Literary agents read hundreds of manuscripts a week. They aren't looking for reasons to reject yours — but a badly formatted document makes it harder for them to say yes.
The baseline
- Font: 12 pt Times New Roman (or Courier New)
- Spacing: Double-spaced, no extra space between paragraphs
- Margins: 1 inch on all four sides
- Indent: First line of each paragraph indented 0.5"
- Alignment: Left-aligned (ragged right), not justified
- Page numbers: Top-right of every page except the first
- Header:
Author Last Name / TITLE / page #
What not to do
- Don't use a fancy font to "stand out." It won't.
- Don't single-space to fit more on a page. It makes editors hate you.
- Don't include page breaks inside paragraphs.
- Don't use tabs for indents — set the paragraph style instead.
Chapter breaks
Start each chapter on a new page. Add 4–6 blank lines above the chapter number or title, then start the text. No fancy glyphs. No ornament. Save that for the typeset book.
The title page
Single page, no page number. Contact info (name, email, phone, address) flush-left at the top. Centered in the middle-lower half: title, subtitle if any, and "a novel by [name]". Word count rounded to the nearest thousand, bottom-right.
When you're ready for the real thing
Standard manuscript format is for submission. Once a book is acquired or self-published, it gets typeset — a completely different process that turns the plain manuscript into the designed pages readers see. That's a topic for another post.
