How to Prepare Your Manuscript Before Sending It for Formatting

To prepare your manuscript for formatting, get three things ready: final, fully edited text in a word-processing file; your images as separate, original files; and clear notes covering where you plan to publish and any content that needs special treatment. Page design itself is the formatter’s job. Your job is content and clarity, not layout.

Do You Need “Standard Manuscript Format” Before Hiring a Formatter?

Standard manuscript format is a submission convention for literary agents and publishers. It means double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. A professional book formatter does not need it. Most advice online, including William Shunn’s widely used manuscript format guide, answers that submission question. Presenting a manuscript to an agent is a different job with different rules.

A formatter rebuilds your book’s typography from scratch in professional layout software. The typeface, spacing, margins, indents, and page numbers in your file do not survive that rebuild. Time spent polishing them is therefore time wasted. Some authors spend days adjusting line spacing and centring chapter headings before handoff. None of that work carries through to the finished book.

There is no need to undo submission format if you already have it, either. Formatters work with whatever visual state the file arrives in. They need three things from you: final text, clearly signposted structure, and your source materials.

When Is a Manuscript Ready to Send?

A manuscript is ready for formatting when the text is final. You have finished every stage of editing, and nobody else is still reading the book with changes in mind. The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) describes the editorial sequence as editing first, then production, then proofreading as the final safety check. Formatting sits in the production stage, so editing should finish before your formatter starts. We have covered whether to edit before or after formatting in more detail.

Proofreading is the one exception to “everything finishes first.” It works best on the formatted pages, known as the proof. Formatting can introduce its own problems: an awkward line break, a heading stranded at the foot of a page, or an image that has wandered from where you wanted it to appear. So plan for a proofread of the proof, not just of the Word file.

Two rules before you press send

First, never send the manuscript while anyone else is still reviewing it. That includes friends, beta readers (the volunteers who read a finished draft and give feedback), your editor, and you. Once the book goes to the formatter, set it aside until the proof arrives. Second, if you realise you sent the wrong version, say so immediately. Some authors also ask for a 24- or 48-hour grace period after submitting, in case a forgotten fix surfaces at 3 a.m. The formatter can assess the files in the meantime, and nothing has to be unpicked. How corrections work later in the job is covered at the end of this article.

How Should You Prepare Your Manuscript Files for Formatting?

A Microsoft Word file (.docx) is the format almost every book formatter prefers to receive. Do you write in Google Docs, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice? Ask whether the formatter is comfortable with those files rather than converting them yourself. Conversion to .docx is usually reliable. However, it is a file-handling job, and file handling is part of what you are paying for.

One file or several?

One file for the whole book, including your front matter and back matter (the pages before and after the story), is ideal, but it should not become a chore. If you wrote each chapter or part as a separate document, send the files as they are. Let the formatter combine them, because merging Word files can introduce section-break and style conflicts. Formatters know how to avoid those traps. Include one extra document listing the order in which the files belong. Plain filenames like “chapter 01.docx” also help more than working titles only you can decode.

Send a PDF as well

Alongside the manuscript, a PDF export of the same document is a genuinely useful extra. Word-processing files can display differently on another computer. Pages end in different places, and the other computer substitutes any font it lacks. The PDF records exactly what you see, so the formatter can check their copy against yours.

Sometimes a PDF is all you have. That is common with older books that have gone out of print, where the rights have returned to the author. Most formatters can extract the text from a PDF, but confirm that before booking. Leave the extraction to them too; a DIY export from Acrobat can merge paragraphs and drag page headers into the middle of sentences.

How Do You Show Structure and Leave Notes in the File?

The clearest way to show your book’s structure is with your word processor’s built-in heading styles. Use Heading 1 for chapter titles, Heading 2 for sections within a chapter, Heading 3 for subsections, and so on. Styles keep every heading level consistent. In Word, the Outline view then displays your whole book as a tree. That view is a quick way to spot a heading set at the wrong level or inconsistencies in wording and capitalization. If styles feel unfamiliar, alternatives work too. Give each heading level its own consistent look, say 18-point bold centred against 14-point italic. Or simply prefix headings with markers like [1] and [2]. Then tell the formatter which convention you used.

Review tracked changes (the feature in Word that records edits as coloured markup) before you send the file. Leftover tracked changes are not a technical problem: a formatter can accept them in one click. They are an ambiguity problem. An unaccepted change leaves it unclear whether you want the edit or not. Review them, and ideally accept them yourself, so the file says exactly what you mean.

Notes that will not end up in print

Be careful with notes to the formatter typed into the body text. A formatter lays out the book without reading it closely. As a result, an instruction like “I want a space here” can end up printed in the finished book. Use your word processor’s comment feature instead. Alternatively, pick one unmistakable convention (square brackets, bold, and a highlight colour together) and flag it at handover. The same goes for anything that needs special treatment. Letters, emails, or quotations may need a distinct typeface. List where they appear, by chapter or page, so nothing gets missed.

Two smaller structural points. If your book has footnotes or endnotes, create them with the word processor’s notes tool rather than typing numbers by hand. Linked notes renumber themselves when one is added or deleted. That spares an error-prone manual renumbering later. And if you fought with your table of contents and lost, say so. The formatter can reconcile it against the actual headings and set the page numbers to match the final layout.

How Should You Supply Images and Captions?

