludgeoning other writers into compliance with its requirements.

To put it another way, other kinds of formatting won’t look right to them, either. By now, you’re probably having a similar reaction, aren’t you?

Don’t think so? Or don’t want to believe you could conceivably share any traits with Millicent? Let’s test the proposition by trying a little Aphra Behn on for size.

If you don’t know her work, you should, at least historically: as far as we know, she was the first woman paid for writing in English. (She’s also hilarious.) Here is a page from THE FAIR JILT (1688):

snapshot-2007-12-14-20-23-16.tiff

You could tell instantly that there was something wrong here, couldn’t you, and not just because Miranda’s trying to seduce her priest? (For convent, read monastery.) Set aside her practically Dickensian affection for semicolons for the moment — which would tend to turn off a modern Millicent pretty quickly — and try to tote up in your mind all of the deviations from standard format.

To refresh your memory and gladden your now-sharpened eyes, here’s what it should have looked like:

snapshot-2007-12-14-20-24-37.tiff

Got your list of problems in hand? Let’s take the problems on the first version from the top of the page: the incorrect version does not have a proper slug line. (For those of you joining us late, a slug line is AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/PAGE #, repeated on every page of the text.)

Seeing this lone page out of context, it’s quite obvious why a slug line is a dandy idea, isn’t it? Without a slug line, it would be virtually impossible to return this wandering page back into the manuscript from whence it came. “Who wrote this?” Millicent cries in ire, glaring around her cubicle at the 47 manuscripts lying there. “It could be from any of these!”

At least Ms. Behn thought to number the pages of Example #1 — but did you catch the problem with how she did it? The page number is in the bottom right-hand margin, not in the slug line, where it belongs.

Did you catch any other difficulties? What about the 10-point type, which will strain Millicent’s already overworked eyes? Or the Ariel typeface? There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but when she’s used to seeing practically every manuscript that heads out of the agency to publishing houses in 12-point Times New Roman, it (chant it with me here) just doesn’t look right.

Anything else? What about that right margins? Mighty straight, isn’t it? That look proper to you?

It’s called block-justification, and it’s another problem that can be laid squarely at the feet of those who insist that a manuscript and a published book should be identical. The text in many published books, and certainly in many magazines and newspapers, is spaced so that each line begins at exactly the same distance from the left-hand edge of the page and ends (unless it’s the last line of a paragraph) at exactly the same distance from the right-hand edge of the page.

Which, to let you in on why this type of neatness bugs professional readers, renders skimming quite a bit more difficult. Fewer landmarks, as it were; to the glancing eye, practically every line of narrative text resembles every other. To those of us used to the ragged right margins and even letter spacing of standard format, it’s actually kind of hard to read.

So there’s quite a bit in Example #1 that’s distracting, isn’t there? Doesn’t help sell the text, does it?

Okay, all of these rhetorical questions are beginning to make me dizzy, so I’m going to wind down for the day. But before I do, let’s take one more look at Example #2, the one Millicent and a contest judge would like:

snapshot-2007-12-14-20-24-37.tiff

Now, let’s take a gander at the same page in business format:

snapshot-2007-12-14-20-26-40.tiff

Startlingly different, isn’t it, considering that I made only two formatting changes? (In case you missed one or the other, all I did was I eliminate the indentations at the beginning of each paragraph and skipped a line between paragraphs.) This, of course, is the norm for business correspondence, as well as for most of the text currently posted on the Internet.

Including this blog. It drives me NUTS that my blogging program won’t allow me to indent paragraphs.

And why? Because it just doesn’t look right. In a contest entry, business formatting is often grounds all by itself for knocking a manuscript out of finalist consideration.

Finding yourself asking why again? Well, to a professional reader, the differences between the last two examples would be more than visually jarring — they’d be downright confusing. In standard format, the only reason for a skipped line between paragraphs would be a section break, so Millicent would be expecting the second paragraph to be about something new.

Okay, so a misconception like that might distract her attention for only few consecutive seconds, but let’s not kid ourselves: Millicent is spending less than a minute on most of the submissions she rejects — it’s actually not all that uncommon for her not to make into the second or third paragraph before reaching for the SASE and a copy of that annoying form rejection letter.

Time loss is not the only reason she might take umbrage at momentary confusion. Let me let you in on a little secret: professional readers, especially those who inhabit agencies and publishing houses, are not overly fond of having their mental image of the story they are reading at the moment jarred.

How do I know this? Well, for one thing, they commonly refer to it as being tricked. As in, “I hate being tricked by a first paragraph that is about someone other than the protagonist.”

There’s a practical basis to this dislike, of course, but it’s kind of complicated. I wrote a couple of fairly extensive posts on the subject last year (here’s a link to the first, and here’s a link to the second, in case you’re interested), but here is the thumbnail version.

Comfortably seated?

To get through all of those manuscripts she’s assigned to screen each week, Millicent has to read quite quickly. If she decides to pass a manuscript on to the next level, she is going to need to be able to tell her boss what the book is about: who the protagonist is, what the conflict is, and why that conflict is important enough to the protagonist for the reader to be drawn into it.

Basically, she’s going to need to be able to pitch it to the higher-ups at the agency, just as the agent is going to have to do in order to sell the book to an editor, and an editor is going to have to do in order to convince HIS higher-ups that the publishing house should acquire the book. And, often, as first-round contest judges will need to do on an evaluation form in order to pass an entry onto the next round.

Okay, brace yourself, because explaining what comes next involves delving into one of the great cosmic mysteries. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Remember earlier in the week, when I mentioned that agents and editors don’t read like other people? Well, one of the primary differences is that from line one of page one, they’re already imagining how they’re going to pitch this book.

So if paragraph 2 or 3 (or page 2 or 3) suddenly informs them that their mental patter has been about the wrong character, they feel as if they’ve been backing the wrong horse. And while there may have been any number of perfectly reasonable narrative reasons for the text to concentrate upon an alternate character for the opening, unless the writing AND the story have already really wowed Millicent, her resentment about being [tricked} about the identity of the protagonist if often sufficient to make her reach for that SASE and form letter.

Feel free to go scream into a pillow over that last piece of logic; you don’t want to keep that kind of existential cri de coeur pent up inside. I’ll wait until it’s out of your system.

Feel better? Good. Before you go rushing off to see if your opening paragraphs might be open to an interpretation of trickery — because, for instance, you might have taken the bold authorial step of noticing that there is more than one human being in the world, and reported a piece of action accordingly — let’s return to the formatting issue that prompted my little segue into the psychology of resentment. Can we extrapolate any practical lesson about business format from it?

You bet your boots we can: it’s not a good idea to give the impression of a section break where there isn’t one.

There’s a lot more psychodrama than one might think involved with these formatting choices, isn’t there? I’ll wrap up this series next time, to spare us further emotional toll. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 32 Comments on Entr’acte: please DON’T just take my word for it

Entr’acte: please DON’T just take my word for it

After yesterday’s post, a reader wrote in to take issue with my stand about the burning issue of whether the language has, without the intervention of the English professors of the world, spontaneously changed to require only one space between sentences and after colons, rather than two. And, as you may perhaps be able to tell from that last sentence, it’s a topic upon which, as an editor, I have some fairly strong feelings.

After I was well into my fourth page of response, it occurred to me that the comment sections aren’t subject-searchable. So I’m going to put off the next installment in my series on how and why standard format is so easily recognizable to professional readers in order to devote an entire post to the issue, where future readers will be able to track it down.

Fasten your seatbelts; I’m about to go to town.

Every time I do a post on standard format, readers write in to tell me that the rules have changed, on this point or on others. And frankly, they SHOULD be commenting, if they believe I have misspoken, or even if they feel a particular point requires further elucidation: false modesty aside, quite a few people do read this blog on a regular basis, and the last thing that I want to do is lead anyone astray inadvertently.

So please, folks, keep sending in those constructive comments.

Apart from the community-support reason to ask follow-up questions, there is another, more self-interested reason that you should consider giving a shout if you think I’ve just told a real whopper: no writer, aspiring or otherwise, should apply a rule to her book without understanding WHY its application is a good idea.

Yes, even with something as basic as standard format. If a particular suggestion doesn’t make sense to you, PLEASE don’t do it just because I say so. Do it because you have thought about it and decided that trying it might help you market your writing.

I know, I know: life would be a whole lot easier if it came with a foolproof set of directions, and nowhere it that more true than in one’s first approaches to the publishing industry. It’s definitely confusing to a newcomer, fraught with unspoken expectations and counterintuitive requirements. As someone who has spent a lifetime around it, I could just give you a list of standard format requirements, dust off my hands, and traipse off to finish my holiday shopping.

That’s not my style, however. I like to take the time to explain the rules, both to render submission less of a big, ugly mystery and to give my readers a chance to make up their minds for themselves. Call me wacky, but in the long run, I think my way helps people more than pronouncements from on high.

Speaking of pronouncements from on high, my correspondent began, charmingly, by quoting one of mine:

“In fact, in all of my years writing and editing, I have never — not once — seen a manuscript rejected or even criticized for including the two spaces that English prose requires after a period or colon. ”

Have you heard of a manuscript being rejected for using only ONE space between sentences? Within the past five years or so?

