Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Shailen here with Readsie. Today we're going to be talking about formatting your manuscript. Now when you're drafting yourself, you can format your manuscript however you like. You probably have a format that you like to draft in, and just draft in whatever format you like most. However, when it comes time to actually submit your manuscript, you do have to follow industry standard manuscript formatting. Now I'll walk you through all the specifications in this video, but we do have a free template that you can download. If you kind of just want all the work done for you, that's probably going to be the easiest way to go about that. So I'll leave that linked in the description, but if you want to know how to set up your manuscript format yourself and do it all manually, I'll walk you through it and show you some examples in this video. This is how to format your manuscript for submission. It's not how to format your manuscript in an actual book. If you want to format your manuscript for, say, an ebook or a print version of your book, you don't want it to look like this. This is all very standard, manuscript-y. This is for agents or editors to review your manuscript. If you want to format your manuscript for publication, we've got a free tool for that called the Reads eBook Editor that will typeset your manuscript and export it in ebook file formats. Now remember that all of this is unless otherwise stated. If you're submitting somewhere and they have specific formatting guidelines on their website that are different from the ones that I'm about to mention, follow the specifications they give you. But a lot of the time they won't give you any specifications. In that case, follow the guidelines in this video. Start out by setting up your document properly. You want to use a doc or docs file for this. Use a professional file name, your last name, underscore, and then the title. Don't use any spaces in the title, instead use underscores. In the US and Canada, you want to use a letter-sized document and A4 for pretty much anywhere else. You also want to have 1-inch margins all the way around. You can double-check this, but it should be the default on your word processor. You want to use the classic Times New Roman in a standard black 12-point font. Some agents will request a sans-serif font, but unless otherwise specified, and in most cases, you can use Times New Roman. You also want the document to be left-justified, double-spaced, and without any extra lines between paragraphs. You also want to set up half-inch indentations at the start of each new paragraph, except after a scene break or at the start of a chapter. You can adjust all this by going Format, then Paragraph, then Spacing. Include a header with the page number, your last name, and the book's title. If your title is longer than three words, abbreviate it to just a key term. So for example, All the Light We Cannot See could just be All the Light. You can adjust these settings by going Insert, Page Numbers, Position, and then adjust the position to the top right of the page. Then once you've adjusted those settings, double-click at the top of the page to add your header, and right-justify it to align it with the page number. The next step is to set up the title page. This is actually relatively easy. Use 12-point Times New Roman for the title page, just like in the rest of the manuscript. You want to put your contact details in the top left-hand corner, or if you have an agent, put their contact details. In the top right, you want to list the word count, rounded to the nearest thousand. In the center of the page, put the title of your book in all caps, with your name two lines underneath. If you're writing under a pen name, you can use it here, but make sure you use your legal name in your contact info. Then centered at the bottom of the page, you want to put the genre and category. The final step is to format your chapters. Start new chapters a third down the page, with the chapter title all caps and centered. If your chapter has a title, or you want to list, say, the point of view characters, put that one line underneath the chapter number. If you want to have a timestamp, put that two lines above the chapter number, left aligned. So for a scene break within a chapter, where you're indicating either a time skip or a point of view shift, you can use either a pound sign or hashtag, or three spaced asterisks. You also want to write out the end at the end of your manuscript, so that whoever's reading it knows they aren't missing any pages. A few other minor things to note that might come up. Don't use all caps in dialogue. Don't use underlining at any point. If you want to emphasize words, use italics. And only use a single space after a period. Double spacing after a period is outdated. Don't do it. And finally, remember to always, always follow submission guidelines. Double check them, triple check them. Follow the submission guidelines, even if they contradict with something that I just said. So that's how to format your manuscript. Once again, I've left a template in the description that you can download if you don't want to set all of this up manually. Thank you so much for watching. Remember to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss any new videos from us. We've got new writing, editing, and publishing tips every Tuesday and Friday. Until next time. Bye.