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Template · By Draftly · Updated 2026-08-19

Manuscript format for novels and short stories

Agents and editors read thousands of these, and the format is how they tell at a glance whether you have done this before. The whole specification is below, filled in for Frankenstein as a worked example, with the title page fillable because that is the part people get wrong.

A painted desk at dusk with a thick manuscript squared up under a black clip, its title page on top showing wide margins and blocks of ink where the words would be, a brass ruler across one corner, a red pencil, a quill in an inkwell, a stamped envelope, a brass letter scale, a cup of tea, two pressed violets and a lit candle, with a village lane climbing away through the open window

How to format the first page of a manuscript

Page setup is a checklist, and a checklist is hard to get wrong twice. The title page is different, because four of these eight lines carry a judgement rather than a measurement. The byline need not be your legal name. The word count is rounded, not counted. The category is a shelf, not a pitch. And the address belongs on the page even when you expect the reply by email.

Every field is filled in for Frankenstein — Mary Shelley, 1818. A first novel by an unknown writer, which is the position most of these pages are filled in from. Every field below is filled in as though it were going out to an agent this week.

  1. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

The title page

8 fields

  1. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  2. Mary Shelley

  3. she/her

  4. 13 Abbey Churchyard, Bath BA1 1LY, United Kingdom

  5. [email protected]

  6. +44 7700 900312

  7. About 75,000 words

  8. Adult literary fiction, gothic

The rest of standard manuscript format

Six groups, and the last two are the ones you will not find together anywhere else. Short stories carry no title page at all, and self-publishing reverses half of what the submission spec asks for, because double spacing exists so that somebody can write between the lines.

Page setup and layout

8 fields
Set these once and save the file as your template.

  1. US Letter in North America, A4 elsewhere. Match the market, not your printer.

  2. One inch on all four sides.

  3. A 12-point serif. Times New Roman is the safe default, and Courier is still read without comment.

  4. Double, with no extra space added above or below paragraphs.

  5. Ragged right, with hyphenation off. Justified text hides the line breaks an editor is reading for.

  6. Half an inch, set on the paragraph ruler. The tab key produces something that looks the same and reflows differently.

  7. None. The indent already says where one paragraph ended.

  8. Black on white. No tinted background, no decoration, no second colour for emphasis.

The running header

5 fields
Five lines of setup that mark the difference between a draft and a submission.

  1. SHELLEY / FRANKENSTEIN / 12

  2. Top right, inside the margin rather than pushed into it.

  3. No header. The contact block does that job.

  4. Page 1 is the first page of the story. A title page is not numbered.

  5. Shorten it to one recognisable word. FRANKENSTEIN rather than the full subtitle.

Chapter openings

5 fields

  1. On a fresh page, using a page break. A run of returns moves as soon as anything above it changes.

  2. About a third of the way down the page, centred.

  3. Two lines below the number, centred, where the chapter has one.

  4. Four blank lines under the last heading line.

  5. Indented like the rest. Flushing it left is a typesetting convention that belongs in the printed book.

Scene breaks and typography

5 fields
Where most house styles agree, and where they have stopped caring.

  1. A single # centred on its own line. Three spaced asterisks read the same way.

  2. Italics. Underlining was how you asked a typesetter for italics, and there is no typesetter now.

  3. An em dash or two hyphens, whichever you pick, used the same way throughout.

  4. Three full stops, kept on one line.

  5. THE END, centred, two lines below it.

What changes for a short story

5 fields
The highest-value part of this page, and the part the two ranking guides keep on separate URLs or leave out.

  1. There is none. The contact block moves to the top left of page one.

  2. About halfway down page one, under the title and byline.

  3. Top right of page one. Round to the nearest hundred below 1,500 words.

  4. First North American serial rights, where the market asks for a line. Novels do not carry one.

  5. The same three parts, beginning on page two.

What changes when you self-publish

5 fields
Half of the specification above exists for a reader who is going to write on it.

