The end of the formatting series -- and The End

Sincere congratulations, campers, for making it all the way through this extended series on standard format for manuscripts -- book manuscripts, that is; once again, let me remind you that short stories, magazine articles, theses, dissertations, and other types of writing are subject to other restrictions -- as well as January and February's intensive examination of how a manuscript moves from a writer's fingertips all the way to publication. We've been tackling the big stuff so far this year, and I'm proud of all of you for having the gumption, not to mention the faith in your writing, to work through it with me.

Next week, it's back to craft, after a brief stopover in the hows and whys of partials. We've earned a respite from hard-and-fast rules, I think.

Besides, you won me a nickel. It's not the Nobel Prize, but hey, I'm grateful.

Yes, an entire nickel: an agent of my acquaintance, a tireless advocate for my giving up this blog in order to rechannel the considerable time and energy I devote to it into my other writing, My readers' consistent devotion to improving both their writing skills and ability to present them professionally, wagered that you would be so tired of formatting after my revisiting repeatedly it for four and a half years that the posts this time around would pass relatively uncommented-upon.

Actually, he didn't suggest betting on it until after I stopped laughing at his contention. "What's so funny?" he demanded. "It's not as though your past posts on the subject aren't well-marked. Why can't readers just go there to find out what to do?"

Because I like the guy and I'm not in the habit of lecturing agents, I restrained myself from suggesting that he just didn't understand how a blog works. "Some will, but many of my readers don't have the time to comb the archives." (See? I honestly am aware of that.) "And the writers brand-new to the game may not yet know that there is a standard format at all. By going over it two or three times a year, I'm doing my part to make sure that everyone's writing can look its best for you. You should be grateful."

He was not. "Did you spend your last three lifetimes blithely violating the rules of grammar and structure, condemning yourself to the Sisyphean task of explaining them over and over again this time around? You're dreaming, my friend -- your readership doesn't need this. I'll bet you twenty bucks that you get fewer comments this time than last."

Well, great as my faith in my readers undoubtedly is, I seldom bet more than a nickel (although I did win a quarter off my mother during the last campaign season for predicting the vice presidential nominees correctly), so he had to settle for that. "You'll see," I told him. "Not only will readers comment more than usual, but they'll come up with questions neither you nor I would have thought of addressing."

He handed over the nickel after Part III. One of you asked a perfectly reasonable about indentation he'd never heard before.

So now I'm jangling a nickel happily in my pocket, and I have yet another convert to what I have long held is the truth about aspiring writers: contrary to practically universal opinion amongst professional readers, deviations from standard format are not usually the result of writers' being too lazy to find out how to present a manuscript. Most of the aspiring writers I encounter are downright starved for accurate information on the subject; the underlying problem is that there isn't enough authoritative information out there to combat all of the inaccurate rumors.

I've always been a big proponent of agency websites simply posting a page with the formatting rules, in fact, so I could devote our shared time here to craft. Which is why, in case any of you long-term readers have been speculating on the subject, I used to end extended series on standard format with a rather peevish little discussion about why, in the face of so much conflicting information about submission requirements floating around these days, professional advice-givers like me don't either:

(a) check out every other source out there to make sure that we're all saying precisely the same thing (which would be so time-consuming that none of us would have time to give any further advice),

(b) take it upon ourselves to force every single individual who is empowered to pass judgment upon a manuscript within the confines of North America to agree upon a single (and preferably single-page) set of rules to which everyone without exception would adhere (which would require a convention so large that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would turn pale at the very thought), or

(c) shut up entirely and let those new to the biz try to figure out some genuinely counter-intuitive rules all by themselves.

I can't speak for everyone currently giving advice on the subject, of course, but in my own case, the answer is really pretty straightforward: the norms I've been explaining throughout this series are in fact the ones I have used successfully myself for many, many years. Since neither I, any of my editing clients, or (as far as I know) any reader of this blog who has followed this advice to the letter has ever been asked by an agent or editor to make a single purely formatting change to his/her manuscript (with the sole exception of the few agents who are now post clear instructions to submitters not to use the requisite two spaces after periods, but we've already talked about that, right?), I feel quite confident in continuing to give this particular set of advice.

