I’m blogging today for Fiction+ at The Chicago Manual of Style’s Shop Talk blog:
When you write a book to send to an agent or editor, you are preparing a manuscript. And even if your ideas, characters, and plot twists are colorful and creative, your manuscript format should not be. Agents and editors almost always require submitted pages to be in a standard format free of images and color and anything flashy.
It’s normal, however, to prepare material before you know exactly where you’ll submit it. That’s why it’s smart to produce a generic document based on Chicago style (the style used by most US trade book publishers) that can be tweaked later if you receive
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Top image: “Formatting” by Amandine Vandesteene from the Noun Project, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