Send every image as a separate, original file at full resolution, even if the images also appear inside the manuscript. For printed books, photographs need about 300 DPI (dots per inch, the standard measure of print image sharpness) at the size they will print. Amazon’s self-publishing platform KDP asks for the same figure in its image guidelines. The copies embedded in a Word file are often not good enough on their own. By default, Word compresses embedded images to a lower resolution of 220 dots per inch. Microsoft documents the setting, and we have covered how to stop Word compressing your book’s images separately. Original files sidestep the problem entirely.

Cues, filenames, and captions

Show the formatter where each image belongs. Embed it in the manuscript, or add a short cue in the text such as “[photo 02 near here]”. Name the files plainly: photo 01, photo 02, map 01. The long alphanumeric names a camera produces when you save a photo are hard to match against cues. And write your captions. Supply them in the manuscript or as a separate file. Forgotten captions are one of the most common queries a formatter has to send back.

Give the formatter placement flexibility wherever the content allows it. “Near here” produces a cleaner book than “exactly here.” An image forced between two specific paragraphs can end up squeezed. It can also leave a page half empty when the preceding paragraph ends low. The same applies to tables and text boxes. The fewer fixed positions, the better the pages flow.

One conversion is worth leaving alone entirely. If you have colour images but plan to print in black and white, let the formatter convert them. A good black-and-white conversion is rarely a single step. It usually needs adjustments to contrast and to the darkest and lightest tones before the image prints well. Handing over the colour originals has a bonus, too. The formatter then holds them for any future edition that can use colour, such as an ebook.

What Should You Tell Your Formatter Up Front?

Tell the formatter where you plan to publish the printed book (e.g., Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, or both). Each platform has its own file requirements. The technical setup of your book’s files depends on the answer. Share any decisions you have already made, such as trim size (the finished page dimensions, like 6″ × 9″) or cream versus white paper. Mention your target page count if you have one. Type size and spacing choices can nudge a book’s page count up or down. Estimating your book’s final page count before formatting helps you have that conversation.

Design references and preferences

Design references help more than adjectives. If you want your book to look like one you admire, send a link to any online preview of it (on Amazon, look for the “Read Sample” option). Photographs of a book from your shelf work too, with care. Lay the book flat, fill the frame with the page, and hold the camera parallel to avoid distortion. Cover several page types: title page, contents, a chapter opening, a full spread (two facing pages), and any special feature such as a table. Beyond references, be as verbose as you like in your notes. Do you want end-of-line hyphenation? Do you have a font-size preference? Flag any unusual elements such as pull quotes (short excerpts repeated large on the page), epigraphs (the brief quotations that open a chapter), or redacted text with words blacked out.

Fonts deserve a specific warning. If you have a particular typeface in mind, name it, but do not buy the font or send font files. Font licences generally do not transfer between users. Supplying a font to a designer can therefore put you in breach of the licence agreement. Formatters either hold licences already or can license a font for your project on your behalf. They will tell you what that costs.

How do changes work once formatting has started?

Treat formatting as a turn-taking exchange, like chess. The formatter completes a pass, and you review the proof (the formatted pages). You return one complete list of corrections, and the formatter takes the next turn. Most formatters price one or two rounds of changes into the fee; a round is one complete list of corrections, implemented and returned. So the first proof is not fixed in stone. What strains the process is a trickle of small changes arriving mid-job. A trickle is genuinely hard to track and easy to lose. Save everything for one list. Also ask up front how many change rounds are included before extra charges apply.

Late changes cost more than early ones for a structural reason. A change to typeset pages (pages already laid out in the formatter’s software) means regenerating and rechecking the files. Print platforms also accept only complete interior files, meaning the entire inside of the book as one file. IngramSpark’s file requirements, for example, call for a single print-ready PDF of the whole interior. There is no way to submit a corrected page on its own. Do you expect heavy revisions after seeing the proof, say on more than a tenth of the pages? Talk to the formatter about the best route. Some can extract a Word file from the typesetting file so you can make changes directly rather than listing them. That saves work on both sides, though the reformatting that follows may carry a fee.

Preparing a manuscript for formatting comes down to three habits. Finish the text. Hand over clean source files: final text in an agreed format, original images with captions, and notes kept out of the body text. Say what you want clearly, from platforms and preferences to corrections batched into complete lists. Do that, and you have done your half of the handoff well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need to double-space your manuscript before sending it to a formatter?

Double-spacing is not needed before sending a manuscript to a book formatter. It belongs to submission format for agents and publishers. A formatter rebuilds all spacing and typography from scratch, so your file’s line spacing has no effect on the finished book.

Can a book formatter work from a PDF?

Most book formatters can work from a PDF by extracting the text. This matters for older books where the rights have returned to the author and the PDF is the only final version. Confirm it before booking, and let the formatter do the extraction. Naive PDF exports merge paragraphs and mix page headers into the text.

What image resolution do print book images need?

Print book images need about 300 DPI (dots per inch) at the size they will print. Amazon KDP and IngramSpark both work to that figure for photographs. Send original image files rather than relying on copies embedded in Word, which Word compresses by default.

How many rounds of changes do book formatters include?

Most book formatters include one or two rounds of proof corrections in their fee. Practice varies, so ask before work starts. Corrections work best as one complete list per round rather than a trickle of individual fixes. Formatters may charge for rounds beyond the included ones.

Where can you find professional book formatting services?

Author organisations are a good starting point for finding a book formatting service. KDP and the Alliance of Independent Authors maintain directories of vetted providers, and author communities share recommendations freely. Wherever you look, ask to see sample work in your genre. Also ask how the service handles proofs and change rounds.