It's all a matter of perspective

If you've been hearing the Muses tap-dancing on the floor of heaven today, I think I know why: at long last, Author! Author!'s epic behind-the-scenes site upgrade has officially drawn to a close. It's still going to take me a while to go back through the literally thousands of pages of archival posts, making sure that they're taking kindly to all of the new bells and whistles, but in theory, the bulk of my blogging time will no longer be sacrificed on the altar of the Internet Deity. Who, I gather, does not hobnob much with the Muses.

Let's get back to the matter at hand: the proper formatting of book manuscripts. As Odysseus no doubt said to his sailors and soldiers on the way home from the Trojan War, I know that it feels as though we've been on this journey forever, but it can't be much farther now.

But hark! Do I hear some discontented murmuring amongst aesthetes out there in the ether? "But Anne," visually-oriented aspiring writers murmur under their breath, so as not to attract the wrath of their nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, "my objection is not so much to the sheer length of time we've spent going over the strictures of standard format for book manuscripts -- not to be confused with the formatting norms for short stories, magazine articles, screenplays, or any other kind of writing intended for professional submission -- but to what I feel these rules are doing to my personal style. The pages look so plain! These rules are stepping all over my right to creative expression.

"So I'm asking you as a friend, Anne: if I believe my writing looks best in a special font like Abadi MT Condensed Extra Bold, and it's how I want my words to look in the published book, why shouldn't I run with it in a submission? Surely, Millicent can look past a little originality of presentation while she is seeking originality in writing."

That's a good question, murmuring aesthetes. The short answer: because Millicent will take your writing more seriously if you format it as she expects to see it -- that is, the way that professional book manuscripts are formatted.

And why might she respond better to that than a more creatively-presented set of pages, murmurers? Is it time to trot out the broken record again?

A manuscript should not resemble a published book in many important respects. Therefore, formatting a submission to reflect one's publication preferences on matters like font (which is the publishing house's decision, anyway, not the author's) will not strike the pros as a creative choice, but a reflection of a misunderstanding of how publishing works -- and an indication that the writer has not yet taken the time to learn the rules of submission.

What's that you're murmuring now? That this is a pretty sweeping set of conclusions to draw from something as simple as font choice or a title page graced with a photograph? Perhaps, but to someone who deals with manuscripts and/or book proposals all day, every day, for years on end, it's not all that far-fetched. After all, it's not as though Millicent's boss, the agent of your dreams, would ever consider submitting your manuscript to an editor at a publishing house in anything but standard format; it wouldn't be taken seriously.

An editor would be too busy staring at that remarkable font choice or non-standard indentation to pay close attention to what's dearest to any writer's heart, the actual writing. So in practice, discontented murmurers, presenting your original writing in standard format is more conducive to getting your creative expression into print, not less.

Counterintuitive, isn't it? That's because you've been looking at the page like a writer, rather than an agent, editor, contest judge, or the Millicent lucky enough to screen submissions for any of the above. It's all a matter of perspective. As international relations professors like to say early and often, where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Don't see why perception of writing talent, like beauty, might lie partially in the eye of the beholder? Okay, tell me: did I take the photograph gracing the top of this post while looking down into an abyss, sideways into an alcove, or up at an impossibly high ceiling?

Out of context, it's hard to tell which way is up, isn't it? (But here's a hint: the purple stuff is flying dust.) Without some orienting landmarks, it's difficult even to know for sure what you're looking at, or from what direction.

That's more or less the same problem the average aspiring writer faces when looking at her own first manuscript or book proposal with an eye to figuring out whether it is formatted correctly. Let's face it, very, very few as-yet-to-be-published writers have ever seen a professional manuscript up close and personal; still fewer have had the opportunity to glance through a professional book proposal.

Oh, there's plenty of advice out there on how it should be done, of course, but as many of you have no doubt noted with chagrin, sources differ. And surprisingly often, the sources most inclined to tell aspiring writers that they have no hope in Hades of landing an agent if their manuscripts don't contain Feature X (because Millicents have, presumably, been trained to reject X-less manuscripts on sight, then rush to a national blackballing database, to urge every other agency in the country not even to open that writer's queries) or if they do contain Feature Y (because not only is Y hopelessly old-fashioned, but spotting even a single instance of it will provoke gales of laughter from Millicent) do not pause in their warning spates long enough to explain why X is desirable in a submission or Y is not.

Heck, most sets of rules don't even specify to which kind of manuscript they're supposed to be applied. No wonder so many aspiring writers labor under the false impression that all writing, anywhere, anytime, should be formatted identically, upon pain of instant rejection. Or, like our murmurers above, just assume that the welter of conflicting guidelines must indicate that Millicent is serious about only the elements common to most sets of rules. Like our murmurers above, they presume that as long as a manuscript is double-spaced and in 12-point type, anything goes.

As you may perhaps have gathered from my many years of revisiting this topic, I have nothing but sympathy for writers at both ends of the spectrum. How on earth is someone new to the game supposed to figure out which end of the manuscript is up, figuratively speaking?

The trick lies in remembering that the principles governing manuscript formatting are based upon practical and historical considerations, not purely aesthetic ones. Shall we wind up that Victrola again?

A manuscript is designed to be easy for the intended audience to read, not for the writer to produce. Thus, while two-inch margins and a cursive typeface may strike a writer as the perfect expressive extension of the spirit of his novel, to someone who reads manuscripts for a living, they're just puzzling. And, frankly, distracting from the writing.