Isn’t that a trenchant question? Isn’t it about time I stopped yammering about the desirability of discussion and got around to answering it?

Here’s the short answer: rejected SOLELY upon that basis, no; criticized as unprofessional, yes, often. Knocked out of finalist consideration as contest entries, absolutely. And I’ve certainly heard it listed among several equally subtle points that led to rejection at agencies; basically, like the other minor restrictions of standard format, it’s contributes to the sense that a writer just doesn’t know the ropes.

The irony, of course, is that the sources that claim the language HAS changed — and permanently, at that — tend to insist that skipping the second space after a period or colon, as our dear old white-headed English teachers taught us to do, automatically stamps a manuscript old-fashioned, obsolete, and generally silly.

How do they justify this? The logic, as I understand it, runs thus: since printed books, magazines, newspapers, and to a great extent the Internet have been omitting these spaces in recent years, the language must therefore have changed. So much so that not only is leaving out the second space now permissible — which it definitely was not until very recently; Paula’s estimate of the last five years is pretty accurate — omitting it is now REQUIRED.

That sounds very serious, doesn’t it? Scary, even. The problem is, if it is required, why isn’t the industry enforcing it in the ways that formatting restrictions are generally enforced, by agents and editors asking writers to change their submissions accordingly?

I’m not being flippant about this: while this rather radical formatting rule change has been popping up in a lot of fora that give advice to aspiring writers over the past five years, the actual practices of the industry have seemed to be the engine behind the change. I have literally never seen (or heard) an argument in favor of omitting the second space made by anyone who works within the publishing industry.

At least not about MANUSCRIPTS.

Printed books, yes — and here, I think, is where the confusion lies, because many publishers have made this change in their newer releases. Essentially, the proponents of eliminating the second space between sentences are arguing that what one sees in print is what one should reproduce on the manuscript page.

As I pointed out yesterday, publishers have made this shift in order to save paper. Which, as those of you who followed this summer’s Book Marketing 101 series already know, is most emphatically NOT the goal of manuscript format, which aims toward ease of reading and hand-editing.

Omitting that second space does, as I mentioned yesterday, render it considerably harder to write corrections on hard copy. It may not seem like a lot of room, but believe me, when you’re trying to make four grammatical changes within a single sentence legibly, any extra bit of white space is a boon.

Hey, carrots are room-consuming. So are scrawls that read confusing, expand this, or Aristotle who?, all of which editors have bestowed upon my manuscripts at one time or another.

I suspect that the underlying assumption of the second-space elimination movement is that editing on hard copy has gone the way of the dinosaur (it hasn’t), just because it is now feasible to send and edit manuscripts electronically. But just because it is technically POSSIBLE to eliminate paper from the process doesn’t mean that it occurs in practice all the time, or even very often.

Remember when Internet-based shopping first became popular, and technology enthusiasts assured us all confidently that the supermarket and shopping mall would be obsolete within a decade? Turns out that a lot of people still wanted to squeeze melons and try on clothes before they bought them. Who knew?

Also, for the argument that the extra spaces are obsolete to makes sense on a practical level — or, at minimum, to generate the levels of resentment amongst agents and editors that its proponents predict — the industry would have to expect that every submission would be camera-ready. In other words, in EXACTLY the format that it would appear in the finished book.

Seeing a problem here?

As those of you who have been following the current See For Yourself series are already aware, standard format for MANUSCRIPTS has little to do with how BOOKS are formatted. As I have been demonstrating for the past few days, manuscripts differ in many important respects from the format the Chicago Manual tells us to expect in a published book, or that AP style urges us to produce in a magazine or newspaper.

Which prompts me to ask: is it really so astonishing that spacing would also differ? And why would a change in publishing practice necessarily alter what professional readers expect to see in a manuscript — especially when that alteration would unquestionably make their jobs harder?

And that, in case you were interested, is why I don’t embrace the practice of eliminating the second space between sentences in manuscripts. Until I see strong evidence that agents, editors, and contest judges frown upon the extra space, I’m going to continue to recommend it.

So there.

I can certainly understand why aspiring writers who had gone the single-space route would be miffed at this juncture, though; changing that fundamental an aspect of a text could eat up a LOT of time. As, indeed, my insightful correspondent pointed out:

It took a lot of effort to train myself to STOP using the two spaces. It’s one of those grammatical rules that seems to have all but disappeared (much like the rather perplexing fad to omit the comma before the word “too”). If it’s necessary, I suppose there’s an easy “find and replace” way to correct my manuscript to add an additional space between sentences?

I’m very glad that the commenter brought up the comma elimination fad, because it provides a perfect parallel to what has happened with the spaces. Just because a rule of grammar’s relaxation becomes common doesn’t mean that the rule itself has disappeared; it just means that breaking the rule has become marginally more acceptable.

For instance, these days, few people other than my mother would stop a conversation in order to correct a speaker who referred to “everyone and their beliefs,” but technically, it remains incorrect. To preserve subject-object agreement, it should be “everyone and his beliefs” or “everyone and her beliefs.” The reason for this shift is primarily sociological, I suspect: when American businesses (and television writers) began to take active steps to make language more friendly to women, the incorrect version sounded less sexist, and thus became widely accepted.

Does that mean that “everyone and their beliefs” magically became grammatically correct overnight? Not on your life. And the better-educated the intended reader- or listenership for the sentence, the more likely that the error will raise hackles.

Had I mentioned that Millicent, along with pretty much everyone who works in her agency, was probably an English major? Heck, she probably wrote her senior thesis on this kind of colloquial speech.

The fact is, the grammatical rule about the requisite number of spaces between sentences and after colons HASN’T changed — the PRACTICE has in many published works; in manuscripts, academic work (almost always the last to accept any sea change in the language), and private writing, the rule most emphatically has not.

And, as with splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, while most people won’t care, the ones who DO care feel very strongly about it indeed. To them, it’s more serious than formatting: it’s a matter of literacy.

That may seem harsh, given that most of the aspiring writers who have embraced this practice report that they are doing it because some apparently authoritative source told them to make the switch — but tellingly, those sources’ certainty on the matter didn’t stop howls of protest from the professional reading community when Miss Snark (among others) suddenly started advising aspiring writers to leave it out. The result was pretty dramatic: mysteriously, half the submissions agents received were harder to read, and the change happened more or less overnight — and since most agents don’t read even the major writing blogs, it seemed to come out of nowhere.

How loud were those howls, you ask? Suffice it to say that the grumbles continue to this day. No one who edits text for a living would vote for this particular change. To professional eyes, it just looks wrong.

To get return to my correspondent’s last comment, I don’t know of an easy way to make the change universally, alas; Word’s grammar checker currently accepts both single and double spaces between sentences as correct, treating it as a stylistic choice rather than a grammatical one. (If the language had actually changed to require only a single space, presumably Word would follow, eventually.) Like most of the population, the good folks at Microsoft seem perplexed by the dual standard.

Yes, it’s a pain for the writer — but as you have probably already noticed, the industry is not exactly set up to minimize effort for writers. Sorry. If I ran the universe…well, you know the rest.

If anyone reading this HAS figured out a simple way to make the change universally throughout a document, PLEASE write in and share it with the rest of us. Aspiring writers the world over will bless your name, and who wouldn’t want that?

A wiser person would probably sign off now, but I’m going to bite the bullet and bring up the question that is probably on many, many minds at this juncture: barring a flash of insight from a reader or a well-timed act of celestial intervention, could you get away with retaining the single-space convention in a document already written?

As you may have gathered, I would not advise it, especially in a contest submission. However, it really is up to the individual writer. As much as writers would LIKE for there to be a single standard upon which every single person in the industry agreed, it just doesn’t happen. There are exceptions in what individual agents and editors want; you might strike lucky.

If you DO decide to go the single-space route (picture me rending my garments here), make absolutely certain that your manuscript has NO other problems that might trigger Millicent’s ire. Also, be prepared for an agent to ask to make the change before the manuscript is submitted to editors — and, if asked, do it cheerfully and without explaining at length why you originally embraced the single-space practice.

Not that YOU would do such a thing, of course, but for those who don’t know better: agents and editors tend not to be amused when writers of first books lecture them on how the industry has changed, and they should change with it.

And this is definitely an instance where folks outside the industry have been making pronouncements about how the industry should operate for quite a while. Even if you are completely polite in how you express it, chances are that the last writer who made the case to Millicent’s boss was not.

The word Luddite may actually have been uttered.

One more caveat before I sign off: I would caution any aspiring writer against assuming that any single problem, formatting or otherwise, was the ONLY reason a manuscript was getting rejected. Most of the time, it’s quite a few reasons working in tandem– which is why, unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon for Millicent and her cohorts to come to believe that an obviously improperly-formatted manuscript is unlikely to be well-written. So changing the spaces between sentences alone probably isn’t going to be the magic bullet that results in instant acceptance.

Whatever course you decide to pursue, though, make it YOUR decision — and stick to it. Don’t leap to make every change you hear rumored to be an agent’s pet peeve unless you are relatively certain in your heart of hearts that implementing it will make your manuscript a better book.

Yes, even if the suggestion in question came from yours truly. It’s your manuscript, not mine.

