These are specific things that we want to see at Cactus Rain Publishing, and I suspect that is true with most publishers. Always read the submission criteria for the specific literary agent or publisher that you plan to query.

As I said before, many times, learn to use the basic functions of your software. Set up the lines to be double spaced. It will not look like a manuscript when I open your document if it is not double spaced lines. It shouts, “Amateur who didn’t bother to learn what the basic standard of the industry is.” If this is any indication of things to come, it is going to need a lot of work that we don’t have time to do right now.

To submit a manuscript to Cactus Rain Publishing, it must be a Microsoft Word document. Period. No discussion. Figure it out.

Use a basic font. This isn’t a creative writing class. I prefer Arial, but any clean non-surf font will do. I’m going to change it to Arial anyway before I start reading the submission. Fonts with surfs, like Times New Roman, are more tiring to read. Surfs are the curvy bits on letters.

Use the center function to center the title to chapters. Don’t use the space bar (that’s what they called it in typing class a million years ago) and try to eyeball the center.

Either set the tab to three or five character spaces. Do not, never in a million years submit to us something that auto indents when you click “Enter.” Oh no, no, no. Don’t do that. It might look fine in the manuscript form, but it is a nightmare to go put those tabs in manually when it comes time to format the manuscript into a print-ready book format.

When a chapter ends, insert a page break right after the last line of text. If you click “Enter” enough times to get to the top of the next page and start a new chapter, guess what happens when it is edited. Removing or adding a word, a line, a paragraph break, a scene break moves everything up or down, including all of those enter commands. The start of the next chapter is no longer at the top of the next page.

This is just like anything else that is worth doing, do it right. My father-in-law used to say, “If you have time to do it over, you had time to do it right the first time.”

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