What looks right in a manuscript, in other words, depends upon the perspective of the person reading it. From where Millicent is sitting, non-standard formatting makes it harder for her to pay attention to the writing. Obviously, she reasons, a writer who presents his work in 14-point type or with half-inch margins, is either unaware that these choices are eye-distracting. So rather than impressing her with his creativity, he simply seems out of touch with how publishing works.

And why might Millicent's drawing that conclusion from her first glance at page 1 prove problematic for the submission, campers? Out comes the broken record:

Because professional manuscripts and book proposals are always present in the same way, Millicent knows that her boss, the agent of your dreams, would have a hard time convincing an editor at a major publishing house to read even the first page of an unprofessionally-formatted manuscript. She also knows that taking on a manuscript by a writer unaware of that will be more time-consuming to represent than one already familiar with how submissions to publishers work.

Ponder that eternal verity, please, until we meet again in Part II.

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Part II: okay, show me why it matters

Unfortunately for lovers of wacky typefaces everywhere, a choice as small as a typeface can make an astonishingly great difference to how professional your work looks to the pros. That comes as something of a surprise to most aspiring writers -- who, not entirely surprisingly, tend to regard that particular decision as a purely aesthetic one. "Why," they ask, and not unreasonably, "should it matter? Good writing's good writing, isn't it?"

Well, yes and no. Yes, good writing is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. No, insofar as good writing tends to have less impact on the average Millicent when it's presented in an unusual typeface.

To see why, let's once again start at the top of the submission packet, taking a gander at the same title page in three different typefaces. Here it is in 12-point Times New Roman, one of the two preferred typefaces:

That's what anyone sitting in Millicent's seat would expect to see -- and before we move on, would you join me in tap-dancing with the Muses over how much crisper that image is than any of the page shots I've been able to post within recent memory? Nearly brings a tear to the eye, that does. Should your emotional intensity be interfering with your ability to spot the small details, try holding down the Command key and pressing + to enlarge the image.

Now that we have it in focus, let's look at precisely the same information, presented in another font. Let's assuming that Aunt Jane had favored 12-point Helvetica so strongly that she just couldn't resist submitting in it:

The letters in this version are quite a bit bigger than in the first, aren't they? Not enough so to appear to be rendered in, say, 14-point font, but large enough to make Millicent wonder whether the word count is accurate. (Estimated word count does, after all, vary by typeface: Times New Roman is estimated at 250 words/page, Courier at 200. More on that below.)

Honestly, do you want her speculating about your credibility before reading the first page of your manuscript? Now that we have seated ourselves firmly in Millicent's office chair, we can see that Aunt Jane's choice of Helvetica, while not a deal-breaker, does not necessarily present her manuscript to its best advantage. Even before the text starts, it's distracting.

Does that increased volume of disgruntled ethereal muttering mean some of you are longing to see a typeface that would be a deal-breaker for Millicent? Happy to oblige. Very few of us who read for a living would be even vaguely tempted to turn the page and start reading this one.

Can't really blame Millicent for regarding the entire manuscript with a jaundiced eye, can we? Despite containing all of the information that a title page should include -- in the right places and in the right order, no less -- this page simply screams that Aunt Jane has not thought about her future agent's ease or comfort in reading. Clearly, she was so intent upon expressing herself via font that she neglected to consider the preferences of someone who might conceivably want to judge her writing.

Still resisting the concept? Okay, slip back into Millicent's moccasins for a second, pretend you've been screening submissions for the last seven hours, and feast your eyes on this:

Ah, that one caught some of you originality-huggers by surprise, didn't it? "But Anne," those who want to stand out from the crowd protest, "I've been submitting my writing on slightly tinted paper for years. White is just so boring, and besides, everybody uses it. I'm merely being strategic: if every other submission Millie sees today is white, mine will automatically catch her eye, right?"

Well, yes, but not for the right reasons -- and not in a manner even remotely likely to convince her that this submission, out of the hundreds she will be perusing this week, is the one that will wow her boss. Yes, regardless of how good the writing might be.

Why? Look for yourself: could the agent possibly submit this manuscript to a publishing house in this typeface and on this oddly-colored paper? Would it stand a fighting chance if she did?

And if it doesn't, does presenting the manuscript in this manner make sense at any stage of submission?

The answers to all three of those questions is a resounding "By Jove, no!" And that's sad, considering that the book this title page covers is, lest we forget, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. The moral, should you care to know it:

Even the best writing can be placed at a competitive disadvantage by unprofessional presentation. Standard format is the good writer's friend, not her enemy.

Is all of that ambient clanking is a thousand writers' hackles being raised? "But Anne," outraged voices thunder, "aren't you making Millicent out to be pretty darned shallow? Whenever I've heard agents and editors asked at conferences or on their blogs about whether cosmetic issues can get a manuscript rejected, they often disclaim the notion with scorn. I've even heard a few of them say that they don't care about issues like typeface, spaces after periods and colons, or where the chapter title lies -- and that strikes me as significant, as I've never, ever heard one say it was okay to let a query letter run longer than a single page. Isn't it the writing all that matters in a submission, ultimately?"

Again, yes and no, hackle-raisers. Yes, the writing matters -- and no, it's not all that matters.

Naturally, the writing matters most in a submission, with freshness, audience-appropriateness, marketability, and fit with the agent or editor reading it jostling for second place. Equally naturally, and something that I often point out, individual agents, editors, and even contest judges harbor individual preferences as well and have been known to express them at conferences. Or on their blogs, Twitter feeds, and over drinks at that bar that's never more than a hundred yards from any literary conference in North America.