Thanks for the great question, Paula, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 8 Comments on See for yourself, part III: God bless the Millicents, every one

See for yourself, part III: God bless the Millicents, every one

For the last couple of days, I’ve been pursuing the dual goals of trying to show you just how obvious it is to a professional reader when a submission ISN’T in standard manuscript format (as opposed to being set up to ape the format of published books) and to drum up a little holiday sympathy for Millicent, everybody’s favorite agency screener.

She’s the Tiny Tim of the literary world, you know; at least the Bob Cratchits a little higher up on the office totem pole get paid, but our Millie often doesn’t. Even if she’s not an intern, she’s still unlikely to be paid very much. Her hours are typically long, and quite a lot of what she reads in the course of her day is, let’s face it, God-awful.

Yes, that thought that suddenly sprang into your mind is precisely right: rejecting queries and manuscripts by the score IS considered on-the-job training for a fledgling agent, in much the same way as an editorial assistant’s screening manuscripts at a publishing houses is the stepping-stone to becoming an editor.

You didn’t think determining a manuscript’s literary merits after just a few lines of text was a skill that came naturally, did you?

The aspiring writer’s learning curve is often not dissimilar to Millicent’s, actually: no one is born knowing the rules of manuscript formatting. (Okay, so I practically was, growing up around so many writers, but that’s a rare exception.) Like Millicent, most of us learn the ropes only through reading a great deal.

She has the advantage over us, though: she gets to read books in manuscript form, and most aspiring writers, especially at the beginning of their journeys to publication, read mostly books. The format is, as I believe that I have pointed out, oh, several hundred times before in this very forum, quite different.

So what writers tend to produce in their early submissions are essentially imitations of books. The problem is, there are many reasons that a manuscript in book format would be hard for an agent or editor to handle — and not merely because the individual pages would appear unprofessional to Millicent.

For starters, published books are printed on both sides of the page, manuscripts on one. Why the difference, in these days of declining tree populations and editors huffily informing writers at conferences that paper is expensive?

Simple: it’s easier to edit that way.

Believe it or not, even in these days of widely available word processors, most professional editing is still done by hand. It’s hard to give trenchant feedback while traveling in a crowded subway car if you have to maneuver a laptop, and many agencies remain far too virus-fearful to allow their employees solicit attachments from writers who aren’t already clients. (Even those who do generally have a policy that forbids the opening of unsolicited attachments.)

But ultimately, most editors edit in hard copy because they prefer it. The human eye is, of course, to blame for this: reading comprehension drops by about 70% when the material is presented on a computer screen; the eye tends to skim.

Which is why — you can hear this coming, can’t you? — a wise writer always reads her ENTIRE manuscript IN HARD COPY before submitting it to anyone even vaguely affiliated with the publishing industry. It’s much, much easier to catch typos and logic problems that way.

Manuscripts should also be typed (don’t laugh; it’s not unheard-of for diagrams to be hand-drawn in submissions, or for late-caught typos to be corrected in pen), double-spaced, and have 1-inch margins all the way around. To call upon our old friend Dickens again, an average page of a manuscript should look like this:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-09-57.tiff

(If you’re having trouble seeing specifics, or just aren’t seeing an image at all, try right-clicking on the image and saving it to your hard disk.)

To give you some idea of just how difficult — or even impossible — it would be to hand-edit a manuscript that was NOT double-spaced or had smaller margins, take a gander at this little monstrosity:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-11-28.tiff

Reader-hostile, isn’t it? Even with nice, empty back pages upon which to scrawl copy edits, trying to cram spelling or grammatical changes between those lines would be well-nigh impossible. Knowing that, Millicent would never dream of passing such a manuscript along to the agent who employs her; to do so would be to invite a lecture on the vicissitudes of the editorial life.

Don’t tempt her just to reject it unread — and don’t, I beg you, provide the same temptation to a contest judge.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, past contest entrants and submitters who wanted to squeeze in a particularly exciting scene before the end of those requested 50 pages? Faced with a hard-and-fast page limit for submission, some wily writers will shrink the font or the margins, to shoehorn a few more words onto each page. After all, who is going to notice a tenth of an inch sliced off a left or right margin, or notice that the typeface is a trifle smaller than usual?

Millicent will notice, that’s who, and practically instantly. As will any reasonably experienced contest judge; after hours on end of reading 12-point type within 1-inch margins, a reader develops a visceral sense of when something is off.

Don’t believe me? Go back and study today’s first example, the correctly formatted average page. Then take a look at this:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-13-48.tiff

I shaved only one-tenth of an inch off each margin and shrunk the text by 5% — far less than most fudgers attempt. Yet admit it — you can tell it’s different, can’t you, even without whipping out a ruler?

So could a professional reader. And let me tell you, neither the Millicents of this world nor the contest judges tend to appreciate attempts to trick them into extraneous reading. Next!

The same principle applies, incidentally, to query letters: often, aspiring writers, despairing of fitting a coherent summary of their books within the standard single page, will shrink the margins or typeface. Trust me, someone who reads queries all day, every day, will be able to tell.

The other commonly-fudged spacing technique involves skipping only one space after periods and colons, rather than the grammatically-requisite two spaces. Frequently, writers won’t even realize that this IS fudging: ever since published books began omitting these spaces in order to save paper, I’ve seen a theory propounded all over the Internet (and sometimes even in writing classes, where the teachers should know better) claiming that skipping the extra space is obsolete. Frequently, the proponents will insist that manuscripts that include the space look old-fashioned to agents and editors.

Well, guess what: standard manuscript format IS old-fashioned, by definition; that fact doesn’t seem to stop anyone in the industry for using it. In fact, in all of my years writing and editing, I have never — not once — seen a manuscript rejected or even criticized for including the two spaces that English prose requires after a period or colon.

I have, however, heard endless complaint from professional readers — myself included — about those second spaces being omitted. Care to guess why?

Reward yourself with a virtual candy cane if you said that cutting those spaces throws off word count estimation; the industry estimates assume those doubled spaces. And give yourself twelve reindeer if you also suggested that omitting them renders a manuscript harder to hand-edit.

We all know the lecture Millicent is likely to get if she forgets about that, right?

Again, a pro isn’t going to have to look very hard at a space-deprived page to catch on that there’s something fishy going on. Since Dickens was so fond of half-page sentences, the examples I’ve been using above won’t illustrate this point very well, so (reaching blindly into the depths of the bookshelf next to my computer), let’s take a random page out of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s VERA:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-16-24.tiff

There are 310 words on this page; I wasn’t kidding the other day about how far off the standard word count estimations were, obviously. Now cast your eye over the same text improperly formatted:

snapshot-2007-12-13-00-18-09.tiff

Doesn’t look much different to the naked eye, does it? The word count is only slightly lower on this version of this page — 295 words — but enough to make quite a difference over the course of an entire manuscript.

So I see some hands shooting up out there? “But Anne,” I hear some sharp-eyed readers cry, “wasn’t the word count lower because there was an entire line missing from the second version?”

Well spotted, criers-out: the natural tendency of omitting the second spaces would be to include MORE words per page, not less. But not spacing properly between sentences was not the only deviation from standard format here; Millicent, I assure you, would have caught two others.I tossed a curve ball in here, to make sure you were reading as closely as she was.

Wild guesses? Anyone? Anyone?

The error that chopped the word count was a pretty innocent one, almost always done unconsciously: the writer did not turn off the widow/orphan control, found in Word under FORMAT/PARAGRAPH/LINE AND PAGE BREAKS. This insidious little function, the default unless one changes it, prevents single lines of multi-line paragraphs from getting stranded on either the bottom of one page of the top of the next.

As you may see, keeping this function operational results in an uneven number of lines per page. Which, over the course of an entire manuscript, is going to do some serious damage to the word count.

The other problem — and frankly, the one that would have irritated a contest judge far more, but probably Millicent slightly less — was on the last line of the page: using an emdash (“But—”) instead of a doubled dash. Here again, we see that the standards that apply to printed books are not proper for manuscripts.

Which brings me back to today’s moral: just because a particular piece of formatting looks right to those of us who have been reading books since we were three doesn’t mean that it is correct in a MANUSCRIPT. Millicent reads manuscripts all day; contest judges read entries for hours at a time. After a while, a formatting issue that might well not even catch a lay reader’s attention can begin to seem gargantuan.

As I pointed out yesterday, if the writing is good, it deserves to be free of distracting formatting choices. You want agents, editors, and contest judges to be muttering, “Wow, this is good,” over your manuscript, not “Oh, God, he doesn’t know the rules about dashes,” don’t you?

Spare Millicent the chagrin, please; both you and she will be the happier for it. Keep up the good work!

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See for yourself, part II: the little things matter, honest

Yesterday, I began a compare-and-contrast exercise, showing common examples of the first pages of submissions and fine-tuning your binoculars so you might see how our old friend Millicent the Agency Screener might view them. And as those of you who read the post can attest, it was pretty obvious that the professionally-formatted title page won the beauty contest hands-down.

After I posted it late last night, I heard wee pixie voices bearding me. “But Anne,” I heard these winsome creatures pipe, “aren’t you assuming that Millicent’s pretty shallow? Whenever I’ve heard agents and editors asked at conferences or on their websites about whether cosmetic issues can get a manuscript rejected, they always reject the notion with scorn. Isn’t it the writing that matters, ultimately?”

