Formatting – TS Hottle Editing

Wadded paper Publishers, especially those in small press, are traumatized by how too many manuscripts come in. Goofy fonts. Weird margins. Author never read the guidelines. (Pro tip: If you’re asking someone to sell your work for you, they make the rules on formatting. End of discussion.) But it gets witchy for editors, too. However, I get it. Writers have so much anxiety about query letters (Maybe agents need to quit talking so much about that. All they do is induce performance anxiety.), acceptance and rejection, and getting seen! And if it’s a first-time novelist, and you’re the lucky editor who gets to read them, you’re reading someone’s baby!

Do a couple of these things, meet with some success, and you, the writer, slowly learn that the final draft for the freelance editor, the agent, or the publisher is a reprieve from the Thing That Will Not Die. Because that shiny new story is a millstone around your neck a year or two later. And while a lot of writers enjoy working with their editors, opening that Word doc with all the track changes turned on usually results in the writer growling, “Oh, what fresh hell is this?” (Because the Thing won’t Die! You still have revisions. Especially if there’s a developmental edit step.)

But how should the manuscript look when it goes to the publisher, agent, or freelance editor?

Most publishers and agents want a specific format: Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced. There’s a title page with the estimated word count and your contact info at the top and the title and your pen name (even if it’s you’re real name. If it’s a pseudonym, put the pen name in quotes.) halfway down the page. If you are subbing print–rare these days, and thank God for small miracles–pagination on every page following the title page is required. If submitting electronically, don’t paginate. Use “#” for scene breaks. Dedication is optional, as are acknowledgments and about the author, but copyright is not needed, even if you registered it. That will be added on publication.

For freelance editors, it’s even easier. Word, Google Docs, OpenOffice all track word counts, so we just need the title page and your prose. However, same rules apply. Times New Roman, 12 point, and double-spaced.

“But why don’t you want page numbers?”

Well, unless I’m looking at a hard copy, which I assure you I will not until your tome is out in the wild, I can see the page numbers in the lower left-hand corner of Word.

“What if the publisher wants something different from what you described?”

That brings me to the most important thing a writer can remember about submitting any kind of manuscript: Read the bloody guidelines! This means you.

“But I want my book to look a certain way. Why can’t I format it?”

Because your book, even if all we do is move commas around and make snarky comments about something funny you wrote, your manuscript and all its carefully formatted pages are going to get altered. At this point, we, the editors, don’t care. Neither should you. One reason is all those funky things you do with formatting come when it’s time to send the book to press. The formatter does that. (I offer formatting services, by the way, just not while I’m editing the book. One step at a time, kiddo.) We are focused on the prose. How are the words strung together. Do you use the Oxford comma or are you wrong? (Another pro tip: Helpful if you tell me your stance on that before I begin reading your manuscript. The publisher will tell you whether you use the Oxford comma or not. An agent has no business having a position on that for anything but their own writing.)

Formatting, if I may beat the dead horse, is how the book will look in print. And if you even partially format a manuscript that has, at best, only a beta read or two, you’re wasting your time. Words are going to move around. Besides, the bigger the publisher, the less control you have over how the book looks, what cover you have, etc. Just because you want that chapter to end on page 34 doesn’t mean that will survive even a proofread.

Instead, focus on sharpening your prose. Read the submission guidelines. If they’re not specific, the above–Time New Roman, 12-point, double-spaced–is sufficient, along with a title page (if subbing to an agent or publisher.) That’s all you need. The formatter will take it from their when your editor is finished.

I recently added formatting to my list of services. I’ll talking pricing and why certain types of projects are more expensive down the page a bit. But for now, I’ll talk about how I format.

I use an app called Atticus, which is web-based but functions like a desktop app. In Windows and on Macs, it behaves more like a phone app, which is really a harness for web data from a specific source. Think about how you manage your mobile phone account. It’s like that. Atticus was created in response to another great formatting product, Vellum, which is strictly a Mac product. Unlike writing and editing tool Scrivener, which started out on the Mac OS X platform because its user base would be more receptive, Vellum prefers to stay inside the late Mr. Jobs’s walled garden. So for some people, the 90s never ended despite the two largest computer companies in the world abandoning hacked versions of the Xerox GUI-based OS from the early 1980s. (Yes, that classic Mac and Windows 3.1 are the exact same thing. Jobs just had better aesthetics than Gates, who liked to use his customers as unwitting beta testers.) So, with a need for a Windows-compatible solution, they created Atticus.

I’ve had the app for about two years now, and it gets better every time I run an indie-pubbed project of mine through it. There are differences between Vellum and Atticus, but the two compare rather nicely. Atticus wants to also be your writing software, though that piece is neither a priority nor really matured yet. Seems developers are aware those of us using Word to write and those in the Cult of Scrivener will simply rise with one voice and yell, “Get off my lawn!” To quote that fine, upstanding paragon of the flower child generation, Chuck Napier*, I reach, brother. I reach.

But since Atticus and Vellum are compatible products that have earned their loyal following, let me speak on behalf of both my fellow Atticus formatters and our Mac-based brethren using Vellum: For the love of all that is holy, profane, and even mundane, please stop sending us manuscripts setup like we’re going to the printer!

I’ve gotten better about asking editing clients not to do this. I make an exception for my primary client, Down & Out Books, since they like to partially format before they set me and my fellow editors loose on it. We’ve grown used to this. It also helps them spot formatting issues before they put the final product together.

But how, oh, pompous IT guy who apparently can write, edit, and format, are we to send you a manuscript?

Simple. Many newer writers (of which I was one once upona) assume they’re responsible for the page headers and numbers. That’s actually the last thing that should happen because… You’re either sending it to a formatter or running it through formatting software yourself. And those nifty packages I just told you about? They do that for you. Where do you want your page numbers? Do you want them or a header (Author name on one page, title on the other.) at the beginning of a chapter? Do you want all your chapters to start on the right-hand side? (My personal preference.) What font do you want to you use? Most of us who format will ignore the ebook formats, but print has a lot of work. In print is where headers, scene breaks, and chapter titles (even when it’s just Chapter 1, etc.) come into play.

A few things that will make your formatter’s (or yours if you DIY it) easier:

We don’t need the page numbers yet. We just need to know if your story begins on Page 1 or whatever page the prologue or Chapter 1 starts on. Every author and every publisher is different. Again, this only comes into play when you’re independent or a really small press.
Make your chapter titles Headers (as in the paragraph styles, not an actual page header. Confusing, but different.) Atticus and Vellum look for those.
This is more for anthologies and collections. For most projects, I will charge a flat $75. If you want the story title in the header and/or the author name for each story, that will cost you a little more. I can’t speak to Vellum’s capabilities (and any Vellum users, please chime in. This is useful information for potential clients, not just mine.) Currently, Atticus does not do separate titles and writers throughout a single book. So that will have to be done in Word, requiring section breaks, really annoying header management, and trying to get the correct trim size in PDF. (Scrivener users, please chime in as Scrivener has awesome formatting capabilities as well.)
Ask if your formatter will do your cover. I send people to GetCovers.com after I have a print page count. That doesn’t happen until after formatting.
Scene breaks. The standard is all over the place, but both Atticus and Vellum give you the option to use an image for your scene breaks or even a blank line. However, it has to know where to break them. Your editor or publisher wants “#” centered to break scenes. Your formatter wants “***”, also centered. Be consistent, because we can always search-and-replace.

*Not only did Chuck make a career playing hard-ass military types, but he famously was a space hippie in the original Star Trek. Chuck looks like he was having fun. Nimoy and Shatner look extremely annoyed in that episode. I reach.