In days of yore, the accepted rule for estimating word count was 250 words per manuscript page. Is that still the case today? If not, how should it be done instead?
When it comes to indentation, keeps things as simple and uniform as possible. Don’t take your cues from the way published books look.
Set up paragraph styles in your word processor to handle pesky tasks like indentation. Your editor and her staff will thank you for it.
A reader writes to ask: I know it’s still acceptable to space twice after periods. However, if there’s a close quote after a period is there actually only one space remaining after the quotation mark before first letter of the next sentence? Also, are there two spaces before
A reader writes to ask: I am currently trying to put together a manuscript of all of my late mother's poetry that she wrote from about 1970 to 2013, when she passed away. I made her a promise that when she died, I would put this manuscript together
A reader writes to ask: I have just one question concerning the "1in from margin" factor: what page size is normally used? 8.5x11? 6x9 ? I see the '1in from margin' statement everywhere but nowhere I've found do they say the page size. In
A reader writes to ask: I'm finalizing a manuscript and your templates are so helpful. One thing I can't seem to find addressed is the use of quotes - a poem or just a quotation from a person, at the beginning of a chapter. Since I
A reader writes to ask: I enjoyed reading your article about formatting short story submissions, but wondered whether the Name/Title/Page# thing is necessary for electronic submissions. I have a story ready for submission to EQMM. There are essentially two kinds of electronic submissions: text pasted into the body
A reader writes to ask: How should we format a manuscript of multiple poems that each span more than a single page? Do we number our pages starting from 1 whenever we begin a new poem, or should we number our manuscript 1,2, 3... 10, etc. regardless of the
A reader writes to ask: I have three questions about longer poetry manuscripts. In most cases, editors request poetry submissions that contain 3-5 poems, yet nearly every example I can see depicts a submission of a single poem. How, or should the subsequent poems be formatted differently? Does the address
A reader writes to ask: I have perused your formatting advice and have a question. You advise underline to indicate italics, what about bold? Make it "actual" or use asterisks, etc? I need to indicate vectors in bold for a fact article but for sci-fi geared magazine. Thanks.
A reader follows up on an earlier question to ask: I have a contents page after the main title page, so I want to start the page numbering on the third page, which is where chapter 1 starts. Have tried everything but can't seem to do it — any
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