How to Format Your Manuscript

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody! I'm John Graden. I'm a professional speaker, trainer and the author of the Imposter Syndrome. Let's talk about how to submit your manuscript for submission. When you're to the point of actually submitting the manuscript - whether it's for an article, a story, a script, a book - you've overcome some certain steps. Obviously you've been invited to submit this manuscript in most cases. This is a crucial fork in the road to publication because if you make a mistake, if you submit it incorrectly, it's the mark of an amateur. You're going to make your own job more difficult. So let's talk about it. I have an example that I've kind of put together and mocked up here. This is typically done on 8 1/2 x 11. I made it a little larger so we could see it in the camera. For this manuscript, in today's electronic world you're not submitted hard copy manuscripts as much as we used to, typically now they're done electronically, but if you are asked to submit one in hard copy you want to make sure you've got your act together and you know how to do this correctly. So in the top left hand part is going to be your name, street address, city, and contact information. Even if you use a pen name use your real name in the top left. Over on the right hand side an estimate of the word count for the book. That's pretty easy to do in Microsoft Word and other word processors to help you get a sense of how large the book is going to be. Typically a non-fiction book is about 50,000 - 55,000 words, and then what rights are you offering. World rights, domestic rights, electronic rights, you want to be specific about that. Double space and type the title - at least the working title for right now - all in caps, double space again, by, and then if you're using a pen name use the pen name there. As far as formatting the actual text, if you're submitting with hard copy double space. That gives the editors a little bit of room to get in there and make notes. If it's being submitted electronically you can double space or space and a half because they can get in there and work either way. Finally, towards the bottom here, if you have multiple subsequent pages, you want to put the title of the book, the author and what page of, like page 2 of 140, 3 of 140, 5 of 140, and then at the very end type in the words end. Make it clear to them that it's over and they're not missing anything. I'm John Graden and I hope that helps you to submit your manuscript correctly. Thank you."