  1. Whatever you are printing at. Letter and A4 stop being the question.

  2. Single, or a shade more. Double spacing leaves room for a pencil.

  3. Narrower, with the inner margin widened for the gutter.

  4. Keep them, and drop the indent on the paragraph that opens a chapter.

  5. The title and your name, set for a reader rather than for a slush pile.

Manuscript format template (PDF)Book manuscript template (Word)

Blank, formatted to the specification above, and yours without an account or an email address.

What the format is for

None of this makes a manuscript good, and no agent has signed a book for having the header in the right corner. The format does something narrower. It removes every reason to stop reading that is not the writing itself, and in a pile of three hundred submissions that is most of the reasons available.

The spacing is the clearest case. Double spacing and one-inch margins are a request for room, left over from a period when the reader would be writing between your lines in pencil. A lot of that reading happens on screen now and the convention has held, partly through habit and partly because a page of double-spaced text is faster to skim for the place where the prose gives out.

Which is why the two groups at the end of the sheet matter more than they look. If you are self-publishing, you are formatting for somebody who wants to read the book rather than mark it, and half of the specification above works against you. Keeping it out of habit is how a self-published paperback ends up looking like a submission.

Draftly exports this format directly. The Manuscript theme in the export dialog sets a 12-point serif, double spacing, one-inch margins, ragged right, first-line indents and the surname and title running header, and it takes the page size from your locale. That covers the specification above without a checklist, which leaves the title page, and the title page is the sheet on this page.

Manuscript formatting mistakes editors notice

The first group gets a manuscript closed unread, because those are instructions rather than conventions. The last group is worth as much as the rest, because a page of rules with no permissions in it makes writers careful about the wrong things.

Named in the guidelines

  • .docx rather than PDF
  • the whole novel in one file
  • the first three chapters, not your favourite three
  • a synopsis pasted in, not attached
  • no zip archives

Read as carelessness

  • single spacing
  • no page numbers
  • a decorative or coloured font
  • two spaces after a full stop
  • the file named draft-final-v7

Read as inexperience

  • underlining for emphasis
  • a copyright notice on page one
  • an attached cover design
  • a word count given to the exact digit
  • indents made with the tab key

Read as a matter of taste

  • Times New Roman or Garamond
  • an em dash or two hyphens
  • # or three asterisks
  • THE END or a blank space
  • Letter or A4 within one market

Questions & Answers

How do I format the first page of a manuscript?
For a novel, page one is the title page and carries nothing else: your contact block top left, the rounded word count top right, the title centred about a third of the way down, your byline two lines under it, and the category at the foot. The story starts on page two. For a short story there is no title page, and all of that compresses onto the first page above the opening line.
What is standard manuscript format, and what does it look like?
Double-spaced 12-point serif, one inch of margin all round, ragged right, half-inch first-line indents, and a running header giving your surname, the title and the page number. William Shunn's specification is the one most guidelines point at, and the sheet above follows it. On the page it looks plainer than people expect and repetitive on purpose. The two blank files under the sheet are set up this way, so opening one is quicker than reading about it.
Should I use Times New Roman or Courier?
Times New Roman, unless a submission guideline names something else. Courier is a holdover from the days when a monospaced page let an editor estimate a word count by eye, and it is still accepted without comment, but it is no longer what a guideline means by default.
How do I format a short story manuscript?
Drop the title page. Your contact block goes top left of page one, the word count top right, and the title and byline sit about halfway down with the story starting under them. Round the word count to the nearest hundred below 1,500 words. Some markets ask for a rights line under the contact block, which a novel does not carry.
What is manuscript writing style?
Two different things get called that. One is the format on this page, which is a set of measurements. The other is house style, meaning the choices a publisher makes about spelling, serial commas and how numbers are set. A publisher does not expect you to guess its house style. It expects the measurements.
Is this manuscript format template free?
Yes, and there is nothing to sign up for. Fill the title page in above and print it, or take the PDF or the Word file. We built the page because the guide ranking above it promises a template in its own title and asks you to open an account to get it.

Un solo lugar para todo el libro.

Abre un capítulo y todo lo que necesita ya está al lado: el reparto, los lugares, las reglas que inventaste, la nota que te dejaste en noviembre. Nada que buscar, nada que sincronizar a mano — y sin esa fricción, los días que escribes empiezan a sumar.