What I’m about to show you are the 15 formatting rules that our book editors ask from our authors at Scribe.

There are no rules, only conventions that developed over the past century of book publishing.

You can’t go to the Formatting Police and get official law on Standard Manuscript Format (I wish, that would make things much easier). The 15 Scribe Manuscript Format Rulesīefore we start, understand there are no actual “rules” for formatting. This means manuscript format is the proper way your manuscript should look when you send it in for editing. Things like font size, page color, word count, page number, line spacing, paragraph breaks–everything that goes into the visual appearance. The actual Microsoft Word or Google Docs file that is your book.įormatting is how your manuscript looks and reads. An example of a correctly formatted Manuscript.Ī manuscript is the finished, written book.Step-by-step instructions in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.Industry-standard formatting practices to make sure your manuscript is professional.You can use the same template, over and over. The good news is that it’s easy to set up the standard format for a manuscript, and once you get it right, you don’t have to re-learn it. Charge you more a lot more money to do formatting work you should have done.Not fix your formatting, and do a poor job editing as a result, or.Think you’re unprofessional and edit your book under that assumption.If you send in a manuscript that’s not formatted properly, your editor will do three things: It comes down to readability for the editor. If you don’t, your book will suffer, and you’re going to spend more money than you need to on editing. LyX is released under a Free Software/Open Source license, runs on Linux/Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X, and is available in several languages.I’ll be honest: manuscript formatting is tedious and boring. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor its printed output - or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced - looks like nothing else. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, “finger painting” font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/ LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents ( WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance ( WYSIWYG).

Free fonts for word processor