---
title: "Standard Manuscript Format, and What Agents Actually Check"
description: "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."
source: https://usegalley.com/blog/standard-manuscript-format
---
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# Standard Manuscript Format, and What Agents Actually Check

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

![A double-spaced manuscript page with a running header and a hash scene break](https://usegalley.com/images/blog/standard-manuscript-format.png) TL;DR Standard manuscript format is Times New Roman 12pt, double-spaced, one-inch margins, half-inch first-line indents, a hash for a scene break, and a Surname / Title / page running header. It is deliberately plain so it is easy to mark up and easy to estimate length from. Nobody rejects a book for a wrong margin, but a manuscript that arrives typeset like a finished paperback reads as somebody who has not done this before.

Every agent’s submission page says “standard manuscript format” and almost none
of them say what that means. The specification everyone is quietly referring to
is [William Shunn’s](https://www.shunn.net/format/novel/), which has been the de
facto standard for decades because it was written down and nothing else was.

Here it is, in the order you would set it up.

## The specification

- **Font.** Times New Roman, 12 point. Courier is the older convention and still
accepted. Do not get creative here.

- **Spacing.** Double, throughout. No extra space between paragraphs.

- **Margins.** One inch on all four sides, on US Letter.

- **Alignment.** Left aligned, [ragged right](https://usegalley.com/glossary#ragged-right). Not justified, because justification
makes it harder to spot line-level problems.

- **Indents.** Half an inch on the first line of every paragraph, done with the
paragraph setting rather than the tab key or five spaces.

- **Scene breaks.** A single `#` centred on its own line. Not three asterisks, not
a decorative glyph, not a blank line on its own, which vanishes at a page break.

- **Chapters.** Start a new page, with the chapter heading about a third of the
way down.

- **[Running header](https://usegalley.com/glossary#running-head).** `Surname / Title / page` on every page after the title
page.

- **Title page.** Contact details top left, an approximate [word count](https://usegalley.com/glossary#word-count) top right,
then the title and byline centred a third of the way down. No header on it.

- **Emphasis.** Italics where you mean italics. The underlining rule belonged to
typewriters, which could not set italic type.

## Round the word count

The word count on the title page should read “Approximately 94,000 words”, not
“93,847 words”. Rounding to the nearest 500 or 1,000 is the convention, and it
signals that you understand the number is an estimate of printed length rather
than a fact about your file.

If you are wondering whether your number is in range at all, that is
[a genre question](https://usegalley.com/blog/how-long-should-a-novel-be) rather than a formatting
one.

## What actually gets checked

Very little of the above, honestly. No agent has ever passed on a novel because
the indent was 0.4 inches. What the format does is signal three things before
anyone reads a sentence:

**That you can follow instructions.** The submission guidelines are the first
brief you are given. Ignoring them is data.

**That the manuscript is easy to work on.** Double spacing exists so someone can
write between the lines. One-inch margins exist so someone can write in them.
Ragged right exists so a long line is visibly long.

**That you are not performing.** A submission that arrives fully typeset, with a
[drop cap](https://usegalley.com/glossary#drop-cap) and an ornamental [scene break](https://usegalley.com/glossary#scene-break) and a serif nobody recognises, reads as
somebody who has spent their energy on the wrong half of the job. The format is
deliberately plain, and that is the point of it.

Individual agents override all of this, and their guidelines beat this post every
single time. If a listing asks for the first fifty pages pasted into the body of
an email, paste them into the body of an email.

## Where the format stops

Standard manuscript format is for submitting. It is not for reading and it is not
for publishing. Once a book is accepted, or once you decide to
[publish it yourself](https://usegalley.com/for/self-publishing-authors), the whole convention gets
thrown away and replaced with real book typography: a trim size, a book face,
justified and hyphenated text, mirrored margins.

That is the part where drafting in a submission format hurts. If you have written
a novel inside a double-spaced Times New Roman document for two years, you have
never once seen the book.

## How Galley handles it

You write on the real page, with your own trim and typeface, and the manuscript
format is generated at export. Two versions come out, because they are two
different jobs.

The **submission package** is the query version: cover page, synopsis, author
bio, and the opening chapters. The **full manuscript** is the whole book with the
`Surname / Title / page` running header, for an editor who is about to line-edit
it. Both are produced to the specification above, so the only thing you have to
get right is the writing.

If the book is not in Galley, there is a
[Shunn manuscript format generator](https://usegalley.com/resources/shunn-manuscript-format-generator)
on this site that does the same job for a file you already have. It opens a
.docx, a PDF or plain text, lays it out to the specification above, and hands
back a Word file. It runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

[Copies made for other people](https://usegalley.com/docs/preview-and-export#for-other-people) ·
[Galley for querying writers](https://usegalley.com/for/traditional-publishing) ·
[Galley for traditional publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-traditional-publishing) ·
[Standard manuscript format in the glossary](https://usegalley.com/glossary#standard-manuscript-format) ·
[The format as a one-page cheat sheet](https://usegalley.com/resources/standard-manuscript-format)

## More on publishing

- [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.
- [Galley for Self-Publishing](https://usegalley.com/blog/galley-for-self-publishing)What self-publishing a novel in Galley involves: a print-ready interior PDF, a valid EPUB, a tuned file per store, and two checks that run before you upload to KDP.

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

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