But I will say something that one seldom hears advice-givers say: whether you choose to adhere to the rules of standard format I've set out here is ultimately up to you. But once you choose to follow a particular rule, you must obey it 100% of the time in your manuscript.

Let me repeat that, because it's monumentally important: it's not enough to adhere to a formatting rule most of the time; you must cleave to it in every single applicable instance in the text.

Why? You should know the words to the song by now: because inconsistency isn't going to look professional to people who read manuscripts for a living.

I used to think that I didn't actually need to state this requirement, as did the agent who lost the nickel to me. After all, isn't the part of the point of a rule that it should be followed on a regular basis, rather than just periodically? However, I've seen enough manuscripts and contest entries (yes, I still judge from time to time) by good writers who sometimes use a single dash and sometimes a doubled one (if you're not absolutely certain which is correct, I can only suggest that you reread this post from earlier in this series), or whose Chapters 1-3, 6, and 17 have a (ugh) single space after periods and colons, whereas Chs. 4, 5, and 10-12 have two, and the rest feature both...

Well, you get the picture. Apparently, the need for consistency is not as self-evident as I -- or certainly my friend, the agent -- had previously believed.

I would point the finger at a few culprits for this astonishingly pervasive problem. First -- and I'm quite positive that those of you who have been hanging around Author! Author! for a while have felt this one coming practically since the top of this post -- the vast majority of aspiring writers simply do not reread their own work enough.

I'm not talking about revision here (although most submissions could use more liberal helpings of that, frankly), but rather actually sitting down and reading a manuscript IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD.

What tips me off that very few writers actually do this before submitting their pages to an agent or a contest? Well, for starters, inconsistent formatting. And spelling errors. And repeated words. And scenes where characters do or say things that they've done or said half a page before.

You know, the kind of stuff that any reader would catch if she sat down with the actual pages and read them closely. You'll hear more about that sort of error in Part II.

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How I won a nickel from an agent, Part II

Often, such errors are not the result of compositional carelessness, but of repeated revision -- the second culprit I'm dragging before the court in irons today. Zeroing in on the same page, paragraph, or even sentence over and over again without re-reading the entire section can easily result in what I like to call a Frankenstein manuscript, one that reads in hard copy as though it were cobbled together from the corpses of several drafts, sometimes ones written in different voices.

Come closer, and I'll let you in on a secret of good writing: it flows smoothly.

A sure narrative voice is a consistent one. That's why writers brand-new to the writing game so often labor under the quite mistaken impression that their favorite books were their respective authors' first drafts, and thus (one assumes) that their own first drafts should be marketable without further revision: because a the author of a well-crafted narrative works hard to create the illusion of spontaneous consistency.

Awfully hard. Seamlessness is no accident, you know.

So what do you think a professional reader like Millicent the agency screener, her cousin Maury the editorial assistant, or their aunt Mehitabel the veteran contest judge thinks when they encounter, say, one sentence that's in the past tense, followed by three that are in the present? Or a character named George on page 8 and Jorge on page 127?

"Inconsistency," they breathe in unison. "This manuscript needs more work."

Or at least a good authorial read-through IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD. If not after every major revision, then at least prior to submitting it.

There's just no substitute for this. Sorry about that.

Third, all of us simply see a great many more grammatical errors and formatting oddities than we did, say, ten years ago. Remember back when everyone thought it was so funny that the vice president at the time (I didn't call that one) corrected a child at a spelling bee who had spelled potato correctly, causing him to change it to potatoe?

At the time, the literate world rocked with laughter over it. Now, we routinely see supermarket signs advertising potatoe and tomatoe prices. And that's a bad thing for literacy, because the more you see the error, the more likely is to make it yourself.

Why? Like Millicent and standard formatting, sheer repetition makes it start to look right to you.

Especially when you spot such errors in ostensibly credible sources. It used to be a rarity to see a spelling mistake in a newspaper or magazine article, because they were so closely edited; since the advent of on-screen editing, it's now not uncommon to see a misspelling or grammatical error in a published book.

