Today.
I want to take you through something that's really important in publishing,
but not particularly sexy.
And it's how to format your book manuscript in Microsoft word.
Now there is a right way and a wrong way to format your book manuscript.
Formatting it in eight point comic sans is probably not a good idea.
But I'll take you through the correct manuscript format so that your manuscript
looks really professional to publishers, editors and agents,
when you send it through. So sit back, hit subscribe and let's get into it.
So we're here magically in Microsoft Word. I've got the latest version of word,
and I want to show you how easy it is to set up your book manuscript in word.
So the first thing I do is I actually use templates.
They make things a lot easier. They speed up the process quite a bit.
You can see that I've got two manuscripts already here,
book manuscript and story manuscript format.
I'll just go and show you how to find those. If you can't see them in word.
So click on this button here, more templates,
and you can search for the word manuscript. This one,
I hear, I use for short stories and this one I use for novels,
the book manuscript template. So I'm going to open that up right now.
Okay. Create now, just to note,
this is actually set up for a letter size page.
So I'm actually going to change the formatting of this first off to be in A4
because we print in A4 in Australia.
Just make sure that it's on the correct paper size for your country.
So you just do this by going into layout.
And if you click size and easy as that.
So we've got that all sorted right there into an A4 format.
That's looking a lot better.
I'm noticing that the headers are also a little bit crazy big, right.
So I'm just going to put these in a normal style
so that we're not getting that really big margin there. And just chuck,
a couple of enters there.
So you just double click out of that into the main body of the text.
And we've got that word manuscript looking really nice.
So this is set up in your standard manuscript format.
So it's really helpful to know what a standard manuscript looks like.
And this is the industry standard.
So your either manuscript will be in times new Roman or courier font.
I personally prefer times,
and I generally think courier looks a little bit old school.
Many publishers will post this admission guidelines on their website and
maybe they'll make a preference for Times New Roman or Courier,
just make sure you follow their rules.
So if they say I'd like my font in Courier New or Courier,
make sure it's in Courier for me. I think Times New Roman is really,
really easy to read. So I usually go with that unless I have to.
The other thing is it should be 12 point. It should be double spaced.
You should have one inch margins. So wide margins.
And this is to allow for comments.
You should have the first line of every paragraph is hanging or
indented. So this little indent here, it should be left,
align, not full aligned, and don't do a right aligned.
Now what I first do is I just check that the paragraph styles are correct.
So I'll just open that up. So that has a left alignment,
first-line hanging and double spacing.
So it's really important that you know how to do this yourself in case you have
a manuscript that you need to format and it's already done.
So you just go into that little paragraph box. I'll show you where that is.
Again,
it's just this one here and you just make sure those settings are correct
like that.
And then that will fix your manuscript up immediately to be almost
perfectly in manuscript format for a publisher.
And you should also have your name, your story title,
and your page number in the top right hand corner.
So we're just going to put this over in the right hand corner here.
So that's really easy. I just did that in the paragraph corner.
I'll put in my name Kat Clay, title,
Amazing Book. And then you double click out of that.
That'll put page numbers on every single page and your name and the
title of your book.
So that's really important because if you drop your pages and they get
out of order, you really need them in order. I have done that.
I'd save your work and then you can start formatting it for your book.
So put in your name, Kat Clay,
about number of words that would be at the end of writing your book.
So the next thing I do is I make sure that the chapter names are set up properly
in word. So I manage chapter names using a heading style.
And there's a really good reason for that because it will help you navigate the
chapters of the book when it comes to making a bigger document.
So it's fine now because there's only one page,
but when you have 300 pages of a manuscript, it's really helpful,
especially in the editing process to be able to see at a glance, your book.
So I'll just go into the view tab.
And one of the things that's really helpful for writing your manuscript is using
this navigation pane. So you can see here that these are set up with headers,
Amazing Book by Kat Clay, the chapter name isn't set up with a header though.
So I'm just going to say, probably use heading 2,
and immediately it comes up here. So chapter name.
If you're writing a book, say a nonfiction book that has subheadings,
this is incredibly helpful because you could have Heading 1,
which is your chapter title.
And then you could say chapter or sub section two, which is,
and you can make that a heading style heading two.
And you see that they'll all set up under the same chapter.
So that is really helpful for actually being able to navigate your manuscript
later down the track. You can see that at a glance. When I have my novel done,
I'll have like all the chapters down here I can just jump to and from them.
So I can jump to the chapter, jump to amazing book, jump to this section.
This is about me. And that speeds up the process so much.
So I hope that's helped.
You see how easy it is to format your book manuscript in Microsoft Word.
If you have any questions or if you found this helpful,
I would love to chat to you in the comments below and make sure you hit
subscribe so you can get regular writing video updates. Thanks for watching.