Well, yes and no, querying sprites. Naturally, the writing matters MOST — but it is not, as many aspiring writers assume, the only issue in how a professional reader will perceive the polish of a manuscript.

But that doesn’t stop folks from talking about it as though it were the only issue, does it?

And I suspect that’s not just because a sane, sensible individual with a reputation to protect is unlikely to stand up in front of 500 eager potential submitters and say, “Look, if you’re planning to submit a grimy photocopy of your book, or insist upon presenting it in 10-point type, or not indenting your paragraphs, just don’t bother to query me.” Instantly, 500 pens would scrawl on 500 programs, DO NOT QUERY THIS ONE.

Which would rather defeat the purpose of the agents coming to the conference to recruit new clients, wouldn’t it?

They learn to be careful: an agent or editor doesn’t have to speak at many conferences (or blog for very long) before recognizing that anything they about submissions is likely to be repeated with the éclat of a proverb for years to come amongst the writing community. I’ve heard offhand comments made from the dais, or even jokes, being debated for hours in conference hallways, and some of Miss Snark’s pronouncements have been more commented upon than St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.

Okay, so that’s a slight exaggeration. My point is, such speakers are in extreme danger of having everything they say quoted back to them as an inflexible rule.

Which is why, I have to say, I don’t feel too many qualms about presenting the rules of standard format as inflexible rules. We are talking, after all, about an industry that both values creativity and considers submitting a book proposal in anything but a black folder dangerously radical.

Presentation issues definitely do matter — which is, again, not to say that the quality of the writing doesn’t. But — and this is a BIG but — rejection decisions are often made on page 1 of a manuscript. Sometimes even within the course of the first paragraph. And if the manuscript is hard to read, due to a funky typeface or odd spacing or just plain poor print quality, it may not be read at all.

And the person who announced that from the dais at a literary conference would be covered head to foot with flung tomatoes in twenty seconds flat.

To the eye of someone who reads manuscripts for a living, professional formatting is simply the least distracting way a book can possibly be presented. Perversely, adhering to the industry’s cosmetic expectations renders it MORE likely that an agent or editor will concentrate upon the beauty of the writing, not less.

So instead of thinking of the rigors of standard format as a series of unimportant (or even silly) superficial choices, try regarding them as translating your calling card, a means of catching Millicent’s tired eye and informing her that this is a manuscript that should be taken seriously.

Because she can’t fall in love with your good writing until she reads it, can she?

My, that was a long preamble, wasn’t it? Let’s get back to the nitty-gritty.

Yesterday, I showed how the first page of text does not, from a professional perspective, make an adequate substitute for a title page. Instead of being a replica of a hoped-for book cover, as many submitters produce, or a shouted-out declaration of the book’s title and who wrote it, the properly-formatted title page is a quiet, practical piece of paper, containing a specific set of marketing information. It should look, in case you missed it, like this:

snapshot-of-ultra-pro-title.tiff

Like everything else in the manuscript, the title page should be entirely in 12-point type. No matter how cool your title page looks with 24-point type, resist the urge, because Millicent will be able to tell from across the room if you didn’t:

snapshot-2007-12-11-22-18-42.tiff

Take a look at the first example again, then the second. Notice any other dissimilarities?

If you said that Mssr. Smith’s title page included both a slug line (the author’s name and title in the upper right margin of the page) and a page number in the bottom right corner, give yourself a gold star for the day. Add whipped cream and walnut clusters if you mentally added the reason that those additions are incorrect: because the title page is not the first page of text. Technically, it should not be numbered.

This means, incidentally, that the title page should not be counted as one of the 50 pages in those 50 pages the agent of your dreams asked you to submit, either. Nor would it count toward the total number of pages for a contest entry.

On both the title page and elsewhere, I would highly recommend using either Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typefaces, both here and in the manuscript as well, as these are the standards of the industry.

I know, I know: another cosmetic weirdness. But like some of the other strictures of standard format, there’s a pretty good reason for this one: word count estimation is predicated upon these typefaces. The Times family is estimated at 250 words/page; Courier at 200. So a 400-page manuscript in Times New Roman is assumed to be roughly 100,000 words. (To make the math clear, 400 x 250 = 100,000.)

Now, in actual fact, it’s probably closer to 115,000 words; as any writer who has compared the estimated word count for her book with the total her word processing program provides, they tend to differ wildly. But word count, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder: a novelist whose title page reported, accurately, that her 400–age novel was 115,000 words might well see it rejected out of hand on the grounds that it was too long.

Why? Well, math may not have been Millicent’s best subject (the inmates of agencies were overwhelmingly English majors), but she can do third-grade math in her head: 115,000 words at 250 words/page would equal a 460-page manuscript. That’s quite a bit longer than editors tend to expect first novels in most genres to be.

In other words, next!

“But Anne,” I hear you cry, “why is Millicent estimating at all? If she wants to know how long it is, why doesn’t she just flip to the last page and check the page number?”

I could give you a long song and dance about how much her wrists hurt from opening all those query envelopes all day, or how her secret midnight e-mail orgies have rendered pinching a torture, but in practice, the answer is far less personal: because the industry doesn’t work that way.

Also, how exactly could she manage to turn to page 400 of a requested 50-page submission?

Let’s turn to the first page of the submission, to see how much of a difference font and typeface make at first glance. Here’s a correctly-formatted page 1 in Times New Roman:

snapshot-2007-12-11-22-20-23.tiff

Pretty spiffy, eh? But definitely not how it would appear in a published book.

Here is the same page, also correctly formatted, in Courier. Note how many fewer words per page it allows:

snapshot-2007-12-11-22-22-42.tiff

Got both of those firmly imbedded in your brainpan? Good. Now format your first pages that way for the rest of your natural life.

Wanna see why it’s a good idea? Take a gander at the SAME first page, but not in standard manuscript format. See how many deviations you can spot:

snapshot-2007-12-11-22-23-50.tiff

Interesting what a difference a few small formatting changes can make, isn’t it? It’s exactly the same WRITING — but it just doesn’t look as professional. To Millicent, who reads hundreds of pages per day, the differences between the three could not be clearer.

And yet there were really very few deviations from standard format here. For those of you playing at home, the typeface is Georgia; the chapter title is in the wrong place, and there isn’t a slug line. Also, the page is numbered in the wrong place — the default setting, incidentally, in many word processing programs.

Again, none of these infractions against the rules of standard format are serious enough to cause Millicent to throw up her hands as soon as she notices them, giving up on the last manuscript. But when poor formatting is combined with literary experimentation — like, say, that paragraph-long first sentence — which do you think she is going to conclude, that Dickens is a writer who took the time to polish his craft, or that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing?

And that, my friends, is why you should pay attention to the little details. The longer you remain in the business, the more those little things will strike you as just, well, matters of right and wrong. As, fortunately or not, they do Millicent and her ilk.

More show-and-tell follows tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on See for yourself, or, Millicent may have a point this time

See for yourself, or, Millicent may have a point this time

snapshot-2007-12-11-01-22-46.tiff
First things first: Boston-area readers, mark your calendars, because next month, I’m going to be giving a talk, The Multiple Myths of Philip K. Dick, at Harvard next month. Saturday, January 26th, to be precise, from 10 am to noon. I shall be joined by the excellent David Gill of Total DickHead fame. Advance registration is strongly encouraged, and I would love to see some of you there!

And in answer to that huge question mark hanging in the air above the heads of those of you who have been following my memoir’s saga faithfully for the last 2+ years: yes, I shall be speaking on precisely what you think I couldn’t possibly be. Not all the beans will be spilled, naturally, but I anticipate a fair number escaping the sack.

It’s all part of the festivities at Vericon, the Harvard/Radcliffe Science Fiction Association’s annual convention. I am especially pleased by the invitation to speak, for back in the dim days of antiquity, I was one of the founding members of HRSFA — where, if memory serves, I was known there as “the girl,” to give you a rough indication of how many of us there were. It seems odd in retrospect, but then, nice Ivy Leaguers pretended that they didn’t read SF, by and large; we had a hard time getting Harvard even to recognize the association. Now, it’s one of the largest clubs on campus.

As Kurt Vonnegut would have told us all: and some people say there’s no such thing as progress.

Back to work. As you may have noticed, I’ve been quiet for the last few days, having recently returned from giving a completely different talk: a species of my favorite class to teach to writers, a blow-by-blow on how VERY different a professional manuscript looks from, well, any other stack of paper an agent or editor might receive in the mail. I love teaching it.

Admittedly, it’s a trifle depressing to watch the inevitable cloud of gloom descend upon my students as they begin to realize just how many small mistakes there are that can result in a manuscript’s getting rejected — but it’s a pure joy to watch those brows unfurrow and those shoulders unclench as their owners learn that there is something they can DO about improving their books’ chances of success.

Over the next few days, I am going to attempt a similar trick at a distance and, like the Flying Wallendas, without a safety net. Drum roll, please: in the spirit of that old chestnut, SHOW, DON’T TELL, I shall demonstrate just how different a manuscript that follows the rules looks from one that doesn’t.

Hold on tight.