Had I mentioned that there's just no substitute for reading a piece of writing IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD? The eye is simply too likely to skip an error on-screen, partially because people read about 70% faster.

Then, too, AP standards -- i.e., what governs what is considered correct in a newspaper or magazine -- have, as we have discussed, recently adopted a number of practices that would not be kosher according to the dictates of standard format. The aforementioned single space after the period or colon, for instance, or capitalizing the first word after a colon.

All together now: sacre bleu!

While eliminating the extra space has been seen in published books for a while (but that doesn't mean it's necessarily proper in a manuscript, right?), post-period capitalization was practically unheard-of in published books until just a couple of years ago. Now, one sees it periodically (often, not entirely coincidentally, in books by journalists), along with some rather peculiar interpretations of the semicolon and the ellipsis.

And what happens, class, when you see rules routinely bent in this manner?

That's right: confusion. Inevitably resulting, no matter what my agent friend says, in good writers raising questions like this:

I tried searching for this, but didn’t find an answer. Ellipses! Is the proper format:?.[space].[space].?or … with no spaces? Thanks as always.

This is a perfectly reasonable question now, of course, but it's not one that was at all likely to come up even five years ago. Prior to that, pretty much any printed source would have adhered to the traditional rules governing ellipses, with the natural result that fewer writers were confused. Heck, they might even have learned the contextual rules governing ellipses in school.

Oh, you want to know what those rules are, since I've brought them up? An excellent thought.

1. Ellipses are most commonly used mid-sentence, to mark a pause in speech. In this context, the periods in the ellipse should appear without spaces between them -- and without spaces between them and the surrounding words, either. In other words, they should look like this:

"I'm appalled," Jennifer said. "More than appalled. I'm...horrified."

2. Ellipses are also used to alert the reader to skipped text in the middle of a quote. In these instance, whether an ellipse should have a space between its end and the end of the next word is entirely dependent upon whether the beginning of the next quoted part is a new sentence. Thus, if the original quotation was,

"I am in no way endorsing this policy or any other, because I feel it would be bad for the nation. I cannot be held responsible for its unhappy results."

It would be proper to reproduce excerpts as:

The prime minister's statement was unequivocal: "I am in no way endorsing this policy...because I feel it would be bad for the nation."

And as:

The prime minister's statement was unequivocal: "I am in no way endorsing this policy... I cannot be held responsible for its unhappy results."

3. Ellipses are also used to show where the narration expects the reader to fill in the subsequent logic, as well as when speaker's voice has trailed off into silence. As in:

Jeremy smiled, slipping one arm out of a sleeve that didn't cover too much of his arm in the first place. A quick wiggle, and the rest of his shirt was off. Then he reached for his belt...

As much as some of you might want me to complete that paragraph, this is a family-friendly website. Besides, you're perfectly capable of imagining the rest for yourself, are you not? In this case, the ellipse indicates my faith in your imaginative powers. As would this, if I were writing dialogue:

"My, it's hot in here." Coyly, Jeremy shrugged his Flashdance-style sweater off one shoulder. "If only there were a way we could cool off..."

4. In reproducing a quote, an ellipse can tell the reader that the quote continued, despite the fact that the writer chose not to show it in its entirety. This can come in handy, especially when writing about the kind of speaker who drones on and on:

"I deny the allegations," the senator said. "I deny them absolutely, unequivocally, and in every other way. I deny that I cavorted in the House; I deny that I cavorted with a mouse. I deny that I cavorted in socks; I deny that I cavorted with a fox..."

Makes sense, doesn't it? (And just between us, wasn't this a clever way of me to answer a reader's question in a post that's really about a larger issue?)

The fourth culprit -- yes, I'm back on my justifying the confusion kick -- may surprise you a little. As so often happens, I have excellent reader questions to thank for reminding me to bring it to your attention: as nit-picky as all of these rules are, sometimes, good writers over-think them. So much so that they sometimes extrapolate extra rules of their own.

