Formats for Manuscripts

We are in a transition period between working with paper and electronic files. Some publishers' editors and agents still want paper (and some want both), but most book manuscripts eventually go to a publisher via computers. "So what?" you may well ask. No aspect of manuscript formatting is more affected by the difference than the selection of the font to use.

Old style demanded a monospace typeface like Courier which looks like it is typewritten (see William Shunn's venerable advice, for example. Also Chuck Rotham). Others advocate something different. Amazing author Orson Scott Card writes:

But now that publishers are getting the final manuscript electronically, they can handle an ordinary proportional font. Times Roman is standard, but I use Bookman Old Style because the letters are so open and the text is warm and readable.

Don't get confused if you look at Card's web page, because it sports a sans serif font--looks like Arial to me--but that is a web page not a paper page, nor is it a manuscript. Well-known writer Moira Allen suggests:

The truth is, most editors really don't care, as long as the font is readable. (I can state this with confidence, having done a survey of about 500 editors; 90% expressed "no preference" with regard to font.) Very few editors will reject your manuscript because it happens to be in New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, or Times Roman.

If you look up these references, you'll also have all the directions (sometimes conflicting) that you need for all format issues. The point of all of them is to provide a document that is easy on the readers' eyes: margins control the line length and with double spacing and font size (12-point), the word count. All the rest is tradition and common sense to keep the pages tagged to the right author and in the correct order.

The hard part is to remember to do it, or to set up your word-processing program to do it automatically for you. And the title page is always different from all the rest. Simple?