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Different publishers may have different guidelines, which is why it's a good idea to check the publisher's website or their listing in the Writer's Market before you submit, but in general (and for US markets) the thinbgs to remember are;
- white, 8.5 x 11", 20 lb. paper
- printed one side only
- 1.5" margin on all sides
- double spaced
- no extra space between paragraphs
- begin each new para with a five-space indent
- text aligned flush left
Turn off auto-hyphenation- Name & contact info in upper left of first page, single-spaced; name, title, and page number in upper right of all subsequent pages
The insistence on Courier—and not just any Courier, but 10-characters-per-inch Courier—was a holdover from the days of mechanical typesetting. Because Courier is a fixed-width font (that is, every letter takes up the same amount of space on the page) it made it easier for a trained editorial eye to estimate the word count—which was not literally the number of words, but the amount of space a piece would take up on the page, with a single "word" assumed to be six characters long—so 2500 longer words take up more space than 3000 short ones, and the word-count estimate would therefore be higher.
That's the same reason the old style manuals advise you to indicate emphasis with underlines in a MS, rather than bold or italic—not because bold and italic are hard for an editor to read, but because putting them in was the typesetter's job. That's the reason for the wide margins, too: the idea was to get about 250 words per page.
Electronic typesetting has changed all that. Now your book will most likely be set in Quark, with the text imported directly from your MS Word files, with your formatting intact—and the new generation of editors has adjusted to that, and getting their word counts electronically.
There are still some old-school holdouts out there, to be sure. But what I'm hearing now is that any standard, legible serif font is okay: I use Times New Roman, 12 points, and do bolds and italics right in the MS. |
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