Different Styles and Formats

It's interesting how so many different publishers are not on the same page as to formatting manuscripts. Usually you hear that editors want your manuscript double-spaced, one inch margins, twelve point Times New Roman font, single sided pages only, and a header with the author name, book title and page numbers.

And indeed, those are the specs most publishers expect to have manuscripts formatted.

But not all. There are some publishers who want manuscripts single-spaced. Some want Courier font. Some don't want headers at all. Some don't even want pages numbered, and some take subs by email, while others wouldn't think of it. Only postal submissions allowed for them.

Usually, when publishers take digital submissions, they are cool with any type of word doc format. But the newest Microsoft Word programs are docx. And some publishers don't want that. I have docx. And it's not a hassle to convert from docx to word.doc. It's easy enough. But some publishers want subs in RTF, and even sometimes in PDF. Man, oh man.

Again, it's easy enough to convert, but I found that you better check your manuscript after converting because sometimes funny things happen to your manuscript after you convert it from, say, docx to doc or RTF, or whatever.

For instance a publisher wanted me to send a full recently, but clarified to not send it in docx. Rather send it in word.doc. OK, easy enough. But after I did that, (and after I sent it,) I discovered that the formatting got screwy. The chapters were starting on lower lines on the new pages, and some even on the same page as the chapter that just ended.

I corrected it, and sent in the fixed version while explaining what happened so they would not wonder why I was sending it again. They were cool about it.

So a word to the wise would be to always double check your manuscript after converting from one type of format to another. BEFORE you send it in, that is.