If you have started submitting to literary agents, you have seen the phrase "standard manuscript format" in half a dozen submission guidelines, usually without a definition. What most of them mean is the format William Shunn documented in the 1990s, which has quietly become the default expectation across English-language fiction publishing.
This post covers what that format actually requires, why it looks the way it does, and the handful of mistakes that make a manuscript look amateur before anyone reads a word of it.
What standard manuscript format requires
The rules are unglamorous on purpose:
- 12pt monospaced font. Courier or Courier New. Some agents accept Times New Roman; almost none object to Courier.
- Double-spaced body text, with no extra blank line between paragraphs.
- One-inch margins on all four sides.
- First-line indent of half an inch. Use your word processor's paragraph indent — never the tab key, and never spaces.
- Page numbers on every page after the first.
- A new page for each chapter, with the chapter title roughly a third of the way down.
- Scene breaks marked with a centred
#, not a blank line on its own.
That last one matters more than it looks. A blank line can vanish at a page break, and then your quiet scene transition reads as a typo.
Why it looks so plain
Because it is not meant to look nice. It is meant to be readable and markable.
Monospaced type at double spacing gives an editor room to write between the lines and makes it easy to estimate length — a page of standard format runs around 250 words, which is why word counts and page counts stay roughly convertible. The generous margins exist so a reader can annotate without crowding your text.
Designing your submission is not just unnecessary, it actively works against you. A manuscript that arrives in a display font with decorative chapter headings signals that the writer has spent effort on the wrong thing.
The mistakes that get noticed
Tabs and manual spaces for indentation. These survive conversion badly and produce ragged first lines. Set a paragraph indent instead.
Extra blank lines between paragraphs. Double spacing already separates them. Adding blank lines on top gives you an oddly airy page and inflates your page count.
Chapter headings styled by hand. If you have made a chapter title bold and centred by selecting the text, your document has no structure — only appearance. Use a real Heading style, and both your table of contents and any later ebook conversion will work.
Smart quotes turned off. Straight quotes ("like this") look like a
plaintext file. Curly quotes are standard in published prose.
Justified text. Standard format is left-aligned with a ragged right edge. Justification introduces uneven word spacing that is harder to read.
Doing it in Word
If you want to do this by hand, the short version:
- Select all, set the font to Courier New 12pt.
- Paragraph settings: line spacing Double, spacing before and after 0pt, special indent First line, 0.5".
- Layout → Margins → Normal (1" all round).
- Insert → Page Number → top right.
- Apply Heading 1 to each chapter title, then set that style to page-break before.
Budget twenty minutes the first time, and expect to redo parts of it when you add a chapter later.
Or skip it
This is exactly the kind of task that should not require twenty minutes of anyone's attention.
Our manuscript formatter takes a .docx, works out
where your chapters and scene breaks are — including chapters you left as
plain paragraphs — and returns a Shunn-standard PDF and Word file. It asks you
about anything genuinely ambiguous rather than guessing, and it tells you
exactly what it changed.
It does not touch your prose. No rewriting, no grammar suggestions, no "improvements" to your sentences. Formatting only.
Free to try, and $5 if you want the footer removed and unlimited adjustments on a file.
A note on what agents actually care about
Formatting will not sell a manuscript. A perfectly formatted dull opening is still a dull opening.
What correct formatting does is remove a reason to stop reading. Agents read hundreds of submissions; anything that makes yours harder to read, or signals inexperience, costs you attention you cannot spare. Get it right, then stop thinking about it and go back to the writing.