One person's pet peeve, however, may not be another's. Since few aspiring writers have access to the industry-specific information required to find out the preferences of every agent to whom they are submitting, adhering to standard format minimizes the probability of running afoul of unknown annoyance-triggers.

Then, too, adopting the norms of standard format and clinging to them like an unusually tenacious leech will also help you preserve your sanity throughout the often-protracted submission process, for the reason I mentioned in passing above -- have you seen how many conflicting sets of ostensibly authoritative manuscript formatting rules are floating around out there?

Honestly, trying to apply every single one of the expressed opinions to your manuscript will drive you 100% nuts. Don't even try. However, because personal (and genre) preferences do exist, it's always worth a submitter's time to double-check an agency or small publishing house's submission guidelines, just in case they call for something wacky. That's worth throwing another record on the machine, surely.

If an agent or editor to whom you are submitting asks for something different, for heaven's sake, give it to her. If, as is almost always the case, the guidelines don't specify, keep the presentation unprovocative and professional so that your writing may shine without visual competition.

In other words, it's only prudent to adhere to the strictures of standard format, rather than assuming, as so many aspiring writers do to their cost, that the writing is the only thing that matters.

Remember, where you stand depends on where you sit. It's a matter of perspective. And from both Millicent and the aspiring writer's perspective, taking the time to present writing professionally is genuinely worth it.

Let us observe a moment of silence to commemorate that. We'll recommence banging the drums and cymbals in Part III.

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Part III: well, but I once heard...

Admittedly, one does occasionally hear of the mythical isolated case of a kind, literature-loving agent has looked past bizarre formatting in order to see a potential client's, well, potential. One also hears of isolated cases where a manuscript rife with spelling and grammatical errors gets picked up, or one that has relatively little chance of selling well in the current market being recognized for the work of genius it is and swept to bestsellerdom. The age of miracles has not entirely passed, apparently.

Have you ever noticed, though, how seldom a specific book title comes attached to those stories? Or, when they do, it turns out on closer examination that the writer in question roomed in college with a major agent, or is married to a senior editor at a large publishing house, or used to be a Monkee? If one happens to fall into such a category, one might well encounter an unusual leniency. Ditto if one happens already to be a household name.

Before anyone raises his hand, though, we've all heard offbeat How I Got Discovered Stories at conferences. But -- and this is a BIG but -- these cases get talked about because they are exceptions, and rare ones at that. (They also tend to have happened before the mid-1980s; agents used to take chances on long shots more often.) 9,999 times out of 10,000, though, a submission's tumbling into any of the pitfalls we've been discussing will result in, if not instantaneous rejection, then rejection upon Millicent's lighting upon the next problem in the manuscript.

Those pesky hackles are clacking again, aren't they? "Okay," the hackled concede, "I can understand how Millicent would be tempted to skip reading submissions presented like the last two examples, where she's likely to strain her eyes. But if presentation is so darned important, why don't aspiring writers hear about it more often at conferences, in articles about submission, or even just in discussions amongst ourselves?"

Excellent question, h-raisers. I can't say for sure, of course, but it wouldn't be going out too far on an interpretive limb to speculate that a sane, sensible individual with a reputation to protect might be slightly reluctant to stand up in front of 500 eager potential submitters and say, "Look, if you're planning to submit a grimy photocopy of your book, or insist upon presenting it in 10-point type, or not indenting your paragraphs, just don't bother to query me, okay?" Having once seen a well-meaning agent tell an indignant crowd that he only took query letters seriously if they came from writers he met at conferences (yes, really; there were many, many witnesses), I can tell you precisely what would happen if some honest soul did take this astounding step: instantly, 500 pens would scrawl on 500 programs, DO NOT QUERY THIS ONE; HE'S MEAN.

Which would rather defeat the agent's purpose in coming to the conference to recruit new clients, would it not?

As a veteran teaches of writing and formatting classes, I can think of another reason that a speaker might want to be careful about such pronouncements: an agent or editor doesn't have to speak at many conferences (or blog for very long) before recognizing that anything she says about submissions is likely to be repeated with the éclat of a proverb, to borrow a phrase from Aunt Jane, for years to come amongst the writing community.

You might be surprised how often it happens. I've heard offhand comments made from the dais, or even jokes, being debated for hours in conference hallways, particularly if those comments happen to relate to the cosmetic aspects of querying and submission. 5-4 Supreme Court decisions are routinely discussed with less vim and vitriol. Some particularly vehement agents' pronouncements have been more commented upon than St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians.

Okay, so that last is a slight exaggeration. My point, should you be interested, is that the very notion of from-the-horse's-mouth rightness carries such a luster that such speakers are constantly in extreme danger of having everything they say quoted back to them as an inflexible rule.

Which is why, I must admit, I occasionally experience qualms about presenting the rules of standard format here at all. On the pro-regulation side, we are talking, after all, about an industry that both values creativity and considers submitting a book proposal in anything but a black folder dangerously radical. (Yes, really.) On the con side, literally nothing else I talk about here consistently raises as much writerly ire.

The very topic of manuscript presentation seems to be emotionally trying for a lot of writers -- disproportionately so, from where Millicent is sitting. Tell an aspiring writer that his dialogue is turgid, or his pacing drags, or he's left a necessary section out of his book proposal, and most of the time, he'll be at least curious about why you think so. (If a bit defensive.) If you tell him that his protagonist's sister is Ruth for the first 72 pages, and Renée thereafter, he might actually thank you.

Yet suggest to the same writer that he might be better off reformatting his manuscript to include such niceties as paragraph indentation or moving his page number to the slug line, and a good quarter of the time, he'll look at you as though you'd just kicked his grandmother. Thrice.