Yes, you read that correctly. Really conscientious writers are quite a bit more likely to subject their manuscripts to extra restrictions than to ignore any of the established rules.

What kind of extra rules, you ask? Well, I can give you a great example from this time around the standard format merry-go-round. Two different readers -- my agent friend still can't get over the fact that even one brought it up -- asked how to format apostrophes and quotation marks. Ripped ruthlessly from their original context:

Could you in one of your really wonderful (and I really mean wonderful) posts on standard manuscript formatting devote a paragraph to quote marks and apostrophes? Times New Roman can have them both straight and curly, so which should I use? Or should I just make sure I’m consistent and leave it at that?

and

A related problem I have is in trying to place an apostrophe at the beginning of a word, particularly when writing dialogue and attempting to add a bit of the vernacular. To just type it, the apostrophe ends up being a “front-end” single quotation mark. I have to resort to some spacing and deleting shenanigans to get to appear correctly.

I freely admit it: I'm always a bit nonplused when I get a question like this, one that assumes a rule that just isn't observed in professional manuscripts. So it might be worth joining me in Part III to see how I handle it.

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My five cents, Part III

As tempting as it might be to dust off my personal preferences on the subject of quotation mark and apostrophe formatting and present them as a binding rule -- which, as we've discussed before, is not an unheard-of thing for either a professional reader or a writing advice-giver to do -- but the fact is, the expectations about both apostrophes and quotation marks in manuscripts have remained unchanged since the days when every submission was produced on a manual typewriter.

Which, in case you haven't seen one lately, provided precisely one option for an apostrophe (') and exactly one for a quotation mark ("). On the same key, on most typewriters.

What does this mean for manuscript format? Good news, insofar as it translates into less work for writers: as long as the format is consistent, Millicent's not going to care one way or the other. Pick the one you prefer, and stick to it.

I can completely understand why the two writers who brought it up -- or any aspiring writer -- would have wondered about this point: as readers, we do see various styles of apostrophe and quotation mark turning up in published books. And given how counter-intuitive some of the rules of standard format are, it would not, let's face it, be at all astonishing if the publishing industry harbored some formatting preference that half of the writers in the world had heard nothing about.

But that's not the case here. You have my full permission never to think about it again. Go sleep the undisturbed sleep of the just.

Before you go, though, one more piece of formatting advice: as you make your way through the bewildering forest of advice out there, toting your massive grain of salt, be aware of the fact that many seemingly authoritative sources out there disagree on certain points for the very simple reason that they're talking about different things, although they often do not say so explicitly. Bear in mind that because such a high percentage of the aspiring writers' market wants easy answers, preferably in the form of a single-page list of rules universally applicable to every writing venue, the temptation to produce a short, one-size-fits-all list of rules is considerable.

That doesn't mean you should disregard such lists entirely, of course. Just keep in mind that any list that purports to cover every type is necessarily going to run afoul of some established standard somewhere -- and that occasionally, rules pop up online and at conferences that would make my agent friend's eyes pop out of their sockets with astonishment.

Which is why, in case you've been curious, I have been going over even the simplest of the actual rules in such great detail, and with practical illustrations; I want all of you not only to adhere to the strictures of standard format, but to understand why each rule is to your advantage to embrace. That's why I keep asking (and asking, and asking) if anybody has any questions. I just don't think handing creative-minded people a brief list of mysterious orders is the best means of helping you become comfortable with the industry's expectations.

So if anyone is looking for terse, bullet-pointed to-do lists for writers, I think any of my long-term readers can tell you that this blog is NOT the place to start. As the thousands of pages of archived posts here can attest, I am the queen of elaboration. Lots and lots of elaboration.

Speaking of elaboration, there's a final formatting issue I should address before I draw this series to a close.

While we're on the subject of unnecessary doohickeys writers are sometimes told to shoehorn into their book manuscripts and proposals, let's talk about what should happen on the last page. Here, too, aspiring writers often give themselves extra trouble.

For a book manuscript, the proper way to end it is simply to end it. No bells, no whistles, no # # #, no -86-. Just stop writing.

