A reader writes to ask:

The font I have been using for 10 years is Arial. I like it alot. Any comments. Should I check with Sheila Williams, the editor at Azimovs.

No. No. No. A thousand times no. Use Courier or Times New Roman. Do not use Arial, and do not bug Sheila about it. Do check the spelling of your intended market before you submit your manuscript. That is all.

A reader writes to ask:

When sending stories via email attachment, some markets insist on RTF, so I'll go to my Open Office files, where all my stories are .DOC, formatted in Standard Manuscript Format (SMF), and save the .DOC as RTF. Opened as RTF, the first paragraph is lined double spaced and then everything else is single spaced between lines. Then every once in awhile, a market will send it back saying they want it SMF. They've called for RTF, but then they say SMF. Okay, so what should I do, go back to .DOC and send it? or is there something I can do to get the RTF to be double spaced between lines??

You are confusing file format with manuscript format. When a market asks for an RTF file, they are only talking about the file format (in this case, Rich Text Format), which has to do with how your document is actually stored on your computer disk and what word processors can read it. You still have to make sure that the contents of your RTF file are formatted according to standard manuscript format, and that means making sure it's all double-spaced.

Fortunately, that's easy to fix. After you export the document, open the new RTF file in Open Office. Hit CTRL-A to highlight the full document. Then go into the formatting menu and change the line spacing from single to double. That should get the full document double-spaced for you. Save it again and send.

A reader writes to ask:

Thanks for all the useful, easy-to-follow information about formatting on your web site. If I were submitting pages by snail mail, I think I'd be set. But the vast majority of agents I'm planning on querying ask for sample pages along with the query letter, and ask that the pages be submitted by email in the body of the message. This seems to make irrelevant a number of issues of formatting. For example, if it's translated into plain text, then the font and the spacing and so forth, that's all suddenly out of my control. Can I assume most will be able to read emails in html? In which case I am trying to approximate the format the best I can or..? I can't find advice on this anywhere. Help!

Formatting submissions for inclusion in the body of an email is indeed a very different beast from formatting them for paper or as email attachments. These days it's rare to find someone whose email client doesn't support reading HTML, but you still don't want to try to duplicate standard manuscript format in email. Instead you should reformat the message to match the medium.

The generally accepted guidelines are to single-space the text of your story, double-space between paragraphs, and not indent the first line of paragraphs—in other words, to format it just like this blog entry, as if you were posting it online. (Some markets expect you to go so far as to place _underscores like these_ around emphasized text instead of underlining or italicizing. I think that's a little excessive myself, but it's probably important to editors who read email in a text-only client.)

As always, check your market's submission guidelines carefully and be sure to comply with any variations they may specify. And remember, if they request that you send your submission as an attached file, standard manuscript formatting will still apply.

I wrote the original version of my manuscript formatting guide in 1993, modeling it after a much older two-page guide I received from Damon Knight in 1985. Back in those days, even for those who'd made the switch to composing prose on computers, the goal of formatting was to produce a document for submission that looked as much as possible like it had sprung to life rolling through the platen of a typewriter, offspring of holy intercourse between paper, typebar, and ink ribbon.

The world of writing and publishing has changed plenty in these past seventeen, or twenty-five, or God knows how many years. A manuscript used to be the mere blueprint for a printed book or story, instructions in a coded language to the typesetter who would laboriously rework the entire thing into clean, finished type. Now the gap between manuscript and book has shrunk to the size of a computer file. Electronic submissions mean that the only physical keystroke in the life history of a given letter in a published work may well be the one executed by the author himself.

The accepted and acceptable standards of manuscript formatting have evolved to reflect this. Proportional fonts are used more and more in manuscripts, while typographical tricks that were necessary on typewriters now no longer make sense. More and more writers are submitting manuscripts that would have looked unacceptable a decade ago, and more and more editors don't mind this one bit. With the almost complete dominance of the word processor, topics like word-count approximation and end-of-line hyphenation are no longer relevant to most of us. It was long past time to update my format guide to reflect this new reality.

You old-school writers and editors, don't worry. I won't abandon my Courier font and double sentence spacing (more on that topic in a future post) without a fight. If I have my way, the manuscripts I produce fifty years from now will look the same as the ones I produce today. But I did want to acknowledge that mores are changing, and that not everyone agrees anymore about what proper manuscript format even means.