Go figure, eh?

Presentation issues definitely do matter. Which is, again, not to say that the quality of the writing doesn't. But -- and again, this is a BIG but -- as we've discussed, rejection decisions are more often than not made on page 1 of a submission. Sometimes even within the course of the first paragraph. If a manuscript is hard to read due to a funky typeface or odd spacing or just plain poor print quality, Millicent may just pass on reading it at all.

While these phenomena are, in fact, quite widely recognized as true, the person who announced them this baldly from the dais at a literary conference would swiftly find herself covered head to foot with flung tomatoes in twenty seconds flat. Metaphorically, at least. Which is why I'm going to keep saying it until I'm blue in the face and you die of boredom:

From the perspective of someone who reads manuscripts for a living, professional formatting is simply the least distracting way a book can possibly be presented. Adhering to the industry's cosmetic expectations renders it more likely that an agent or editor will concentrate upon the beauty of the writing, not less.

They can't fall in love with your good writing until they read it, can they? So don't you want to do everything within your power to convince them that your manuscript is the one that deserves more than a cursory glance?

Of course you do. Instead of thinking of the rigors of standard format as a series of unimportant (or even silly) superficial choices, try regarding them as translating your calling card, a means of catching Millicent's tired eye and informing her that this is a manuscript that should be taken seriously.

"Okay, Anne," lovers of Bauhaus 93 sigh. "What fonts would be the least, you know, Millicent-provoking for me to use?"

I would highly recommend using either Times, Times New Roman, or Courier, both on the title page and in the manuscript. These are the standards of the industry, and thus the least likely to raise Millicent's ever-knitted eyebrows. Like other strictures of standard format, there's a pretty good reason for this one: from where she is sitting, word count estimation is always predicated upon one of these typefaces.

Why is the question of estimating relevant on a title page? Again, we must look to Millicent's perspective: unlike word counts in articles or short stories, word counts in book manuscripts are generally estimated, not based upon the actual number of words. For short stories and articles, use the actual total.

Was that giant gust of wind that just knocked my desk over your collective gasp of astonishment? I'm not entirely surprised; a lot of aspiring writers are confused on this point. "But Anne," they shout, and who can blame them? "My Word program will simply tell me how many words there are in the document. Since it's so easy to be entirely accurate, why shouldn't I be as specific as possible? Or, to put it another way, why would an agent or editor ask for the word count, then expect me to guess?"

Would you fling something at me if I said once again that this is a matter of perspective? From Millicent's seat, the answer is pretty obvious: industry practices dictate how manuscripts are handled, not the whims of the fine folks at Microsoft. The Microsofties I know are sterling human beings to a man, but they're hardly experts on the publishing industry's requirements.

And really, why should they be? We're going to be talking about that in Part IV.

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Part IV: is it time yet to get back to the big picture?

Contrary to astonishingly popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, just because Word is set up to allow certain things -- giving you an exact word count, for instance, or access to 147 different fonts -- doesn't mean that the publishing industry wants writers to do things that way. (And if you doubt that, consider the doubled dash vs. the automatic emdash Word favors.) Word processing programs came into use long, long after standard format for manuscripts, after all; why should agents, editors, and Millicents allow computer programmers to dictate what strikes them as professional?

Perspective, people: which makes more sense, assuming that the word count on your title page will be read by Millicent -- or Bill Gates?

I cannot, naturally, speak to Mssr. Gates' views on the subject, but here is why Millicent would care on the estimation front. The Times family is estimated at 250 words/page; Courier at 200. So a 400-page manuscript in Times New Roman is estimated to be roughly 100,000 words if it's in Times -- something Millicent should be able to tell as soon as she claps eyes on the submission's title page, right? -- and 80,000 if it's in Courier.

Wondering why anyone would estimate at all? Since word length vary, and because manuscripts shrink around 2/3rds in the transition to published book, the number of pages is actually a better measure of how much it will cost to print and bound the thing. So if your title page says that your baby is 86,250 words and it's in Times New Roman, a pro will just assume that it's 345 pages (345 x 250= 86,250) rather than flipping to the bottom of the stack of papers to check. If it's in Courier, she would conclude that it is 431 pages -- and that your math skills are not particularly good.

Now, in the world as we know it, a 400-page manuscript in TNR is usually closer to 115,000 words than 100,000; as any writer who has compared the estimated word count for her book with the total her word processing program so kindly provides, they tend to differ wildly. But word count, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder: a novelist whose title page reported, accurately, that her 400-page novel was 115,000 words might well see it rejected out of hand on the grounds that it was too long.

Why? Well, math may not have been Millicent's best subject, either (as one might expect, the inmates of agencies tend overwhelmingly to have been English majors), but she can do third-grade multiplication in her head: 115,000 words at 250 words/page would equal a 460-page manuscript. That's quite a bit longer than editors tend to expect first novels in most genres to be these days; at around 450 pages, binding costs rise significantly.

In other words: next!

Boy, those hackles are getting a workout today. "But Anne, why would Millicent want to estimate at all when she has a submission in front of her? If she wants to know how long it is, why doesn't she just flip to the last page and check the page number?"

I could give you a long song and dance about how much her wrists hurt from opening all those query envelopes all day, or how her secret midnight e-mail orgies have rendered pinching a torture. She has a hard job, truly. In practice, the answer is far less personal than practical: because the word count is right there on the title page.

Tell me, hackle-raisers: why should she doubt its accuracy? Unless, say, the title page were in a non-standard typeface like Helvetica, she's going to assume that an aspiring writer familiar enough with standard format to include the word count on the title page would also know how to estimate it accurately.