Even the ever-popular THE END is not needed. In fact, I know plenty of Millicents (and their bosses, and editors, and contest judges) who routinely giggle at the use of THE END to indicate that a manuscript is not, in fact, going to continue. "What is this writer thinking?" they ask one another, amused. "That I'm going to keep reading all of that blank space after the last paragraph, wondering where all of the ink went? That I'm incapable of understanding why there aren't any more pages in the submission? Please!"

Remember what I was saying earlier in this series about professional critique being harsh? Don't even get me started on professional ridicule.

Personally, I have sympathy for how confusing all of the various advice out there must be for those who have never seen a professional manuscript up close and personal. But honestly, some of the rules that commenters have asked about over the last three years must be from sources that predate World War II, or perhaps the Boer War. I've been editing book manuscripts for most of my adult life (and proofing galleys since early junior high school), and I have to say, I've literally never seen a single one that ended with "-86-"

So truth compels me to admit that I can sort of see where Millicent might find it amusing to see in a submission.

But you can sort of see her point of view here, can't you? To people who read book manuscripts for a living in the US, the very notion of there NOT being a consensus is downright odd: why, the evidence that there is a consensus is sitting right in front of them. The mailman brings stacks of it, every single day.

"Oh, come on -- everyone doesn't already know these rules?" my agent friend asked, incredulous. "This information is widely available, isn't it?"

That's a quote, people -- but as someone who regularly works with folks on both sides of the submission aisle, I have come to believe that the wide availability of the information is actually part of the problem here. The rules governing book manuscripts haven't changed all that much over the years, from an insider's perspective, but from the point of view of someone new to the game, the fact that they have changed at all, ever -- coupled with these rules not being applicable to every conceivable type of professional writing -- can look an awful lot like inconsistency.

And we all know how Millie, Maury, and Mehitabel feel about that, don't we?

If the flurry of rules starts to seem overwhelming, remind yourself that although submissions do indeed get rejected for very small reasons all the time, it's virtually unheard-of for any manuscript to have only one problem. Like ants, manuscript red flags seldom travel alone.

So I would caution any aspiring writer against assuming that any single problem, formatting or otherwise, was the only reason a manuscript was getting rejected. Most of the time, it's quite a few reasons working in tandem -- which is why, unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon for Millicent and her cohorts to come to believe that an obviously improperly-formatted manuscript is unlikely to be well-written. The notion that changing only one thing, even a major one, in the average manuscript would render it rejection-proof is not particularly easy for a professional reader to swallow.

There is no such thing as a rejection-proof manuscript, you know. While it would indeed be dandy if there were a magical formula that could be applied to any manuscript to render it pleasing to every Millicent out there, that formula simply doesn't exist; individual tastes and market trends vary too much. Not to mention the fact that the slow economy is making most agents and editors really, really cautious about picking up any manuscript at all right now.

This is vital to understand about standard format: it's not a magic wand that can be waved over a submission to make every agent, editor, and contest judge on the face of the earth squeal with delight at the very sight of it. But it is a basic means of presenting your writing professionally, so your garden-variety Millicent will be able to weigh it on its non-technical merits.

All I can claim for standard format -- and this isn't insignificant -- is that adhering to it will make it less likely that your submission will be rejected on a knee-jerk basis. However, I'm not going to lie to you: even a perfectly-formatted manuscript is going to garner its share of rejections, if it's sent out enough.

Why? Because every agent out there, just like every editor, harbors quirky, individuated ideas about how the perfect book should be written.

Sorry. If I ran the universe...

Well, you know the rest. Try not to lose too much sleep through trying to second-guess what Millicent and her ilk want to see. Just do your best: writing well and presenting a clean manuscript honestly is how pretty much all of us landed our agents.

Keep moving ahead -- the Nobel committee is counting upon all of us to provide the laureates of tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

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How not to give an author interview -- seriously

I hope you will pardon a brief digression from the topic at hand -- standard format for manuscripts -- but something I saw on television last night was such a marvelous example of what not to do in an author interview that I couldn't resist seizing the opportunity to talk about how to do it better. So while I very rarely comment on pop culture in this forum, I am breaking into our series already in progress to spend a day chatting about what does and does not work in an author interview.

