How to format a manuscript for literary agents

A literary agent reads dozens of submissions in an evening, and most get set aside before the second paragraph. Standard manuscript format doesn't make a sentence better, but it removes the reasons an agent has to stop reading for the wrong ones. When a submission looks like every other professional manuscript that has crossed their desk, they can focus on the story instead of noticing that something about the page looks off. Get the format right and it disappears. Get it wrong and it's the first thing they see.

Why formatting still matters

Manuscript format isn't a matter of taste. It grew out of decades of publishing houses passing physical pages between editors, typesetters, and printers, and the conventions that survived are the ones that made a stack of paper easy to read and mark up. Agents inherited those conventions and still expect them, because the problems they solve (reading long documents fast, estimating a word count, keeping pages in order) haven't gone away just because the pages are a Word file now instead of a manila envelope.

Font and spacing

Use 12-point Times New Roman or a similar serif font for the body text. Courier New at 12 point is also accepted, and some agents still prefer it because its fixed character width makes a word count easy to estimate at a glance. Whichever you pick, use it through the whole document; don't switch fonts for chapter titles or scene breaks. Double-space the entire body, including dialogue. Don't add extra blank lines between paragraphs on top of the double spacing. Single spacing crams too much text onto a page and leaves no room for notes in the margin, and it's the fastest visual signal that a manuscript wasn't prepared with submission in mind.

Margins and paragraph indents

Set one-inch margins on all four sides. Indent the first line of each paragraph half an inch using your word processor's paragraph or ruler settings, not five taps of the space bar or a tab press. Skip the blank line between paragraphs; the indent already marks a new one. Align the text to the left and leave the right edge ragged. Justified text stretches the spacing between words unevenly to fill the line, a print-typesetting habit that has no place in a document meant to be read and marked up, not laid out for a press.

The header

Every page after the title page carries a running header in the top corner: your last name and a short form of the title, followed by the page number. If a stack of pages ends up out of order, or a printer jams and scatters a chapter across a desk, the header is what lets someone put it back together without opening the file. Keep it plain text, in the same font as the body, with no bold and no box drawn around it.

DOE / THE LAST ORCHARD / 14

Chapter breaks and scene breaks

Start each new chapter about a third of the way down a fresh page. Center the chapter number or title, in the same font as the rest of the manuscript. Don't add an underline or a border, and skip the drop cap some templates insert automatically. Within a chapter, when the scene or point of view shifts without a full chapter break, mark the gap with a single centered pound sign on its own line. Skip the row of asterisks or the string of dashes. The pound sign is the version most agents expect to see, and it survives being pasted into a query manager or converted to plain text without turning into a stray symbol.

The title page

Keep the title page plain. Put your contact information, name, address, phone number, and email, in the top left corner. A few lines below it, or in the top right corner, put an approximate word count, rounded to the nearest thousand. Center the title and your name, or pen name, roughly halfway down the page. That's the entire page. No cover image, no epigraph, no dedication, no table of contents. Those elements belong to a finished book, and adding them to a submission reads as someone dressing up a manuscript instead of revising it.

What agents reject on sight

A decorative font is the quickest way to look inexperienced. A script face or a display typeface reads as a distraction before an agent gets to the first sentence. Tables and text boxes rarely survive being copied into an agent's own reading software, and they tend to arrive as broken fragments of text in the wrong order. An elaborate title page, especially one built like a book cover with an image and a tagline, tells an agent that time went into packaging rather than the pages behind it. None of these choices make the writing better. They only slow down the person trying to read it.

Formatting a full manuscript by hand is where these rules tend to slip: a font that changes between chapters, a header that quietly reverts to single spacing halfway through. Chaptered's manuscript export produces a file in standard submission format, so the version that goes to an agent doesn't need to be rebuilt page by page to match what they're expecting to see.