I know, I know: from a writer's perspective, that's kind of a wacky assumption. But her chair boasts a different view than ours. Besides, how exactly could she manage to turn to page 400 of a manuscript, when her boss requested that the writer send only the first 50, without resorting to some pretty impressive maneuvering through time and space?

I'm aware that I'm running long today, but in the interest of clarity, let's invest another few minutes in turning to the first page of the submission, to see how much of a difference font and typeface make at first glance. Here's a correctly-formatted page 1 in Times New Roman. Just for giggles, I'm going to use that notorious editorial nightmare, the opening paragraphs of A TALE OF TWO CITIES:

Now let's take a peek at the same page, also correctly formatted, in Courier. Note how many fewer words per page it allows:

Got both of those firmly imbedded in your brainpan? Good. Now format your first pages that way for the rest of your natural life.

Just kidding -- you want to see why it's a good idea, don't you? Okay, take a gander at the same first page, not in standard manuscript format. See how many differences you can spot:

Fascinating how just a few small formatting changes can alter the presentation, isn't it? As with our earlier title page examples, it's exactly the same writing, but it just doesn't look as professional. To Millicent, who reads hundreds of pages per day, the differences between the last three examples could not be clearer.

And yet, if we're going to be honest about it, there were really very few deviations from standard format in the last example. For those of you playing at home, the typeface is Georgia; the chapter title is in the wrong place, and there isn't a slug line. Also, the page is numbered in the wrong place -- the default setting, incidentally, in many word processing programs.

In all probability, none of these infractions against the rules of standard format would strike our Millie as serious enough to cause her to toss a submission aside as soon as she noticed them. But when poor formatting is combined with literary experimentation -- like, say, that paragraph-long opening sentence ol' Charles managed to cough up -- which do you think she is going to conclude, that Dickens is a writer who took the time to polish his craft, or that he just doesn't know what he's doing?

It's never in your best interest as a writer to tempt a professional reader to draw the wrong conclusion about your devotion to your craft. Remember, where a manuscript stands depends upon where the reader sits.

Before any hackles start racing skyward again, I hasten to add: where the submitting writer sits often makes a difference to a reader's perception, too. Her reception of that last example is very likely to be different before Dickens became a household name or after. Once he was established, he could get away with more.

Unless you happen already to be famous, though, I wouldn't advise taking the risk. (And if you do happen to be famous, could I interest you in writing a back jacket blurb?)

In fairness to Millicent, it's highly unlikely that it would even occur to an established Charles to deviate this markedly from standard format. Experience working with an agent or editor would discourage it. The longer you remain in the business, the more those little things will strike you as just, well, matters of right and wrong. As, fortunately or not, they do Millicent and her ilk.

Come to think of it, that sense of fitness may well be the reason that discussions of formatting tend to become so vitriol-stained. We all like to be right, and propriety is in the eye of the beholder. After all, each of us is most familiar with the view from her own chair.

Pulling back from one's own perspective can be most helpful. There's a reason that it's called the bigger picture, people.

In that spirit, let's take a longer view of our original photo, to situate ourselves:

Substantially simpler to tell up from down now, isn't it? Taking a broader perspective, you can see that the green light on the left is coming from a stained-glass window; on the left, there's a decorative support beam. From the myopic tight shot, it was far less obvious that this was a cathedral.

Making sure your writing is framed properly can have a similar effect. Keep up the good work!

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Me and you and a boy? girl? dog? named Snafu

Sorry about my recent slow rate of posting, campers; as the sharper-eyed among you may have noticed, we here at Author! Author! have been experiencing what the old television shows used to call euphemistically technical difficulties. Quite a bit of progress can be seen behind the scenes, I assure you, but it will be a little while before the full benefits will be visible from your side of the page. Mea culpa, and thanks for hanging in there.

I've been hesitant to keep pressing forward with our series-in-progress on manuscript formatting while the visual examples are still acting a bit squirrelly. Writers' conference season is almost upon us, however, and proper formatting can make the difference between an enthusiastically-read post-pitch submission and one that our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, picks up with trepidation, so I'd like to smuggle the standard format basics into everyone's writing tool kit sooner rather than later. Let us press on unabashed, therefore.

When last we broached the subject, I showed how the first page of text does not, from a professional perspective, make an adequate substitute for a title page in a book manuscript -- a demonstration that, if past is any prologue, may well have left some of you scraping your jaws off the floor. Don't be too hard on yourself, if so: most first-time submitters simply assume that if a manuscript does include a title page -- and a hefty majority of submissions arrive without one -- it should be a replica of a hoped-for book cover. That's what they've seen in bookstores (ask your grandparents, children), so that must be what looks professional to the professionals, right?

As I hope those of you who have been following his series have already shouted: heavens, no. Standard format for manuscripts does not resemble what's on the printed page of a published book in many respects.

You'd be surprised at how many aspiring writers are not aware of that, judging by how many single-spaced, non-indented, photo-heavy submissions turn up at agencies. Even the more industry-savvy rookies -- the ones who have taken the time to learn that book manuscripts must be double spaced, contain indented paragraphs, be printed on one side of the page, etc. -- are frequently unaware that that in traditional publishing circles, the author typically has very little say over what does and does not grace the cover.