I'm thinking ahead, you see. When you give your first filmed or recorded interviews, I'd like to see you pull it off effectively -- and, if possible, in a manner that might conceivably help you sell a few books. (I'm funny that way.)

The interview I saw last night did not, in my opinion, meet those minimal criteria for interview success. For the sake of those who do not have time or be in a space that allows for running acrimonious video clips, though, I shall give a general description of what happened before starting to talk theory.

Basically, this author (who shall remain nameless throughout, as I have not read his book, and I don't want any of this to be construed as a review of it) fell into a trap that book-promoting authors -- particularly first-time authors -- tumble into all the time: he seemed to forget that what he was doing there was promoting his book.

Oh, you may laugh, but it happens all the time. In the excitement of dealing with public attention, it's very, very easy to forget that the person in front of you -- be it talk show host (as in this instance), radio host, a freelancer who picks up extra cash by interviewing authors, or even a question-asking audience member at a book reading -- did not walk into the room because you're a fascinating person. If you're an author booked for an interview, the interviewer is there to talk about your book.

As, incidentally, are you, if you're on a book tour. If you should also happen to be a fascinating person, well, that's just icing on the cake.

The cake itself is your book and your ability to talk about it in such a way that readers, hearers, and/or audience members will remember your name and the book's title after the interview ends. If you can also manage to talk about your subject matter in such a way that it causes these people to murmur, "My, but that sounds like an interesting book; I think I shall check it out," well, let's just say that your publisher will be grateful.

True, your mother may wonder why you didn't talk about your fourth-grade softball team, but trust me, everyone else who participated in your book's road to publication will be happy that you remembered that the author's job in the interview is to make the book, not himself, look good.

I can say it in three or four more ways, if it's still not sinking in. Trust me on this one: if you have any significant success in a writing career -- and I sincerely hope that you do -- it's advice that will serve you well.

Seriously, if you take nothing else from this post, please, I implore you, cling like a leech to the notion that a book-promoting author is first and foremost a marketer. That way, you'll never find yourself in the hideously embarrassing (yet disturbingly common) position of realizing after an interview is over -- or, sacre bleu! after it's already aired or been published in a magazine -- that you were chatting away as if everyone in the audience were waiting breathlessly to hear your opinion on everything but your subject matter.

"Book?" audience members and readers say after such interviews. "What book? I just thought that guy was there as a pundit. Was I supposed to remember anything else but what side he took in the debate?"

Speaking of erring on the side of punditry, as you may already have gathered from my vehemence on this particular point, the author in today's example did not, in my opinion, consistently bear in mind that he was at least ostensibly there to promote his newly-released book. Stepping almost completely into the role of opinion-giver, he got into an argument with the interviewer, not a bad strategy for a pundit, but almost always a losing proposition for an author promoting a book.

The result: the author lost his cool during a nationally televised interview, so much so that by the time the segment ended, he was actively arguing that the host should waive the length restriction and allow him to keep talking uninterrupted "to make the points I came here to make."

As someone who has both conducted and given many, many interviews, I'm here to tell you: that's not a request that's at all likely to be granted by a friendly interviewer. The chances of an interviewer the interviewee has already insulted agreeing to such an arrangement are roughly equivalent to the probability that dinosaurs will spontaneously appear in each of our back yards first thing tomorrow morning, bearing gift baskets of freshly-baked croissants.

Let's just say that your flowerbeds are safe from dinosaur-trampling.

The weird thing, from a book-promotion perspective, was that in promoting this book on this particular talk show, an argument was 100% predictable, and thus could have been prepared for with ease. The author was promoting an overtly political book on a television show whose host (and studio audience, apparently) did not concur with his political opinions. Which happens all the time, right? Surely, anyone who had watched the show before -- as any reasonably prudent author should always do before giving an interview on it -- would have been able to predict the likelihood of a political debate ensuing.

