Standard Manuscript Format: A Simple Checklist for Submitting Your Novel

An agent opens your submission and, before reading a single sentence, already knows whether you have done this before. Standard manuscript format is the quiet signal that says you know the conventions, so the reader can stop thinking about your file and start thinking about your story. It is not art. It is a set of plain defaults that make a manuscript easy to read, easy to mark up, and easy to estimate. Here is the whole thing as a checklist you can work through in one sitting.

Page setup, font, and spacing

Start with the page itself. Use one inch margins on all four sides, the standard for US Letter paper. Set the font to 12 point Times New Roman. Courier in 12 point is also accepted and still turns up in some corners of the industry, but Times New Roman is the safe default.

Double space the entire document, from the first line to the last. Do not add extra space between paragraphs. The spacing lives in the lines, not stacked on top of them.

Align your text to the left with a ragged right edge. Do not justify it. Justified text spreads words to force a straight right margin, which looks like a finished book and makes a working manuscript harder to read and edit.

Indents and paragraphs

Indent the first line of each paragraph by half an inch. Use the paragraph indent setting for this, not the tab key and never a row of spaces. Consistent, automatic indents keep the file clean if anyone reformats it later.

The exception is the opening paragraph of a chapter or a scene, which gets no indent at all. That first line sits flush left to signal a fresh start.

The title page

The first page is the title page, and it carries your practical details. In the top-left corner, single spaced, put your legal name, your address, your email, and your phone number. This is your real name, not your pen name, because this is contact and contract information.

In the top-right corner, put your approximate word count, rounded to the nearest thousand. A book of 92,350 words becomes "about 92,000 words." Nobody expects an exact figure, and rounding shows you understand that.

Then drop to the vertical center of the page and center your title, with your byline a line or two below it. The byline is the name you want to publish under. The title page carries no page number and no running header.

Headers, chapters, and scene breaks

Every page after the title page needs a running header in the top corner. The standard form is your surname, a slash, one keyword from your title, another slash, and the page number, like this:

Okafor / Tidewater / 47

This is purely practical. If a printed stack of pages gets dropped or shuffled, anyone can put it back together.

Start every new chapter on a fresh page. Use a page break, not a column of empty returns. Give the chapter heading some room near the top, then begin the text below it.

For a scene break within a chapter, center a single hash or asterisk on its own line, with a blank line above and below. This marks a shift in time or place without starting a new chapter. When the manuscript ends, center the words THE END a line or two after your last sentence.

Naming and sending the file in standard manuscript format

Send a Word document, a .docx, unless the guidelines tell you otherwise. It is the format editors mark up and the one nearly everyone can open. Name the file using the common convention of your surname and title joined by an underscore, so it reads clearly in a crowded inbox:

• LastName_Title.docx, for example Okafor_Tidewater.docx

A quick checklist before you attach it:

• 12 point Times New Roman, double spaced throughout
• One inch margins, left aligned with a ragged right edge
• Half inch first-line indents, with no indent on the first paragraph of each chapter or scene
• Title page with contact details top-left, rounded word count top-right, title and byline centered
• Running header on every page after the title page
• Each chapter on a new page, scene breaks centered, THE END at the close

The rule that beats every rule

These are the widely accepted conventions, and they will rarely steer you wrong. But an individual agent's or publisher's submission guidelines always win. If they ask for a specific font, a particular header, or a pasted-in query instead of an attachment, do exactly that. Guidelines change, so read the current ones on the page you are submitting to, every time.

The honest catch is that wiring all of this up by hand in Word is fiddly. You set the indents, fight the spacing, build the title page, add the header, and check it all on a deadline. If you would rather skip that step, some writing tools handle it for you. Everwrite, for one, can export a finished book to standard manuscript format as a .docx, so the layout is correct without the manual setup. However you get there, the goal is the same. Make the format invisible, and let the writing carry the page.