Your ultimate guide to formatting your manuscript

The world of formatting manuscripts is hard and horrible and confusing and any other adjective you could use to showcase the horrible nature of this beast. Your content in this stage of the process should be golden. You can either do this yourself or pay someone to do it but if you want to save yourself some money and be able to make changes if you need to, learning to do it yourself might be a good idea. Before we start this ultimate guide, I want to tell you that it is split into parts:

1. Why you need to format?

2. An introduction to working with text

3. Nuts and bolts of formatting

4. Final formatting for publication

Both of these will be covered in this master post. if you want me to make a more in depth guide in the future, do write it in the comments and I can do!

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Why do you need to format?

Formatting your manuscript is super simple and really important. This is very simple if you do it right and quite honestly one of my favorite parts of the process. I get a lot of reward from seeing my novel written and now is formatted into an actual book that I will be able to hold in my hands.

In this section I'll cover the why of formatting. Very simply, from your word document on your computer to a finished book you can hold in your hands, it needs to go through a number of steps to make sure it's presentable and 'up to par'.

Before I dive too deep, I need to farmilarise you with the mechanics of a formatted text.

An introduction to working with text

First in the line of understanding texts is getting to grips with the hierarchy of headings and how they look in a text.

As you can see here in the image, the texts act as a type of hierarchy. The larger the text, the higher in the order the title is (this doesn't nessesarily apply though to all works as a lot of it is personal preference). As you can see, you're able to change these to whatever size and whatever font you would like.

You can do this by clicking onto the style you want to change and selecting the font you want and the size you want. this will change every single one. This is called styles, which is one of the ways to make everything consistent in a manuscript (saving you a lot of time). Let's give you a quick tour of the menu!

First you have your text options (under the size and font selection) as follows: Left, centre, right and justified. Next along is the line spacing options (either single, 1.5 or double). You've got your color selection and the other options you've not got to worry about for a fiction book, unless you want something specific. You've then got a preview with how your text will look and once you're done press OKAY and your changes will be applied.

Now you've had a quick tour, let's have a look at how a manuscript looks before you add styles and afterwards. This is the result before:

This is the result after:

The first one seems so much more messy and unorganized, with the heading segmenting the text. You need to through before proceeding and check all of your chapter numbers/titles are correct and formatted like this, it'll make anything you need doing so much easier. Even though the second is far from professional for self-publishing standards quite yet, there is a lot to do! That formatting and hierarchy makes it look a lot cleaner. Which one would you prefer?

Pre-formatting tip

if you have just written your manuscript without formatting it, there might be quite a lot of work to do depending on how long and 'thick' it is. you need to make sure all of your body text (unless there are exceptions) is formatted to one style and the headings formatted to another style to make it consistent and look beautiful.

Sections

these are one more thing that I need to cover before you can format effectively. There should be a section for each part of your manuscript. If you are submitting for indie publication, you need a front matter (before the story, which starts on the left hand side btw) and a back matter (which comes after the story ends and includes things like extra chapters, authors notes, author bios, ect). You might have added sections to a document before and if you don't know how to do it, then here is the guide.

How to add sections

go to Layout on the menu at the top. Scroll to the breaks and elect the type of break oyu want. I suggest continuous to make it easier but you can decide from even, odd pages, ect. Something else to consider is if you want off and even pages or just ne, but you can decide this on a orange menu that comes up.

Page numbers

You've probally added page numbers into a word document before. If you haven't then please read this guide below. Something worth mentioning, though, is that your front and back matter (before your content and after) do not have to have page numbers on them.

how to add page numbers

this is pretty simple. Navigate to the insert tab and then scroll right until you reach page numbers and then select where you want them. Most manuscripts use these on the bottom centre, but your manuscript as long as you're consistent, can be any you want.

The nuts and bolts of formatting

Now I've given you a crash course on the basics on formatting titles and organisation, I now need to get you ready for formatting with a few more basics. I'm going to split this up into steps.

Step One: Get your headings and body text in order!

You need to make sure your headings are in order before tinkering around with a few more custom options. For this, I would make some styles if you need that, I've got a small guide below! Otherwise, skip onto part two.

How to make styles

1. click on the two arrows next to the styles menu (where you found headings earlier) and then click 'create a style'.

2. You can then name your style

3. customise it like you did earlier with your headings and/or body text. make sure to chose a color and font which matches what you want the style to be for. I.e: signs being in small letters.

Step Two: The fun begins!

Now your text should be a hierarchy of headings, subheadings and you are easily able to navigate it. You can now have a little play around with the look of the text. There are so many things to do in this step and you can get as creative as you like or put it simple. You need to understand the essence of your book to design it carefully and pick the right font (look at other competitors in your genre to understand their graphic design).

If its a non fiction book it might use different typefaces compared to a romance novel which may use a different typefaces to a grand, epic fantasy novel. I want to make this note here, that the formatting will be for self publication mainly, let me quickly cover how you format your work if you are submitting to an Agent.

Formatting for an Agent

The first steps to formatting for an agent is selecting an agent you really. like the sound of and who fits your profile and novel and writing them a query letter, I will write a guide on how to do this soon and also how to select a agent and write a letter to them and what to include, ect. Mainly this is really simple and you should follow their guidelines on their website. Agencies, also, have their own formatting guidelines which will be specificifed on their website. Ultimately, make sure to just follow what they ask to a T.

Now that is written, let me give you a walk through how my work is formatted!

Formatting for self-publication

So you want to go from your novel to your published manuscript? Great, follow my lead! The first step is you're going to want to make sure all your styles are in order.

Once you've done that, you need to make sure all your titles are consistent. That, though, are the basics and you might benifit from going for a walkthrough, which I'll give you now. At the start, the manuscript looks like this:

My first stop on this trip, I want to change up the title and the number. I want to make the title of the chapter in small caps and the chapter number in a larger font.

Now I need to make sure that the manuscript looks presentable. the first part of it to work with the title. (Remember left clicking on a thing in the styles gallery, which is where the title is, allows you to change it!). This is how I've managed to do that:

Now the title is sorted, the subtitle (for chapter titles only, then refer back to above) is next. If you aren't formatting your work with subtitles, you can ignore this step.

This is what the product looks like moderately finished:

Now for the body text!

Something really important to note here is that you should not indent the first paragraph of your manuscript. I've made this mistake and it look me a few years to know that you shouldn't do that. It took a lot of looking at published books and trying to figure out how they did it.

Adding a drop cap

Now I want to make sure that I can add a drop cap because i find these to be great to look at. if you don't want one, then you don't have to use one. For those who do, follow along!

If you want to customise it, you can do so like this:

You can customise it as much as you like through this method:

When all is said and done then your manuscript should look like this:

Now you've got everything in order from a formatting perspective, now to mess around with the page size. You need to make sure that your page size is correct and suitable for your work. Trade paperbacks, for example, tend to use A5 paper. You can select it through doing the following steps:

You can now select what you want from the menu. Careful if you have many sections because you will need to apply them to each section individually.

Now you're ready to go and make your manuscript shine! Go forth and defeat those typos on final around edits and go forth and make the most of your newfound skills. If you would like my help with it, just make sure to contact me! Also read some of my other blog posts on other writing related topics to boost your writing skillset!