Millicent is quite cognizant of that fact, however; experience watching books travel the often bumpy road from initial concept to publication have shown her that cover art is almost invariably the publishing house's choice. So is pretty much everything on the dust jacket, including the back jacket copy, the book's typeface, and every other cosmetic consideration. So when she opens requested materials to find something like this:

she sees not a manuscript perfectly ready for publication -- that's what some of you, thought, right? -- but evidence that the sender does not understand the difference between a published book and a manuscript. At minimum, this admittedly rather pretty top page demonstrates that the writer does not understand that throughout the publication process, the title page of a manuscript is not just its top cover.

Nor is it merely the shouted-out declaration of the book's title and who wrote it, another popular choice in submissions. What possible practical purpose could a title page like this serve at the submission stage?

Not much doubt about what it's called or who wrote it, true, and the typeface certainly blares those two facts with gratifying gusto, but how precisely does this (unusually small, for some reason best known to the writer) sheet of paper fulfill any of the functions the agent or small publisher to whom it was submitted might need it to serve? How, in fact, is it a better title page than the most common of all, the following?

No, your eyes are not deceiving you: the single most popular title page option in manuscript submissions is none. It's an especially common omission in e-mailed submissions. Half the time, e-mail submitters don't even include a cover letter; they just attach the requested number of pages. "I've been asked to send this," title page-eschewers murmur, doubtless to convince themselves, "so the agency has to know who I am. Besides, my name and the title are in the slug line -- that's the writer's name and title in the upper right margin of the page, should anyone have been wondering. Surely, that's enough to identify the manuscript."

Well, it might be, if Millicent were fond of guessing games, but hands up, anyone who seriously believes that agents ask to see so few manuscripts in any given year based upon the tens of thousands of queries they receive that any requested materials must be instantly recognizable not only to their weary peepers, but to the entire staffs of their agencies. Keep those hands up if you also cling to the writer-flattering notion that agents and editors hearing pitches at conference find so few of them convincing that they could easily identify both book and writer by the storyline alone.

Found better uses for your hands, did you? Glad to hear it. But if presenting a fantasy book cover isn't the point of including a title page, and if its main goal is not to shout that you -- yes, YOU -- managed to pull off the quite impressive achievement of writing an entire book or book proposal, what meaning is this poor, misunderstood page supposed to convey to Millicent?

Its mission is not particularly romantic, I'm afraid: a properly-formatted title page is simply a quiet, practical piece of paper, containing a specific set of marketing information any agent or editor would need in order to bring your book to publication. If Millicent doesn't spot that information as soon as she claps eyes on the pages her boss, the agent of your dreams, asked you to send, her first impression of your submission will be that you've made her life a little harder.

Call me zany, but I doubt that was Ann Gardiner's goal when she put all of that effort into designing that pretty faux book cover and popped it into the envelope with her first 50 pages. I would be surprised if Ama Narcissist actively desired to make it difficult for an agent who fell in love with her writing to contact her. And I would be downright flabbergasted if the e-mailing submitter that just didn't think to include a title page with his Word document hadn't just assumed that Millicent keeps every single one of the thousands of e-mails her agency receives in any given week in a special file, all ready to be leafed through so if her boss wants to see more of the manuscript, she can waste 17 hours trying to track down the sender's original e-mailed query. Because all that's required to respond to an e-mailed submission is to hit REPLY, right?

Again: heavens, no. Any reasonably established agency may be relied upon to be juggling far, far too many submissions at any given time.

Do those inarticulate gasps of frustration mean that some of you have under-labeled manuscripts in circulation at this very moment, or merely that you have questions? "But Anne," hyperventilating writers the English-speaking world over gasp, "I'm an inveterate reader of agency and small publishing houses' submission guidelines, and they rarely state a preference for including a title page. What gives?"

What gives at the moment, my air-deprived friends, is the word count limit. It will reset in Part II.

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Part II: but the pictures are so pretty!
originally posted: April 24, 2013

it's actually pretty uncommon for submission guidelines to get down to the nitty-gritty of page formatting. As much as the strictures of standard format may seem new and strange to an aspiring writer confronting them for the first time, it's just how the publishing industry expects professional book writing to be presented. A title page is so presumed to be part of a properly-formatted manuscript that many submission guidelines might not bother to mention it at all.

The relative silence of submission guidelines may be why, in practice, submitting without a title page is far more common than including one, especially for electronic submissions. This presentation choice is particularly common for contest entries, perhaps because contest rules seldom come right out and say, "Hey, buddy, include a title page, why doncha?" -- and they virtually never say, "Hey, buddy, don't bother with a title page, because we don't need it." Instead, they usually just ask entrants to include certain information with their entries: the category the writer is entering, perhaps, with contact information on a separate sheet of paper.

Which has, you may be interested to hear, a name amongst those who handle manuscripts for a living. It's called, if memory serves, a title page.

Ah, a forest of hands has sprouted in the air. "But Anne," murmur those of you who currently have submissions floating around out there without your contact information attached, "I'd like to go back to that part about the expectation that a manuscript should include a title page being so widespread that a pro putting together submission guidelines might not even think to bring it up. Assuming that pretty much everyone else whose submission will land on Millicent's desk on the same day as mine was in the dark about this as I was until I read your recent fine-yet-sleep-disturbing post, should I even worry about not having included a title page? I mean, if Millie were going to reject manuscripts on this basis alone, she'd be a non-stop rejection machine."

Of course, she isn't a non-stop rejection machine. She's a virtually non-stop rejection machine. She genuinely gets excited about quite a few submissions.

But that wasn't really the crux of your question, was it, worried submitters? You're quite right that this omission is too common to be an instant-rejection offense at most agencies, despite the fact that including it renders it far, far easier for the agent of your dreams to contact you after he has fallen in love with your writing. However, any deviation from standard format on page 1 -- or, in the case of the title page, before page 1 -- will make a manuscript look less professional to someone who reads submissions day in, day out. It lowers expectations about what is to follow.

