TRANSCRIPT

In the last video I talked about how to find a publisher if you don’t have a literary agent and also the importance of knowing each publisher’s submission guidelines.

Before sending your manuscript to publishers, you also need to be aware of formatting and to make sure your manuscript is formatted properly. The problem is, if you Google the phrase “how to format a children’s book manuscript,” you get something north of 44,600,000 million results for that search.

So this could have you wondering… should I use Times or Helvetica? How do I describe an illustration? Should dialogue be in quotation marks? I know that this created a lot of paranoia for me when I first started out. And I started wondering, “If I don’t format the manuscript perfectly, will publishers reject it just based on the appearance?”

I finally came to the conclusion that getting hung up on appearance was unproductive and slowing down the process of getting from manuscript to published. I simply needed to choose a format that looked clean and professional and that covers the common information that I found in all the articles about how to format your manuscript – but not all 44 million. I figured that if the story was good, publishers would respond positively. If it wasn’t good, they wouldn’t respond positively – even if I had the world’s most perfectly formatted manuscript.

My book, The Unstoppable Picture Book Author, which you can download at my website, howardpearlstein.com, includes two of my sold manuscripts so you can see how they were formatted. You can copy them exactly or use just them as a jumping off point for your manuscript.

In general, though, no matter how you decide to format your manuscript, be sure to do the following four things:

1. Use a clean, easy to read font.

2. Put your name and contact info on the first page.

3. Put your name on every page.

4. Number the pages.

The bottom line here is don’t agonize over finding the one perfect manuscript format. Instead… agonize over the writing. Make sure your manuscripts themselves are the best that they can be.

And speaking of agonizing, don’t agonize over typos either. I don't think a publisher would toss a manuscript because of a typo. In fact, I’ve seen tweets from agents saying that they wouldn’t dismiss a manuscript just because of a typo – even if their name was misspelled. Still, on the other hand, a manuscript is a reflection of your commitment to being a professional writer. And a typo detracts from this. So, you know, proof every word and have someone who’s good with proofing also take a look at it.

And here's like a little side tip I learned along the way: after proofing, copy and paste your manuscript into the body of a Gmail. I’ve had Gmail highlight spelling errors and grammatical mistakes that Word missed.

So once you have your manuscript formatted properly, you’re then ready for the last step before submitting… and that is writing your query letter. I’ll get into that in the next video.

Thank you so much for watching. If you got any value out of this video, like it, subscribe to my channel and share the video with other aspiring picture book authors.