The basics still remain, even if some of the details continue to evolve. To those hundreds of sites that have linked to my format guide over the years, I hope you still find it useful and relevant, if not more so than before. To those who've disagreed with it in the past, sometimes vehemently, I hope you find more common ground here now. And to those stumbling across it for the first time? God help you poor kids for wanting to be writers.

Please let me know what you think of the revised and updated version of "Proper Manuscript Format," and best of luck with your writing.

A reader writes to ask:

I am going to FEDEX my short fiction story to [a certain American] magazine, who were the only gracious ones to send me a response to my e-mail query (out of hundreds of e-mail queries sent). Before i do that, i need to enclose a cover letter with it. Would you have a sample i could use?

That's a bit outside the scope of this blog, but since it does have to do with the image of yourself as a professional writer that you present to an editor, I'll judge it a fair question for consideration here.

A cover letter should almost always be short, simple, and to the point. What it contains will be different depending on the circumstances of your submission.

If you were sending a query or an article cold, you would briefly describe the work, explain what qualifies you to write it, and recap your previous credits (if any). For a fiction query or submission, you really only need the recap of your credits. More cover letter hints can be found with a Google search, and good summing-up can be had in the About.com article "Cover Letter Advice."

Your situation is a little different, though, in that you're submitting a story after receiving a positive response to a query. In this case, your cover letter need only thank the editor for responding to your query and point out that the full manuscript in question is enclosed. Here's the text of a cover letter I've used in similar situations:

Thanks for your interest in The Accidental Terrorist, my memoir about my experiences as a Mormon missionary. Enclosed is the full manuscript for your consideration. I'm always available to talk or answer questions, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

I also want to address your plan to send your story via FedEx: Don't.

The only situation in which you would do that are if 1) they've asked you to get the story to them by a certain date, and 2) FedEx or another express delivery service is the only way to get it there on time. (Possibly also if you're submitting from overseas, but probably not even then.) In most circumstances, your submission will not be anywhere near urgent enough to the market to justify either the expense to you or the need for someone at the publisher's office to receive and sign for the envelope. Just use normal snail mail, and try not to put any annoying burden on the receiver.

A reader writes to ask:

I am submitting a short story collection, but the publisher requests just the first 50 pages.

How do I handle this in terms of what I would write for word count? Do I include the number of words in first 50 pages? The entire manuscript?

You mentioned including a list of where stories had been published. What should this list look like? A simple 1, 2, 3? Should I title the page?

In your cover letter—and this goes for novels as well as collections—you should mention the word count for the full manuscript. That's the information your editor needs in order to understand the size of the book you're proposing. There is no need to give a word count for the 50-page excerpt.

I'm not aware of a hard-and-fast rule for how to list the publication history for your stories, so use your best judgment. I would simply include a page headed "Publication History" at the end of the sample pages. (You can indicate in your cover letter that such a list will follow the excerpt.) It would be fine to single-space within entries on this page, and numbering them is not required. To get even fancier, you could use hanging indents for each item in the list.

For instance, I did it like this for my chapbook, An Alternate History of the 21st Century:

 
Publication History
 

"From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left" originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1993.

"Kevin-17" originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1995.

"Observations from the City of Angels" originally appeared online at Salon.com, 16 July 2003, under the title "Love in the Age of Spyware."

"Strong Medicine" originally appeared online at Salon.com, 10 November 2003.

"Objective Impermeability in a Closed System" and "Not of This Fold" appear here for the first time.

A reader writes to ask:

I came upon your blog when asking a question about short story indentation at ask.com. I don't know if you'll ever read this, but if you do and can spare some time, I'd appreciate a response.

I was just about ready to submit an anthology of short stories to the printer. I am self-publishing some of my stories.

Anyway, for some reason, this afternoon I looked at four short story anthologies in my personal library. In three of them, all of the stories begin without any indentation. In the fourth, there is an indentation, but the first letter of each story is formatted in an oversized capital letter.

I have begun each of my stories with a standard paragraph indentation, just as I note you indicate short stories should be formatted. But now seeing the formatting of the anthologies in my possession, I wonder if I should re-do the formatting of the first paragraph of each story.