Writers often overlook odd formatting as a reason that a manuscript might have been rejected. Certainly, other reasons get a lot more airplay, particularly at writers’ conferences.

If you want to take a long, hard look at some of the better-discussed reasons, I would urge you to gird your loins and plunge into the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE category at right. For those of you who missed it, last autumn, I went over list of knee-jerk rejection reasons given by a group of agents going over a stack of actual submissions at a conference, one by painful one. Because so many of the reasons caused writerly blood to boil and learned eyebrows to hit ceilings, I was sorely tempted to re-run that series while I was ill this fall, but in 2006, it took up more than three weeks’ worth of posts to cover the topic. Of late, I have had other proverbial fish to fry.

As we are heading into the long, dark days of winter, however, while agents and editors are cuddled up all snug in their offices, reading the manuscripts they hadn’t gotten to over the previous eleven months, it seemed like a good time to revisit the most common mistakes of them all, deviations from standard format for manuscripts.

Not to be confused with what is correct for published books.

In answer to all of the cries of “Huh?” that elicited from readers new to this site, a professional manuscript SHOULD differ from the published version of the same book in a number of subtle but important ways. All too few aspiring writers realize this, a fact that is unfortunately quite obvious to an agent, editor, contest judge, etc., from practically the moment their eyes light upon a submission.

Why is it so very apparent? Because much of the time, writers new to the business clearly go out of their way to format their submissions to resemble published books, in the mistaken belief that this will make their work seem more professional.

The opposite is generally true — and often, it’s apparent as early as the title page.

(If the implications of that last assertion made you dizzy — if, for instance, you found yourself picturing our old pal Millicent the agency screener pulling a submitted manuscript out of its envelope, casting a critical eye over the first page, hooting, and stuffing the whole thing into the handy SASE — try placing your head between your knees and breathing deeply. I’ll wait until you recover.)

The most common initial signal is the absence of any title page whatsoever. Many submitters, for reasons best known to themselves, omit the title page altogether — often, I suspect, because they are unaware that a professional book-length manuscript ALWAYS has a title page.

To set your minds at ease, forgetting to include a title page almost certainly won’t prevent Millicent from reading your manuscript; she tends to read even the most bizarrely-formatted submissions for at least a line or two. But that initial impression of an author’s lack of professionalism — or, to call it by a kinder name, of having a lot to learn about how the publishing industry works — does often translate into a rather jaundiced reading eye for what comes next.

Why? Well, let’s take a peek through her reading glasses, shall we? The first thing Millicent sees when she opens the average requested materials package is something like this:

snapshot-2007-12-11-01-25-34.tiff

(Note to those of you Windows users who have been having problems viewing posted pictures: helpful reader Chris wrote in to say that you can view them in Windows Picture Viewer by right-clicking on the images and saving them to your hard disk. Thanks, Chris!)

I see all of you long-term blog readers out there with your hands in the air, jumping up and down, eager to tell everyone what’s wrong with this as a first page of text — and you’re absolutely right, of course. We’re going to be talking about precisely those points in the days to come.

For now, however, I want you to concentrate upon how this example has failed as both a title page and a first page of text, by not including the information that Millicent would expect to see on either.

What makes me so sure she would find this discovery, at best, disappointing? Because what she (or her boss agent, or an editor, or a contest judge) would have expected to see on top of that pile of paper was this:

snapshot-2007-12-11-01-28-43.tiff

This is a standard manuscript title page for the same book — rather different, isn’t it? Visibly different, in fact, from several paces away, even if Millicent isn’t wearing her reading glasses.

Again, submitting the first example rather than the second would not necessarily be instantly and automatically fatal to a manuscript’s chances, of course. Most of the time, Millicent will go ahead and plunge into that first paragraph of text anyway.

However, human nature and her blistering reading schedule being what they are (for those of you new to this screener’s always-rushed ways, she has a stack of manuscripts up to her chin to screen — and that’s at the end of a long day of screening queries), if she has already decided that a submission is flawed, just how charitable an eye do you think she is likely to cast upon the NEXT problem on the page?

Uh-huh. To use her favorite word: next!

To be fair to Millicent, while it may well be uncharitable of her to leap to the conclusion that Faux Pas’ manuscript is likely to be unpolished because he did not include a proper title page, agencies do have a vested interest in signing writers who present themselves professionally. For one thing, they’re cheaper to represent, in practical terms: the agent doesn’t have to spend as much time working with them, getting their manuscripts ready to submit to editors.

And no agent in his right mind would send out a manuscript that didn’t include a standard title page. It serves a number of important — nay, vital — marketing functions.

Let’s take another look at the professional version, shall we? So you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down the page, here it is again:

snapshot-2007-12-11-01-28-43.tiff

How is this sheet of paper a better piece of marketing material than Faux Pas’ first page?

Well, right off the bat, it tells a prospective agent or editor what kind of book it is, as well as its approximate length. (If you do not know how to estimate the number of words in a manuscript, or why you should use an estimate rather than relying upon your word processor’s count, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.) Both of these are pieces of information that will tell Millicent instantly whether the submission in her hand would meet the requirements of the editors to whom her agency tends to sell.

For instance, if her boss had decided not to represent Action/Adventure anymore, or if editors at the major houses had started saying that they were only interested in seeing Action/Adventure books longer than 90,000 words, Rightly Stepped would be out of luck.

The standard title page also tells Millicent precisely how to contact the author to offer representation — and that’s a very, very good thing for everyone concerned. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: it’s ALWAYS in an aspiring writer’s interest to make it easy for an agent to help her.

I might be wrong, of course, but I suspect that NOT forcing Millicent to forage through the mountain of paper on her desk to find a misplaced cover letter with your phone number on it MIGHT be a good start.

By contrast, Faux Pas’ first page doesn’t really do anything but announce the title of the book and leap right into the story. That’s one underachieving piece of paper.

Some writers attempt to consolidate the proper functions of the title page and first page of text into a single sheet of paper. This format is particularly common for contest entries, for some reason:

snapshot-2007-12-11-01-32-39.tiff

While such a top page does indeed include the requisite information Millicent or her boss would need to contact the author, cramming it onto the first page of text doesn’t really achieve anything but saving a piece of paper. It doesn’t even shorten the manuscript or contest entry, technically speaking: the title page is never included in a page count; that’s why pagination begins on the first page of text.

I shall go into what DOES belong on the first page of text tomorrow, with accompanying exercises. For today, let’s keep it simple: all I ask is that you would look at the proper title and the unprofessional examples side by side.

Got all of those images firmly in your mind? Good. Now weigh the probability that someone who reads as many manuscripts as Millicent — or her boss, or the editor to whom her boss likes to sell books — would NOT notice a fairly substantial difference in the presentation. And assess the probability of that perception’s coloring any subsequent reading of the manuscript in question.

Kind of obvious, once you know the difference, isn’t it? Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 17 Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Well, so much for predicting how tired I would be: the very day after I said I didn’t want to abandon you all in mid-title page, I found myself too wiped out to do my promised next post on title pages. Mea culpa — but I think I shall be taking the next few days off from posting, until I figure out how to integrate it with the masses of sleep I seem to need at the moment.

Let me move on to the second style of title page quickly, though, while I am fresh from a nap.

Last time, I mentioned that there were two formats commonly used in professional title pages. The one I showed you last time, what I like to call the Me First, is actually rather more common in submissions to agents than submissions from agents to editors, but it is certainly acceptable.

While the Me First format is perfectly fine, the other standard format, which I like to call the Ultra-professional, more closely replicates what most agents want their authors’ ultimate manuscript title pages to look like. Take a gander:

snapshot-of-ultra-pro-title.tiff

Elegant, isn’t it? And yet very market-oriented, because all of the requisite information is so very easy to find. Here is a downloadable version of the same, for those of you who would prefer to have it on hand.

I probably don’t need to walk through how to construct this little gem, but as my long-term readers know, I’m a great believer in making directions as straightforward as possible. I like them to be easy to follow in the ten minutes after an agent has said, “My God, I love your premise! Provide me with the manuscript instantly!” Call me zany, but on that happy day, I suspect that you’re going to have a lot on your mind.

So here’s how to put this little gem together. Set up a page with the usual standard format for manuscripts defaults — 1-inch margins all around, 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier — then type in the upper right-hand corner:

Book category (If you’re unclear on what this is, are tempted to vacillate between several, or resent having to categorize your complex book at all, believe me, I sympathize — but please see the BOOK CATEGORIES category at right with all possible speed.)

Estimated word count (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of estimation, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

Skip down 12 lines, then add, centered on the page:
Your title
(Skip a line)
By
(Skip a line)
Your name (or your nom de plume)

Skip down 12 more lines, then add in the lower right corner:

Your real name
Line 1 of your address
Line 2 of your address
Your telephone number
Your e-mail address

As you may see from the example, it looks nifty if the information in the top section and the information in the bottom one share the same left margin. Since some addresses are longer than others, using this format results in that left margin’s being set at different points on the page for different manuscripts. While Flaubert’s address is short, Edith Wharton’s is not, producing a cosmetically altered title page:

snapshot-edith-wharton-title.tiff

Again, there should be NO other information on the title page, just lots and lots of pretty, pretty white space. After you sign with an agency, your agent’s contact information will appear where your contact information does.

