How to format your mss once accepted
You do NOT need to try to format your file as a book. We do that. When you submitted your manuscript, you submitted a PDF, which preserves the formatting you wanted. What we need once your work is accepted is a manuscript that follows a few simple rules so that we can format it to our stylesheets with a minimum of effort.
You do not need a title page or table of contents. You do not need page headers or footers.
General Rules
1. Under no circumstances… don’t make me shout this… under NO circumstances are you to use spaces or carriage returns to place things on the page. You should submit a file without any double spaces or double carriage returns. Got that?
No double spaces; no double carriage returns. But you always use a double space after a full stop? Well, don’t. Are you still using a typewriter? No. Do you go ‘ding’ at the end of each line? No. So stop.
Are we saying you need to go through and remove all the double spaces after every full stop? And we can't have an empty line between each paragraph so we have to remove every one of those? Yes. That's exactly what we're saying.
Are we saying you need to go through and remove all the double spaces after every full stop? And we can't have an empty line between each paragraph so we have to remove every one of those? Yes. That's exactly what we're saying.
2. Anything that should appear in a Table of Contents (chapter headings, poem titles, etc.) must… don’t make me shout again…
MUST
be formatted as a Heading style: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. If you don’t know how to apply styles in Word, you need to learn. Google is your friend. Do not worry about how Word makes its Heading styles look; we apply our own stylesheets with our own formatting.
3. Do not… NOT… use single quotation marks to indicate direct speech. It leads to all sorts of horrors like the following:
‘But I wouldn’t ever do that,’ whimpered Beatrice. ‘It’s… it’s… it’s… impossible to tell a quotation mark from an apostrophe.’
Use double quotation marks (“) to open direct speech and double quotation marks (”) to close it. If someone is reporting direct speech within direct speech… okay. Then you can use the single quotation marks. But ONLY then. If you have written your whole novel using single quotation marks, it’s a real drag to change it. You can’t just change it automatically because the text is also littered with apostrophes. So it’s a long, slow, boring manual change. Well, better you than us. And you’ll know for next time.
‘But I wouldn’t ever do that,’ whimpered Beatrice. ‘It’s… it’s… it’s… impossible to tell a quotation mark from an apostrophe.’
Use double quotation marks (“) to open direct speech and double quotation marks (”) to close it. If someone is reporting direct speech within direct speech… okay. Then you can use the single quotation marks. But ONLY then. If you have written your whole novel using single quotation marks, it’s a real drag to change it. You can’t just change it automatically because the text is also littered with apostrophes. So it’s a long, slow, boring manual change. Well, better you than us. And you’ll know for next time.
4. Do not indent paragraphs with a tab or (horror!) with spaces. Either define the style to indent the paragraph or leave it left aligned and add space before the normal paragraph style. See rule 5 below.
5. Do NOT use double carriage returns between paragraphs. This is a repetition of rule 1, but it bears repeating because… YOU. If you are not using an indent to mark the paragraph and you want to add space between them, format your paragraph style to add space before the paragraph. Don’t know how? Well, Google does. Look it up.
No double carriage returns.
Special Rules for Poetry
6. Under no circumstances… don’t make me shout this… under
NO
circumstances use
spaces or tabs or carriage returns to place things on the page. You must submit a file without any double spaces, tabs, or double carriage returns.
Yes, this is the same rule as General Rule 1. above. I don’t care about your “move ‘trenchant’ three pixels to the left”. Not at this stage. There is plenty of time for shifting things on the page when we are reviewing drafts.
If a poem has a particularly complex layout, DO NOT try to format the Word document to show it. We have your initial PDF which shows how you expect to see it on the page. You can make a note in square brackets at the top of the page – [SEE PDF FOR HOW THIS SHOULD APPEAR ON THE PAGE] – and leave the formatting to us.
Anything you try to do to make it easier for us will inevitably make it much more difficult. Do not use tabs, do not use spaces to format the position of words on the page. Why? Because our books are formatted to a different page size with different margins and use a different font and different font size. Your space is not our space. Your tab size is not our tab size.
Now, a word about line length. It is quite possible that some of your lines will not fit in a single line in a book. We do all sorts of clever things to make long lines fit, but sometimes, it simply cannot be done. Be prepared to work with us on this. You can’t fight physics. Sometimes, too long is just too long.
Yes, this is the same rule as General Rule 1. above. I don’t care about your “move ‘trenchant’ three pixels to the left”. Not at this stage. There is plenty of time for shifting things on the page when we are reviewing drafts.
If a poem has a particularly complex layout, DO NOT try to format the Word document to show it. We have your initial PDF which shows how you expect to see it on the page. You can make a note in square brackets at the top of the page – [SEE PDF FOR HOW THIS SHOULD APPEAR ON THE PAGE] – and leave the formatting to us.
Anything you try to do to make it easier for us will inevitably make it much more difficult. Do not use tabs, do not use spaces to format the position of words on the page. Why? Because our books are formatted to a different page size with different margins and use a different font and different font size. Your space is not our space. Your tab size is not our tab size.
Now, a word about line length. It is quite possible that some of your lines will not fit in a single line in a book. We do all sorts of clever things to make long lines fit, but sometimes, it simply cannot be done. Be prepared to work with us on this. You can’t fight physics. Sometimes, too long is just too long.
7. If a poem has a title, the title MUST be formatted as a Heading Style. Yes, this is the same rule as General Rule 2. above. But read on…
If a poem does NOT have a title, you should still begin the poem with a BLANK paragraph formatted as a Heading Style. The first line of the poem should then begin on the following line. Do not worry about how Word makes its Heading styles look; we apply our own stylesheets with our own formatting.
If a poem does NOT have a title, you should still begin the poem with a BLANK paragraph formatted as a Heading Style. The first line of the poem should then begin on the following line. Do not worry about how Word makes its Heading styles look; we apply our own stylesheets with our own formatting.