You seem to be confusing book design with manuscript formatting. Let me try to explain the difference.

Manuscript formatting is what you do to prepare your book or story for submission to an editor. The editor's job is to decide whether or not to accept the manuscript for publication, and then to offer suggestions on improving the manuscript. He or she will likely make a lot of notes directly on the manuscript itself. That's why, when submitting a manuscript to an editor, you should do the things I suggest in my manuscript formatting guidelines, such as using a big, readable font, double-spacing, indenting paragraphs half an inch, and so on.

Once you and the editor have together hammered that manuscript into acceptable shape, the next stage is book design. This is the process by which your manuscript gets converted into the format in which it will be printed and bound. A lot of arcane knowledge and skill goes into proper book design, but at the very least a few basic things will happen. Your manuscript will be changed to a font more appropriate to a finished book. The text will be single-spaced instead of double-spaced. Your book will be given page numbers that appear in different positions on the left and right-hand pages. Paragraph indentations will likely be made smaller. The book designer will also decide what kind of fancy formatting to use at the beginning of each chapter (or, in the case of a collection, at the beginning of each story), and will apply that formatting consistently throughout the book.

All this is in the interest of making your book attractive and easily read by a reader as opposed to an editor. Though there are still rules and guidelines to follow, there is more latitude in book design than in manuscript formatting. When you pull a book down off your shelf to see how it is laid out, you are looking at book design, not at manuscript formatting.

That's what happens in traditional publishing, anyway. When you self-publish, you are essentially cutting out the middleman—the editor. You are not submitting a manuscript for anyone's consideration. You are paying someone to publish your book, and that means going directly to the book-design stage.

The big question to ask here is whether someone at the publishing company will do the book design for you, or if you have to do it yourself. If the company will do it for you, you may be able to offer some suggestions or preferences but you won't have to worry about questions like whether or not to indent or use initials or drop caps at the beginnings of chapters.

But if the company requires you to submit print-ready copy yourself, then you do have to make those choices, and, in fact, you may have a lot of work ahead of you. Word-processing programs like Microsoft Word can be used to create complex book layouts, but that can be tricky unless you're an expert user. Desktop-publishing programs like QuarkXPress or Adobe FrameMaker are more powerful but are also more complicated to learn to use.

In any event, find out from your publishing company how involved you will need to be in the book-design process before you start worrying about how your chapter headings are going to look.

A reader writes to ask:

At the end of your podcasts, you include the important fact that your podcasts have a Creative Commons license on them, and I'd like to ask how I can be sure my own work has that protection. I've uploaded some of the preliminary drafts of chapters of my unfinished book onto a website in PDF form, and I did put a copyright statement at the bottom essentially stating "it's my work, don't steal it," but I don't know if I need to receive any official documentation of a Creative Commons license, or if there's a more secure way to make my work available for anyone who wants to read it.

I want to preface this (slightly off-topic) discussion by stating that I am not an expert in copyright. Bearing that in mind, the first thing you should understand it that your work is copyrighted automatically by virtue of the fact that you wrote it. You don't need to include an actual copyright statement on your work to make that true (though you can, of course). If you anticipate ever litigating over unauthorized uses of your work, you might consider registering your copyright. (Learn more about American copyright registration from the U.S. Copyright Office at copyright.gov.)

The only reason you would need a Creative Commons license is if you want to be able to make your work available for others to repost, reuse and/or remix for free. With Creative Commons, you can customize the license under which you release your work, choosing which rights you want to reserve and which you want to give away. Cory Doctorow and other high-profile writers routinely release their books online under such licenses, and for some of them it seems to be working out very well indeed. (For more info on Creative Commons and how to license your work, please see creativecommons.org.)

That said, when you post your work online, you always run the risk of someone using it for unauthorized purposes, Creative Commons license or no. Ironically, the safer way to ensure that no one reuses your work is probably to publish it on paper, since it's much easier to reproduce electronic documents than hard copy.

To close on a note more related to manuscript formatting and submitting, please remember that it is rarely necessary to include a copyright notice on your submissions. All reputable editors and publishers understand that your work is implicitly copyrighted, and the risk of their stealing your work and publishing it without attribution and recompense is, in practical terms, nil.