That’s it, my friends – the two primary options you have, if you want your title page to look like the bigwigs’ do. And believe me, you do. Try formatting yours accordingly, and see if your work is not treated with greater respect!

After my last post, forward-thinking reader Christa anticipated my next point, so I have already covered the issue of whether you should include a title page in an e-mailed submission. Since the comments are less easily searched than the text of my posts, I’m going to go over the logic a bit here as well.

The answer, in case you were wondering, is yes — it is an excellent idea to include a title page with an e-submission. It’s an even better idea to include it as PART of the manuscript attachment, rather than as a separate attachment.

A bit perplexed? You’re not alone. Let me deal with the whys first, then the hows.

As Christa rightly points out, an agent who sends you an e-mail to ask for a full or partial manuscript, like one who calls after reading your first 50 pages to ask for the rest of the book, obviously has your contact information already. So why repeat it by sending a title page?

The first reason — and not the least significant, in an industry that values uniformity of format — is that every professional title page includes this information. It’s what agents and editors expect to see, and believe me, any agent who accepts e-queries receives enough e-mail in a day to render the prospect of scrolling through those received a few weeks ago a Herculean task. Make it easy for her to contact you, and she’s more likely to do it.

Second, even if the agent or screener scrupulously noted all of your contact information from your query AND filed away your e-mail address for future reference, agencies are very busy places. Haven’t you ever accidentally deleted an e-mail you intended to save?

I tremble to mention this, but most of the agents of my acquaintance who’ve been in the game for a while have at least one horror story about reading a terrific piece of writing, jumping up to show it to someone else in the office — and when they’ve returned, not being able to find the mystery author’s contact information.

Don’t let them tell a story like this about you: Millicent is unlikely to scroll through 700 e-mails to track down even the most captivating author’s contact information. And even if an agent asks for an e-mailed submission, he will not necessarily read all of it on screen — once it’s printed out, it’s as far from the e-mail that sent it as if it had come by regular mail.

Besides, do you really want to begin your relationship with the agent of your dreams (or editor of your passions) by deviating from standard format, even virtually? As every successful civil disobedient knows, you are generally better off politely meeting expectations in matters of little moment, so you may save your deviations for the things that really matter.

As Flaubert famously advised writers, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Okay, so he wasn’t talking about title pages. But the same principle applies here: a title page — or lack thereof — does make a strong statement about the professionalism of the manuscript, regardless of context.

I wouldn’t advise sending the title page as a separate attachment, though: because viruses can be spread through attachments, folks in the industry tend not to open attachments they did not specifically ask to see. Instead, insert the title page at the beginning of your manuscript file.

Do I see a raised hand or twelve out there? “But Anne,” I hear some quick-on-the-draw readers cry, “won’t including it in the document make the title page look wrong? Won’t it automatically have a slug line, and won’t including it mess up my pagination?”

Good questions, all, but these outcomes are relatively easy to avoid in Word. To prevent a slug line’s appearing on the title page, insert the title page into the document, then go to the Format menu and select Document, then Layout. There should be an option there called “Different First Page.” If you select that, you can enter a different header and footer for the first page of the document, without disturbing the slug line you will want to appear on every other page.

Don’t include a slug line (AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/#) on the title page, or a page number. Just leave the header and footer blank.

To ensure that the first page of text (which will be page 2 of the document, right?) is numbered as page 1, you will need to designate the title page as 0. In Word, you do this by going to the View menu, selecting Header and Footer, then Page Number Format.

While I’m on the subject of formatting, and now that I know how to insert snapshots of pages into this blog, I think that next time, I shall take reader Dave’s excellent suggestion and show you what a page of text in standard format looks like. I have long been yearning to show how to format the first page of a chapter correctly.

And that’s the kind of longing I have when I’m NOT feverish; there’s no accounting for taste, eh? Speaking of which, my couch is calling me again, so I am signing off for today. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 12 Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part II, or, lots of lovely, lovely white space

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part II, or, lots of lovely, lovely white space

Yesterday, I waxed long, if not precisely eloquent, about what a difference a professional-looking title page can make to a submission or contest entry. I hit this point pretty hard, because I know from experience as both a freelance editor and a contest judge that many, many talented aspiring writers simply assume that they don’t need a title page — a misconception that definitely costs them presentation points.

So where do these sterling souls tend to place the title page information, such as contact information and the book’s title? On page 1 of the text, where one might expect to find it in a short story submitted to a literary magazine.

Trust me, this is not where a professional reader is going to expect to find this information in a manuscript — and in many contests, including requested information such as genre and target audience on the first page of the text, rather than on a title page, can actually get an entry disqualified.

(To address the most common reason contest entrants misplace this information: don’t worry about the title page’s adding to your page count; it is not included in the page total. In every type of manuscript, pagination begins on the first page of TEXT, not on the title page.)

In a submission to an agency or publishing house, a professional reader will expect to see pieces of information on the title page: title, author’s name (or nom de plume), book category, word count (estimated), and contact information. If an author has an agent, the agent’s contact information will appear on the title page, but for your garden-variety submission, the contact info will be the writer’s.

As I mentioned yesterday, it really is to your advantage to arrange your contact information precisely where an agent or editor expects to find it. You want to make it as easy as humanly possible for them to say yes to you, right?

That being said, as in so many aspects of the publishing industry, there is actually more than one way to structure a title page. Two formats are equally acceptable from an unagented writer. (After you sign with an agent, trust me, your agent will tell you which one she prefers.)

I like to call Format #1 the Me First, because it renders it as easy as possible for an agent to contact you after falling in love with your work. It’s the less common of the two at agencies, and it’s a trifle spare, compared to most title pages. Lots and lots of blank page space, which is catnip to writers. We long to fill it. But resist that urge:

snapshot-of-me-first-title.tiff

For those who would like to have their very own copies, to see the formatting up close, here is a downloadable version. (Many thanks to clever reader Chris for suggesting this, and brilliant webmaster Brian for teaching me how.)

And here are the step-by-step directions. Standard format restrictions apply, so 1-inch margins, please, as well as 12-point type, and do use the same typeface as you used in your manuscript. However, unlike every other page of the text, the title page should neither have a slug line nor be numbered. As I mentioned above, it is not included in either the page or the word count.

In the upper left-hand corner, list:

Your name
Your address
Your phone number
Your e-mail address.

In the upper right-hand corner, list:

The book category (see how important it is to be up front about it? It’s the very top of the title page!)
Estimated word count.

Skip down 10 lines, then add, centered on the page:

Your title
(Skip a line)
By
(Skip a line)
Your name (or your nom de plume)

There should be NO other information on the title page in Format #1. Luxuriate in all of that lovely, lovely white space.

Why, you may be wondering, does the author’s name appear twice on the page? For two reasons: first, in case you are writing under a name other than your own, as many writers choose to do. It’s quite common for writers to use only their pseudonyms in submissions — which can cause some real confusion when a fictional person’s name appears on under the signature line on a contract.

Standard format eliminates any possible confusion by clearly delineating between the name the writer wishes to use on the title page (which appears, straightforwardly enough, under the title) and the one the writer would like to see on royalty checks (listed under the contact information).

(And no, for those of you who have been asking about it, Anne Mini is not a nom de plume, but the name on my birth certificate, believe it or not. My parents were so literarily-oriented that my father demanded to be led to a typewriter before they settled on a name, to see how each of the top contenders would look in print. The better to grace future dust jackets, my dear. And yes, there is a nonplused nurse out there somewhere who can swear that this is true.)

The second reason that the writer’s name appears twice on the title page is, as I mentioned above, to make it as easy as possible for the agent or editor to acquire the book. And that, in case you were wondering, is one reason that it is so very easy for the major US publishing houses to enforce their no-unsolicited-submissions-from-unagented-writers rule: the merest glance at the contact information will tell an editorial assistant instantly whether there is an agent involved.

Do not, under any circumstances, include a quote on the title page — and I wouldn’t recommend doing it on the first page of your manuscript, either. Many authors do this, because they have seen so many published authors use quotes at the openings of their books, to situate themselves amongst the pantheon of the published — and because, let’s face it, most of us read widely enough that we’ve collected a few pithy sayings along the way.

Trust me, the aptness of your quote selection isn’t going to wow the pros, for the very simple reason that 99.8% of them will just skip over it. They ask for submissions to read your writing, after all, not other people’s.

If you must use a quote at the opening of the book, center it on an unnumbered separate page that follows the title page. Or, better still, wait until after the book has been acquired by an editor, then have a heart-to-heart about it.

And remember, if you want to use a lyric from a song that is not yet in the public domain, it is generally the author’s responsibility to get permission to use it — and while for other writing, a quote of less than 50 consecutive words is considered fair use, ANY excerpt from an owned song usually requires specific permission, at least in North America. Contact the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for assistance in making such requests.

Tomorrow, I shall go through the other title page style, which is my preferred method, the Ultra-Professional.

On a personal note, my posts will probably be shorter than usual in the weeks to come, and I may not be posting as often: I’ve recently found out that I have come down with mono, a rather nasty condition that apparently requires sleeping about twice as much as I usually do. The recovery time is rather lengthy — but I wasn’t about to abandon you all in mid-title page, was I?

