Good formatting shows off your work to its best advantage, but it’s not just an aesthetic consideration. Manuscripts can be rejected if they are not properly formatted, as the agent doesn’t have time to figure out what’s going on. They want to have an immersive reading experience—they don’t want it to be interrupted by typos, broken paragraphs and incorrect punctuation. So it’s worth making sure your text is as clean as possible, to give them that smooth read they are looking for.

If you are already comfortable with activities like indenting, line spacing, aligning and page breaks, you might not need too much work done. On the other hand, you may detest any form of desktop publishing and want to hand in completely unformatted work, possibly in several different documents needing assembly. None of this is a problem—you want someone else to do the formatting because you would rather spend your time writing, and who could blame you?

Formatting includes the following kinds of issues:

• line spacing

• indenting

• chapter heading placement

• chapter numbering

• page numbering

• headers and footers

• author info on title pages

• epistolary text placement

• getting rid of extra spaces and tabs

I also like to include elements of copy editing and proofreading, so that the document gets as close to the requirements of the relevant style manual as I can possibly make it. This is not professional standard proofreading, which is different from formatting, but it takes your manuscript to a standard that will please an agent or acquisitions editor.

Some texts need little adjustment, whereas some texts need work done on every single line. Whichever camp you fall into, you are welcome here, as I love formatting!