To gain a better a sense of why, let's revisit a couple of our examples from earlier in this series. Welcome back, R.Q. Snafu and Faux Pas. See if you can spot where they went astray.

While opening pages like these do indeed include the requisite information Millicent or her boss would need to contact the author (although Faux Pas' pulls it off it better, by including more means of contact), cramming all of it onto the first page of text doesn't really achieve anything but saving a piece of paper, does it? What precisely would be the point of that? This tactic wouldn't even shorten the manuscript or contest entry, technically speaking: the title page is never included in a page count. That's why pagination begins on the first page of text.

So what should a proper title page for a book manuscript or proposal look like? Glad you asked:

Got all three of those last three images indelibly burned into your cranium? Excellent. Now weigh the probability that someone who reads as many manuscripts per day as Millicent -- or her boss, or the editor to whom her boss likes to sell books -- would not notice a fairly substantial difference in the presentation.

Exactly. Now assess the likelihood of that perception's coloring any subsequent reading of the manuscript in question.

The answers are kind of obvious once you've seen the difference, are they not? Trust me, Millicent will have seen the difference thousands of times.

Again, I see many raised hands out there in the ether. "But Anne," upright individuals the globe over protest, "I get that including all of the information in that last example would render it simpler for a Millicent who fell in love with the first three chapters of MADAME BOVARY to contact Mssr. Flaubert to ask for the rest of the manuscript. I'm not averse to making that part of her job as easy as humanly possible. However, I don't quite understand why my presentation of that array of facts need be quite so visually boring. Wouldn't my manuscript be more memorable -- and thus enjoy a competitive advantage -- if the title page were unique?"

At the risk of damaging your tender eardrums, HEAVENS, no! To folks who handle book manuscripts for a living, a title page is most emphatically not the proper place for individual artistic expression; it's the place to -- stop me if you've heard this before -- provide them with specific information necessary for dealing with a submission.

Anything else is, in a word, distracting. To gain a sense of why, let's take a gander at another type of title page Millicent sees with great frequency -- one that contains all of the right information, but is so unprofessionally formatted that the care with which the writer followed the content rules gets entirely subsumed in the visuals.

Where should I even begin with this one? It's pretty, undoubtedly, but would anyone care to start listing any of the five things wrong with it?

If you immediately zeroed in on the picture, give yourself a gold star for the day. Since there is literally no chance that any image a writer chooses to place on a manuscript or proposal's title page will end up on the published book's cover, what's the point of placing it here? Decorating your submission's title page with photos or drawings will just seem bizarre to Millicent. (And that goes double for Mehitabel, the veteran literary contest judge. She is likely to emit a well-bred little scream when she opens the entry envelope.)

Award yourself two gold stars if you said Ms. White should nix the red lettering -- or any lettering that isn't black, for that matter. Like every other page in the manuscript, the title page should be printed in black ink on white paper. No exceptions.

Help yourself to a third gold star out of petty cash if you also caught that her contact information should not have been centered. Pin a great big blue ribbon on yourself, too, if you pointed out that Ms. White used two different typefaces here, a classic standard format no-no. Not to mention the fact -- although I do seem to be mentioning it, don't I? -- that the type size varies.

Feel free to chant it with me, axiom-lovers: like everything else in the manuscript, the title page should be entirely in 12-point type. It should also be in the same font as the rest of the manuscript.

With the usual caveat: unless an agent specifically requests otherwise, of course. Or contest's rules; double-check for title page restrictions. (Why? Well, since the title page is generally the first part of an entry Mehitabel sees, not adhering to the rules there can knock an otherwise promising submission out of finalist consideration before she has a chance to read the first line of text. Contest rules exist for a reason, you know.)

You may place the title -- and only the title -- in boldface if you like, but that's about as far as it's safe to venture on the funkiness scale. Do not, I beg you, give in to the temptation of playing with the typeface. No matter how cool your title page looks with 24-point type, resist the urge, because Millicent will be able to tell from across the room if you didn't.

Don't believe that size matters? See for yourself:

Quite a difference, isn't it? Apart from Mssr. Smith's tragic font choice and his not having countermanded Word's annoying propensity to reproduce e-mail addresses in blue ink, did you notice any potentially-distracting problems with this title page?

I see some of you jumping up and down, waving your hands frantically, but the word limit blocks your answers. We shall compare notes in Part III, never fear.

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Part III: I've gotta be me...or do I?
originally posted: April 24, 2013

How did you do? If you said that the last example included both a slug line and a page number in the bottom right corner, snag yourself yet another gold star. Add whipped cream and walnut clusters if you mentally added the reason that those additions are incorrect: because the title page is not the first page of text, and should not be formatted as if it were.

While I'm on a boldface kick, title pages should not be numbered. This means, incidentally, that the title page should not be counted as one of the 50 pages in those 50 pages the agent of your dreams asked you to submit. Nor would it count toward the total number of pages for a contest entry.

That loud whoop you just heard was contest-entering writers everywhere realizing that they could squeeze another page of text into their entries. Who knew so many of them could tap-dance?

While you've got those title pages firmly imprinted upon your brainpan, let me briefly address a question from incisive reader Lucy, one of many aspiring writers enamored of the clean, classic look of initials on a book cover. As you may have noticed, our pall Snafu shares the same preference. Lucy wondered if other naming choices might raise other distracting thoughts.

