---
title: "Galley for Traditional Publishing"
description: "Querying agents or working with an editor: standard manuscript format, the submission package, watermarked beta drafts, and getting an editor's Word comments back where they belong."
source: https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-traditional-publishing
---
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# Galley for Traditional Publishing

August 10, 2026 [Publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/publishing)[Galley](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/galley)

![A double-spaced manuscript page in standard manuscript format](https://usegalley.com/images/blog/galley-for-traditional-publishing.png) TL;DR If you are querying rather than uploading, the file that matters is a double-spaced Word document in standard manuscript format, and the submission package builds one from your book with the synopsis, bio and opening chapters already in it. Beta drafts go out watermarked per reader. An editor's DOCX comes back with their comments attached to the prose they were about, which is normally the part a round trip loses.

Almost every writing tool sold in the last five years is sold to
self-publishers. The pitch is a finished paperback, and the demo ends with a
KDP upload. If you are querying agents, none of that is your problem. Your book
does not need a [trim size](https://usegalley.com/glossary#trim-size) yet. It needs to arrive looking like every other
manuscript on that agent’s desk, and to survive being passed around in Word for
two years.

Galley does the self-publishing half too. This is the other half.

## Standard manuscript format, without the fiddling

The convention is old and boring and it matters. Times New Roman at 12pt.
Double-spaced. One-inch margins on US Letter. Half-inch first-line indents.
Scene breaks marked with a hash rather than a decorative glyph. Chapters opening
about a third of the way down the page. Contact details top left, an approximate
[word count](https://usegalley.com/glossary#word-count) top right, rounded so it does not look like you counted.

That is [Shunn’s format](https://www.shunn.net/format/novel/), which is what
“[standard manuscript format](https://usegalley.com/glossary#standard-manuscript-format)” means in practice, and Galley exports straight into
it. Your book keeps its real typeface and its real page while you write. The
submission copy is generated, so you are never reformatting your own novel back
into Courier-adjacent respectability by hand. If your book lives somewhere else,
the [Shunn manuscript format generator](https://usegalley.com/resources/shunn-manuscript-format-generator)
applies the same specification to a file you already have, in the browser.

Two versions come out of it. The **full manuscript** is the whole book with a
[running header](https://usegalley.com/glossary#running-head) on every page, `Surname / Title / page`, which is what an editor
who is about to line-edit you wants. The **submission package** is the query
version: a cover page, your synopsis, your author bio, and the opening chapters,
in the order agents ask for them.

## Revision before you query, not after

The reason a manuscript gets rejected in paragraph three is rarely the plot. By
chapter fourteen you cannot see your own prose any more, and
[the checks in Galley](https://usegalley.com/features/revise) are the ones your eye stopped running.

Filler words counted per thousand, with the chapter each one peaks in. The
character called Jeanie forty-one times and Jeany once. British and American
spelling drift, straight quotes that escaped, hyphenation gone inconsistent, all
swept in one pass that leaves dialogue alone, because a character who says
“colour” is a character and not a typo.

A [style sheet](https://usegalley.com/glossary#style-sheet) lives beside the manuscript in the
[story bible](https://usegalley.com/features/story-bible), which is the document a copyeditor will ask
you for anyway. Writing it while you draft is much easier than reconstructing it
from a finished book.

## Beta readers, and knowing whose copy leaked

Beta drafts export one file per reader, with that reader’s name watermarked on
every page. It sounds paranoid until a PDF of an unpublished manuscript turns up
somewhere, and then it is the only thing that tells you where it came from.

There is a proofreading PDF too, two pages to a sheet, if your reader is the kind
who prints it and attacks it with a pen.

## The Word round trip, including the notes

Publishing runs on Word and I do not expect that to change. Export a DOCX,
send it, get it back covered in track changes and margin comments.

Most tools import the edits and drop the comments, because comments are not
content. That is usually the half you paid for. Galley reads the comments out of
the package and anchors each one to the prose it was pointing at, so an editorial
letter’s worth of marginalia arrives attached to the sentences rather than as a
list you have to re-find.

## Keeping the version you actually sent

Query rounds go on for a long time and the book keeps changing. Draft milestones
let you mark a version and name it, so “the draft I sent to the agent in March”
stays a thing you can open in November when she finally replies and asks whether
anything has changed.

Underneath that, every chapter keeps daily snapshots you can compare against and
restore, and deleted work waits thirty days in the bin.

## The AI question, which agents are now asking

Nothing in Galley writes, rewrites, suggests or completes a sentence. Nothing
trains on your book. The tools count, check and typeset.

I built it that way because I wanted it that way, and it has turned out to
matter commercially: publishing contracts and agent submission forms increasingly
ask you to warrant that the work is your own. Being able to answer that without
qualification is worth something. [The full position is here](https://usegalley.com/blog/no-ai-in-your-prose).

## Where Galley is the wrong tool

If your plotting happens on a corkboard with index cards and coloured string,
[Scrivener](https://usegalley.com/compare/scrivener) takes that seriously and I do not. Its compile is
also more configurable than my export menu, and if you have already built a
compile format you love, you will find mine opinionated.

If you write in the document with a co-author in real time,
[Google Docs](https://usegalley.com/compare/word-google-docs) is where that happens.

## And if the querying does not work out

Plenty of writers query for a year and then publish the book themselves. In
Galley that is not a migration. It is the same book, and the print PDF and EPUB
are in the same menu as the manuscript export.
[That path is written up here](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-self-publishing).

[Galley for querying writers](https://usegalley.com/for/traditional-publishing) ·
[Is Galley for you?](https://usegalley.com/galley-for-you) ·
[Exports and the toolkit](https://usegalley.com/features/make-the-book) ·
[Preview and export](https://usegalley.com/docs/preview-and-export#for-other-people)

## More on publishing

- [Standard Manuscript Format, and What Agents Actually Check](https://usegalley.com/blog/standard-manuscript-format)The Shunn manuscript format specification in plain terms: font, spacing, margins, indents, scene breaks, the running header, and the word count that should be rounded.
- [Writing Software for Novelists Who Don't Write in English](https://usegalley.com/blog/write-a-novel-in-your-language)How to write and typeset a book in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Greek or Vietnamese, which typeface each script gets, and what still needs building.
- [Accessible Ebooks and the European Accessibility Act](https://usegalley.com/blog/accessible-ebooks-and-the-eaa)What the EAA means for a self-published novel sold in the EU: accessibility metadata, what makes an EPUB accessible, the microenterprise exemption, and the large-print edition nobody makes.

[Every publishing post](https://usegalley.com/blog/tag/publishing)

[← All posts](https://usegalley.com/blog)

Galley is the tool that does the part this post is about — the finished, printable book.

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