As, indeed, an author of any kind of controversial book might reasonably expect in any interview situation. If one of your book's selling points is its potential to spark debate, you would walk into any interview prepared for a debate to be sparked, right?

But as so often occurs in both television and radio interviews, the author in this case did not seem particularly well prepared for this contingency. Or so I surmise from the fact that by roughly a minute and 45 seconds into the 11-minute interview, the author clearly began to become flustered by the host's wanting to have a political debate.

On a show that takes as its daily subject matter political news. Who could have seen that coming, eh?

So already, we should be grateful to this author, for he has taught aspiring authors everywhere something about preparing for an interview: watching (or in the case of radio, listening) to at least a handful of episodes of the show is essential to the preparation process. For print interviews, there's no substitute for reading some recent articles by the interviewer.

Why? Well, can you think of a better way to become aware of any slant the interviewer might have? Or -- and this is even more important for an author promoting a book -- any particular kind of response that interviewer's established audience might expect?

As today's example illustrates so beautifully, it's really not a good idea to wait until the interview is actually in progress before finding out these things. Please join me in part II for even more beautiful illustrations on the same theme.

Or, to put it another way, it got worse. Don't you want to hear how?

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How not to give an author interview, part II

By a minute and 45 seconds into this embarrassing author interview, what had been a fairly intelligent exchange of ideas directly related to the topic of this poor author's book began to degenerate into just another political argument of the type that anyone who has turned on a cable news program within the last couple of years has seen a dozen times over.

Hey, I have nothing against political debates -- although I hasten to add that my point here is not to prompt my readers to start arguing about who was right and wrong politically in this instance; we're here to talk about how to present and promote writing, right? -- but in this case, allowing the interview to devolve into one cost the author rather dearly: in the minds of the viewers (who are, he hopes, his potential readers, right?), his book has become just another argument for his side of a political debate, rather than a book about his subject matter.

In other words, his message became generic, rather than book-specific, and therefore much, much easier for potential readers to tune out.

Now, as I mentioned above, I have not read this book; I have no idea how it does or doesn't resemble other books produced by authors of a similar political stripe. But as someone who frequently promotes books, I can say for certain that when an author presenting himself as an expert on a particular topic stops talking about that particular topic in an interview, it's usually harder for potential readers to remember what the book's about after the interview ends.

Tell me: would you feel that was an effective use of your book's promotional time?

Let's return to the arguing author -- who, regardless of how one might feel about his politics, was by this juncture in an exceptionally hard position for a book-promoting writer. There were 8 minutes and 15 seconds remaining in the televised interview, the argument in progress was veering farther and farther away from the subject matter of his book, and in order to make his book sound authoritative, he needed to make sure viewers understood just how and why he was a credible expert -- or, to put it in terms the whole industry could understand, to establish his platform.

Which, frankly, I'm still rather at a loss to explain -- and I re-watched this interview three times, in preparation for writing this post. From what I saw in the first 1:45 of this interview, it wouldn't even have occurred to me that in order to understand his particular corner of the political world, I should rush right out and buy his book.

In other words: the interview up to that point had failed the litmus test of any author interview. It did not interestingly promote the book he was there to promote.

How, then, could he have turned the interview around? What would you have done in his place?

Since my readers are a pretty savvy bunch, I'm guessing that your first answer to that question was not, "Why, I'd start talking over the host, in order to win the argument, with an eye toward talking about my book after I had reduced the host to silence." That would be a strategically poor choice, right? Not only would virtually any interviewer resent it, but since it renders both sides of a discussion substantially harder for onlookers or listeners to follow, it tends to annoy even a sympathetic audience.

But guess what our exemplar du jour did?

Uh-huh. For most of the rest of the interview. Punctuated, unwisely, by statements like, "Let me get a word in edgewise," and "Let me make my point."

Not the best way to endear oneself to any interviewer, and usually not a particularly effective means of garnering sympathy from an audience. Audiences are smart: they can tell for themselves when an interviewee is being bullied.