What if you have a weird name which is gender confusing? Say a boy named Sue? Should he put Mr. Sue Unfortunate on his title page? Or just Sue Unfortunate?

Lucy's responding, of course, to the fine print on R.Q.'s first page. Here it is again, to save you some scrolling:

I was having a little fun in that last paragraph with the still surprisingly common writerly belief that the agents and editors will automatically take a submission by a woman more seriously if the author submits it under her initials, rather than under her given first name. J.K. Rowling aside, this just isn't true, at least in fiction circles.

In fact, in North America, women buy the overwhelming majority of novels -- and not just women's fiction, either. A good 90% of literary fiction readers (and agents, and editors) have two X chromosomes -- and some of them have been known to prefer reading books by Susans rather than Roberts.

So unless you have always hated your parents for christening you Susan, you won't really gain anything professionally by using initials in your nom de plume instead. Go ahead and state your name boldly, Sue.

Even better, why not publish under a name you actually like instead? That'll show your Susan-loving parents, Norm.

I just ruffled a few feathers out there, didn't I? "But Anne," I hear many an initialed purist exclaim, "I don't want to be judged as a female writer; I want to be judged as a writer. What's wrong with removing gender markers altogether from my title page -- or my query letter, for that matter?"

Well, there's nothing wrong with it per se, Susan, except that people are probably going to leap to a conclusion about your sex regardless, at least if you happen to be writing in a book category that tends to be marketed more to one sex than another. In most fiction and pretty much all nonfiction categories, Millicent's first response upon seeing initials on a title page, especially if neither the By part and the contact information contain a first name, will often be, "Oh, this is a female writer who doesn't want to be identified as one," rather than "Gee, I wonder who this intriguing person without a first name is. I'm just going to leap right into this manuscript with no gender-based expectations at all."

Why might young Millie have this reaction -- and her older boss be even more likely to respond this way? Because female writers (and with a few notable exceptions, almost exclusively female writers) have been submitting this way for a couple of hundred years now. It's not all that hard a code to crack.

Historically, the hide-my-sex-for-success strategy has been used far, far less by male authors -- except, of course, that hugely prolific and apparently immortal author, Anonymous, and the reputedly male writers of such ostensibly female-penned first-person classics of estrogen-fueled wantonness (avert your eyes, children) as THE HAPPY HOOKER, COFFEE, TEA, OR ME? and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. Even during periods when some of the most popular and respected novelists have been women (and there have been quite a few such periods in the history of English and American prose, contrary to what your high school English textbook probably implied), when someone named Stanley Smith wrote a novel, the title page has generally said so.

Because, you see, even back in the 19th century, many readers would have just assumed S. Smith the novelist was a nice lady named Susan. (It's probably where your parents got the idea to christen you that, Norman.) Or those readers would have assumed that you were an Oxford don writing scurrilous fiction that might have shocked your colleagues on the side. That avocation has historically resulted in fewer book readers naming their children Susan, though.

That being said, an author's pen name is ultimately up to the author. The choice to identify yourself with initials or not is entirely up to you -- or, more accurately, to you and your agent, you and your editor, and you and your future publisher's marketing department. Some sets of initials look cooler than others in print, just as some names look better than others on book jackets.

Or so claimed my father, the intrepid fellow who demanded that the maternity ward nurse convey him to a typewriter to see how my name looked in print before committing to filling out my birth certificate. The better to check if it would look good on a book jacket, my dear. So for those of you who have wondered: however improbable it sounds, Anne Mini is in fact my given name; it just happens to look great in print, thanks to a little paternal forethought.

If I had preferred to publish under A. Mini, though, I doubt anyone but my father would have strenuously objected. Certainly not at the submission stage -- when, for some reason that mystifies Millicents, many aspiring writers seem to believe that the question of pen name must be settled for good. It doesn't. Should you already be absolutely certain that you would prefer to go by your initials, rather than your given name, feel free to identify yourself that way on your title page.

For convenience's sake, however, it's customary for the contact information to list the name one prefers an agent to ask to speak to on the telephone.

Which brings us back to Lucy's trenchant question: how on earth does a writer with a gender-ambiguous name delicately convey whether s/he would prefer to be addressed as Ms. or Mr.? S/he doesn't, at least on the title page, or indeed in the query letter: that's a matter for subsequent conversation with one's agent. These days, though, it's unlikely that the agent who has just fallen in love with the writer of our last example would address a potential client so formally: the e-mail or phone call offering representation would probably begin Dear Norman.

At worst, an agent reading in a hurry might call and ask for Ms. Unfortunate. But you can live with that, can't you, Susan?

Besides, unless a writer's gender (or sex, for that matter) is crucial to the story being told, why should it come up before then?

See earlier commentary about being judged by one's writing, not one's sex. If a writer is genuinely worried about it, s/he could always embrace Norman's strategy above, and use a more gender-definite middle name in the contact information.

Keep your chins up, Susans everywhere -- you may have little control over what literary critics will say about your work, but you do have control over what name they call will you while they're doing it. That's worth something, isn't it?

More concrete examples of properly and improperly formatted manuscripts follow next time. As always, keep up the good work!

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Anne Mini grew up in the middle of a Zinfandel vineyard in the Napa Valley. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, writing for Let's Go, and composing back label copy for wine bottles, she spent several years teaching Plato and Confucius to frat boys at a large, football-oriented university. She has since gratefully given up academia in order to write and edit full-time. Her memoir, A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick, won the 2004 Zola Award. She has also won numerous writing fellowships, as well as being a finalist for an NEH Fellowship. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She currently lives in Seattle, writing and book doctoring for good writers.