So bear with me, please, if my responses are a bit slower than usual in the near future — and keep up the good work!

Posted on - 3 Comments on Writing standards III: dueling italics, and some information for those of you who attended the Surrey writers’ conference

Writing standards III: dueling italics, and some information for those of you who attended the Surrey writers’ conference

Before I launch into specifics about italics today, I want to flag down those of you who attended the Surrey International Writers’ Conference last weekend — in particular, those of you who pitched to Cricket Pechstein or Jeffery McGraw, agents from the August Agency. A reader of this blog, experiencing post-conference difficulties in tracking down the agency’s website (www.augustagency.com), had asked me to find out what was going on. I made an inquiry or two, and YES, my friends, they DO want to hear from you. Here’s what Cricket had to say:

“While Jeffery and I were in Surrey at the conference something right out of a technothriller was playing itself out. Our webhost called me to say he was battling cyber pirates who were trying to highjack our server in an attempt to access some of his other clients, banks! He was slamming doors shut as fast he could, so I told him to bolt ours, too. It worked. The cyber pirates were left to search elsewhere for a website to highjack to either raid information or funds, or as part of a convoluted trail around the world to hide their tracks.

“We’re pleased to say our website is back up and running smoothly today, open for business, with only a hint of smoke from shots fired across our bow…

“See everyone again next year at Surrey — the world’s BEST writers conference.

Cricket Pechstein”
The August Agency LLC

So all’s well that ends well, to coin a phrase. Just another piece of evidence, I guess, that online searches alone are not necessarily the best way to check on the credibility of an agency.

Back to the italics issue. Rejoining our story in progress, excellent question-asker Claire had written in to observe: “I’ve heard it preached that… only an amateur would use italics because manuscripts are not formatted like books, and that we still need to pretend we’re indicating to the typesetter that certain words need to be italicized.”

I have to say, I am inherently wary of any advice that begins, “Only an amateur would…” I don’t think it’s supportive of writers just starting out, but hey, that’s my own personal style of advice-giving. To be blunt about it, every writer is an amateur until after the first book contract, right? So that critique could be leveled at everyone who hasn’t worked with an editor.

So there.

I also know many published authors who would be mighty surprised to hear that the italics they have been using in their manuscripts for years were a sure sign of amateurism.

Italics ARE the industry standard for emphasis and foreign words (replacing the underlining that used to be the norm for typewriter-produced material for both these usages), so taken out of context, I cannot tell why anyone would have made such a sweeping statement against them as a species. But I’ve noticed in the last year or so that there are apparently still some sources out there that are telling submitters to underline, instead of italicize, such words.

Considering how tradition-bound standard format is, it seems a little funny to have to say this, but: this advice is outdated. In the old days, authors were asked to underline words that either needed to be checked for foreign-language accuracy or were to be italicized in the manuscript. Why weren’t the words to be italicized on the final printed page italicized in the old typed manuscripts, you ask? Simple: you needed a special typewriter for it. Every typewriter, however, was capable of underlining.

Now, however, NOTHING IN A MANUSCRIPT SHOULD BE UNDERLINED, and for one very good reason: to an editor’s eye, underlined words equal more ink; italicized words do not.

While this might not seem like a big deal in a 300-page manuscript, try multiplying those 300 pages by 3000 copies, and then figure the cost of the extra ink. (Actually, to be technically accurate, multiply those 300 pages by 2/3, because books shrink between manuscript and printed page, then figure out the ink consumption. But you get the general idea, right?) It’s like that story one heard about Northwest Airlines’ cost-cutting efforts in the early 1990s: they removed one olive from each of the salads they served in first class.

Not a big change, right? Net savings in the first year: over $100,000.

Since now italics are within the price range of every computer user, obviously it’s more straightforward for the author just to italicize the words she wants italicized. So go ahead and do it — but do be aware that this is a stylistic choice, not a technical one, and thus a decision that you will need to defend to an agent or editor. (And, just so you know: long italicized sections in printed books are generally there by the editor’s choice, not the author’s.) .

One caveat, however: I do know many agents, editors, and screeners who routinely skip over entire italicized paragraphs at the beginning of submissions, as well as over long, all-italics sections and opening epigraphs. Their assumption, accurate or not, is that such sections are italicized specifically because they are not integral to the plot, and thus may safely be ignored.

I just mention. You might want to stick your long clumps of italicized text after, say, page 15. Or rethink whether those big bits need to be italicized at all.

It IS still expected that writers will italicize foreign words, for the benefit of the line editor and proofreader — who, incidentally, do both still exist in the industry, unlike the vanished typesetter. You’re free not to do it, of course, just as you are free to ignore any of the other rules of standard format, but it will just look to professional eyes as though you misspelled an English word.

Usually, the discussion on the net about italics is NOT about their limited technical use, but about the stylistic choice whether to use them as automatic indicators of character thought OR the popular use of them mentioned above, to offset entire chunks of text. Opinion is sharply divided on this subject — with one side typically using the “only an amateur would do THAT” argument.

Since, as I mentioned yesterday, I blogged about the character thought side of this very issue for three days straight at the end of August, I’m not going to recap the arguments on the various sides here. Suffice it to say, the people who feel strongly anti-italic like to go out to lunch with the Point-of-View Nazis and bitch about the rest of us and our slovenly ways.

I tend to discourage the use of block italicization of entire sections, for the same reason that I frown upon writers whose work is from several points of view using different typefaces, italics, or boldface to indicate a point-of-view switch: to professional eyes, these tactics can look like an admission on the part of the author that she lacks the writing skill to make voice or venue changes clear any other way. Also, long blocks of italics are simply harder to read on a manuscript page than regular print.

So should you do it? It’s up to you. As with all matters of style, there are agents who hate italicized thought and agents who love it. Ditto, as Claire points out, with writing gurus.

The problem, as I pointed out a couple of days ago, is that many of the people out there writing about writing don’t seem to make much of a distinction between legitimate style issues, which are up to the author, and formatting issues, which are not. Since the industry itself does not take the logical step of simply posting lists of standard format requirements, it is hard to find a final authority on matters of format. To complicate matters, the widely-taught AP format is incorrect for manuscripts, so there is a tremendous amount of conflicting information out there.

Which means, I suppose, that you could just surf the net until you found advice you like. Personally, I wouldn’t do this, but that’s because I’ve seen how information tends to travel on the rumor circuit.

Here’s how it typically goes: a single agent on a single conference panel expresses a personal opinion — and the next day, it turns up on a half a dozen writers’ fora as THE ONLY way something can be done. Writers tell other writers about it, and so on, until it becomes well known as a rule. But the fact is, a lot of these so-called rules are actually just personal taste taken out of context.

Which isn’t to say that if your manuscript violated the quasi-rule AND fell under the eyes of that particular agent who lambasted it, it wouldn’t be rejected. But generalizing from a single case to an entire industry is not the best way to obtain accurate results.

Again, I am not setting myself up as the sole authority on the matter — I am only sharing my experience about what does and doesn’t tend to get a manuscript rejected. The formatting rules I have been posting here are pretty much what every major agent in the country has clients use. However, if you’re happier sticking to Courier and eschewing italics altogether, or following whatever over-and-above-standard-format restrictions you’ve heard advised, by all means do it.

For the record, I routinely use italics for emphasis, and I italicize all foreign words. I also add the trademark symbol to every word for which it is appropriate (another one that a lot of authors would like to see go) — and I have NEVER had anyone in the industry suggest that any of these things were even vaguely problematic. Neither have any of my clients, friend… again, you get the picture.

Thanks for raising these issues, Claire, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 5 Comments on Conflicting opinions on writing standards: what’s a girl to do?

Conflicting opinions on writing standards: what’s a girl to do?

Reader Claire wrote in the other day with an interesting observation, one that I thought merited its own post. Quoth she:

“I tend to read your blog as if it were the Bible, but as I’ve seen conflicting formatting advice on the use of italics and font all over the Internet from equally wonderful writers, I find myself having a crisis of faith. I’ve heard it preached that only Courier will do because it’s not mono-spaced as is Times New Roman, and that only an amateur would use italics because manuscripts are not formatted like books, and that we still need to pretend we’re indicating to the typesetter that certain words need to be italicized. I guess I need reassurance that your advice is what belongs in the canon. As for the life changing news that query letters should be in correspondence format, I am truly grateful. Thanks for opening the doors of the temple to the uninitiated.”

Well, for starters, Claire, I’m not sure anyone should be treating what I say — or what anybody says, for that matter — as Gospel, and on matters of style, there simply isn’t a canonical source that will answer all conceivable questions for every kind of book. (Sorry, but it’s true.) On matters of formatting, it’s been my experience that the folks who take such matters as italicizing foreign words seriously take it VERY seriously, so I can certainly understand why an aspiring writer would want there to be a firm canonical text that states beyond the shadow of a doubt what needs to happen in a manuscript.

So while admittedly, my first impulse was to disclaim the idea of a canon at all — the substance of my original answer: if you don’t like my advice on any given point, for heaven’s sake, don’t take it! — I’m going to talk explicitly today about a subject I generally avoid like the plague, out of professional courtesy to other writers on writing. I’m going to talk about why we writing advice-givers so often advise diametrically opposed things.

To set everyone’s nervous pulses at ease right off the bat, most of the conflicting advice I have seen deals with matters of style, with industry trends in what is liked and disliked, rather than with matters that will get your submission rejected unread after three lines. (Next week, I am planning a fairly hefty series on what industry professionals said at the two conferences I attended this month about why they stop reading a submission — and I think it may surprise you how many of those reasons are matters of personal preference.) The industry assumption is, alas, that only properly-formatted submissions deserve serious consideration, so you are quite right, Claire, to be concerned with whether you are getting the real story on how to present your work.

I try to maintain a fairly strong distinction between what a writer MUST do in a submission (i.e., adhere to standard format) and what it might help a writer to do in it (e.g., matters of style). And I have to say, my version of the must-do advice has never steered anyone wrong, as far as I know.

There’s a good reason for that. In the must-do posts, all I am presenting is a discussion of what has worked successfully for my own work and that of my editing clients, and what I have seen used by career writers throughout my life. I know from long experience that no manuscript adhering to the standard format guidelines I have given here will be rejected for technical reasons — but I have seen many, many manuscripts that do not adhere to them rejected.

Beyond that, I talk about matters of style, and those discussions are, too, based upon my observations of the industry as a writer, editor, contest judge, and interviewer of agents, screeners, etc. As with all advice, I would hope that my readers recognize that what I am presenting is my opinion, and thus not to be regarded as the revealed word of God, any more than any other fallible mortal’s. Seriously, it’s not really possible to comment credibly upon one’s own credibility, and I suppose if I were worried about it, I would go on about my doctorate, publishing successes, my status as a fine human being, my kindness to stray kittens, etc. I don’t make any secret of my background — my bio is posted on this site for all to see, after all — but I would prefer to think that my advice speaks for itself.

As I routinely tell my editing clients, if a particular piece of stylistic advice doesn’t make sense to you, don’t follow it. Yes, it’s important that your work be professionally packaged, but it’s equally important that you sound like you.

I have to say, though, I think the tone of my blog is one of the least order-barking of any writer’s on the net, yet every time I post a list of standard format restrictions, I am barraged with questions each time I set foot outside my door for the next month. As if MY changing my mind on a particular point would make a particle of difference to whether it is necessary to adhere to industry standards. But as I believe I have pointed out several times before, I run neither the publishing industry nor the universe: I don’t invent the rules; I just report ’em to you. Sorry about that.

Believe me, my life would be FAR easier if I just stopped being honest with my readers about the doubled dash vs. the emdash, or about underlining vs. italics. Yet about a fourth of the people who ask me about them seem to be wanting me to say, “Oh, I was just kidding about THAT part of standard format,” or to be trying to draw me into a dispute with another online writing advice-giver, as if we could settle differing opinions on stylistic issues by arm-wrestling once and for all.

Trust me, neither is going to happen; I have neither the time, the inclination, nor the arm strength. I have manuscripts to get out the door, people, mine and others: believe me, devoting a couple of hours a day to misleading you about how title pages should look would NOT be an efficient use of my time.

Although it’s not a bad premise for a comic novel, come to think of it.

That being said, Claire’s crisis of faith is quite understandable, because there are a LOT of people on the net claiming to be experts on what does and doesn’t work in a submission. And, frankly, a lot of them seem to be speaking in tones of great authority. The burning bush sounds like a timorous stutterer compared to some of the Point-of-View Nazis out there, and there is certainly no shortage of prophets of doom who will tell you that their advice alone holds the hidden key to publication.

Being emphatic doesn’t mean they’re correct, though — or that their opinions are either reflective of or influential in the industry as a whole. I — and most of the good writing bloggers out there, I think — try to be honest with you about the fact that, as nearly as I can tell, the only magic key to success is writing talent; I merely try to let you in on the not-quite-secret handshakes, such as submitting in standard format, that will enable you to get your talent under the right eyes for long enough that it can be discovered.

And the first step to that, in my experience, is submitting in standard format. The second is avoiding the most common manuscript mistakes, and the third is polishing one’s style. The first two, I think, tend to be fairly cut-and-dried; the last is much more personal to the writer. But, again, my goal here is to try to help speed up my readers’ progress through those steps by showing what I have seen does and doesn’t work, not to give dicta for the ages.

I’m not convinced that any writer about writing, however well qualified, is entitled to be regarded as an authority beyond that. It’s not as though the online advice-givers make the rules of the industry — and as much as some of our readers might like to see us step into the ring and duke it out, I, for one, don’t think that it would be appropriate for any of us to dictate matters of style as unwavering rules. Personally, as a fiction writer, I do tend to take far more seriously the insights of writing gurus who have actually written a novel or two themselves (which surprisingly few have), but again, that’s my individual choice.

Yet when writers farther along in the publication process give advice to the aspiring, practically everything we say can sound like a prescription for literary greatness, can’t it? It’s a fine line between being honestly self-revealing and saying, “Hey, I think you should work precisely the way I do.” And, as anyone who has ever spent much time at writers’ conferences can tell you, a lot of writers who teach writing stray across that line with some frequency.

In my experience, what works for one writer will not necessarily work for another — and really, the vast majority of us writing about writing are not writing about immutable rules most of the time. We’re writing about practice; we’re writing about style; we’re writing about our experience of what does and doesn’t work in the industry. We’re writing about our writing habits, and while I do definitely think listening to the more experienced is a great way to learn, sometimes our quirks are not transferable.

To make the distinction clear, I would NEVER even consider sending out a submission that did not have the foreign words italicized, any more than I would send out one that did not include a slug line on every page; because I know that to be the norm of the industry, I would encourage you never to do it, either. I’m completely comfortable presenting that as a hard-and-fast rule, one that I am equally likely to preach to you as to the fairly well-known foreign-born author of 5 published novels and 2 nonfiction books in my writers’ group, who is not always consistent about it (at least before I get my grubby paws on her chapters). I’m known for harping upon standard format in a variety of contexts.

However, I always put my longish hair up in a French roll while I am revising my own work, and for a very good reason. For years, the left side of my nose always broke out when I was revising. I thought it was just due to stress, but during a revision of my memoir last year, I noticed that my nose looked better after hot days of revising than after cold ones. That seemed counterintuitive, so I started paying attention to what I was doing while I was staring at the screen re-reading my work for the 521rst time — and lo and behold, it turns out that some little imp in my id springs to life at that particular moment, grabs a few strands of my hair, and idly rubs it against my nose while I’m thinking. I must have been doing this for years, but I had never noticed the cause, only the effect. Thus my skin’s being happier on hotter days: those were the days I wore my hair up. So now, whenever I revise, I twist my hair into a French roll, to keep it away from my face.

Now, this is my own personal pre-revision ritual, right? Flipping up my hair, just like always starting a writing session playing the same piece of music, alerts my body to the fact that it’s revision time, helping me to sink into the task faster. It works for me.

I am not, however, under the illusion that wearing a French roll would help anyone else get published. See the difference?

But perhaps that is straying a bit far afield from Claire’s questions, which were after all about my credibility on the hard-and-fast rule front. Why does my advice on format sometimes clash with that of others with equally good credentials? Well, there are a quite a few of us, and while I can understand why readers might like it if we all gave the same advice all the time, the fact is, we’re all individuals, with different levels of experience in the industry. I honestly don’t think it’s too astonishing that we don’t always agree.

Some of what is said out there does astonish me, admittedly, but that’s just my opinion and my experience talking. Since I grew up in a family whose members have been getting published since the early 1930s, I probably have a stronger sense of tradition than most, as well as a longer list of anecdotes about what happens to submitters who do not adhere to standard format. I was told scary bedtime stories about such people, after all. But I was also one of the few 10-year-olds in the country who knew what all of the major fiction-printing magazines paid per word for short stories, and probably the only junior high schooler on the planet entrusted with the delicate task of proofing galleys. I’ve had my mitts on a LOT of manuscripts in my day, and obviously, that is the perspective I bring here.

I think it’s completely legitimate for all of us to present our various arguments and let the reader decide, though. Yes, even on matters of formatting. You’re smart people. (And, if you’ll pardon my saying so, I believe this strongly enough that I prefer not to expend my scant writing time here in arguing over what somebody else has advised, especially without knowing the context or the rationale he used in advising it.) Presumably, if you are reading several different writing blogs on a regular basis, they are all giving you something. If they have given you advice that makes sense to you, who am I to say that you should not take it? Or to decree that your work would benefit from getting your hair off your face while you’re working, for that matter?

So I guess my answer, Claire, is that I don’t think you should take any of my ilk’s pronouncements as canonical, especially when it’s a matter of style, not hard-and-fast rules — which, incidentally, is what most discussions of italicization choices are (but of that, more tomorrow). A good writer or editor can certainly give you stylistic advice, but honestly, style is personal: it’s really not something about which you should be taking anyone’s word, no matter how authoritative-sounding, as unquestionable Gospel. The ultimate choice, always, is yours.

But then, I am the author who spent a significant part of her memoir urging readers not to be too credulous about anything any author says in any memoir. I’m just not all that into authority. The writer at the next blog over may well feel differently.

Oh, my — just look at the time. I’ll deal with the specifics of fonts and italicization tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!