Which was not, to my eye, the case here, incidentally; I could be wrong about the motivation here, but as nearly as I could tell the author merely seemed to be unused to making his case to people who did not already agree with his political views. Again, rather strange, given that even a passing familiarity with the show would have lead him to expect that.

Here again, though, we writers can learn something from this situation: in preparing for any interview situation, an author should always practice in mock interviews with both friendly and hostile interviewers.

Established authors do this all the time, and for very good reason: if they're not prepared to parry wittily off-camera and off the record with someone they already know, experience tells them that making being grilled by a total stranger under a studio's worth of bright lights look easy is going to be, well, hard. Hey, being urbane requires some serious practice.

Besides, it's a great way to get your more passive-aggressive kith and kin involved in promoting your book. Come on -- don't you have a cousin or former college roommate who wouldn't just love the opportunity to try to get your goat under the guise of interview prep? Right before you embark on a book tour is a dandy time to put 'em to work.

Do I see a few hands raised out there in the ether? "But Anne," some timid souls point out, "what makes you think that last night's interviewer was not trying to be a bully? I've just watched the interview, and the host kept firing questions at the author."

Good point, timid souls -- but if a writer is going on a book tour, or even talk to readers at a book signing, he's going to need to steel himself to the possibility of being asked questions related to his book. Especially in an interview, because, let's face it, it's the interviewer's job to keep asking questions.

In this case, though, I have another reason for thinking well of the interviewer's motivations: after the frustrated author had been increasingly talking over him, even mid-question, for quite some time, at 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the interview, the host changed the subject rather pointedly back to, you guessed it, the general subject matter of the book. Which, considering that both parties were visibly annoyed by that point, was actually rather generous of him.

Need I even say that the author did not respond to it that way? Having gotten into an argumentative rhythm, he reacted not by eagerly seizing the opportunity to talk about his book -- the reason he had come on the show in the first place, lest we forget -- but as an invitation to further debate. But by then, the author was clearly in it to win the argument, period.

Always a bad move in an interview, by the way, even if you're 100% positive that you are right and the interviewer is wrong. Why? Well, think about it: even in a televised or radio interview, the host is inevitably going to have the last word, right? He can talk about you after you have left; the show's directors, producers, and editors are going to have the power to edit what you said. And in print, an unfriendly interviewer can simply not reproduce what you said correctly.

Tell me, would you rather have these people on your side, or to win the argument?

Before you answer that, allow me to add that I'm not asking your heart here; I'm asking your head. Specifically, the part of your brain that wants to convince potential readers to go out and pick up a copy of your book.

Winning a short-term argument at all costs no longer sounds like the best long-term strategy, does it? Again, we can extrapolate a general rule: feel free to make your case in an interview, but if the discussion gets nasty or personal, turn the talk back to the book. Remember, your goal here is to get the interviewer to help you promote it, not beat him in an argument.

What can happen if an interviewee loses sight of that goal? Fortunately for our learning curve, today's example shows us a frequent outcome: about a minute after the host threw the author that lifeline, he visibly gave up on trying to talk about the book. For the next several minutes, the interview once again devolved into a political debate between two people who do not agree about politics.

Good television? Perhaps, but again, I ask you: is this the most efficient use of televised promotional time, from the author's point of view?

Clearly, I have an answer in mind to that question. Please join me at Author! Author! for the continuation of this saga, so that you may draw conclusions of your own.

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Drawing some much-needed lines in the sand
originally posted: February 13, 2010

I'm so sorry, everyone -- my website experienced a wee meltdown late Thursday night. Some hidden toggle evidently got switched, and ever since, apparently, it has been impossible to post a comment on my last post. Rather unfriendly, wasn't it, since I'd specifically asked all of you to comment with questions?

Rest assured, any reluctance to hear from you rested firmly on the technology side, not the human one. So please, feel free to comment away.

This would be an especially good time to bring up any long-smoldering concerns about formatting, actually, since I'm going to be devoting next week's posts to showing you how standard format for manuscripts looks on the printed page. Some of my best examples were derived from readers' questions; this time around, in fact, in response to a recent reader's request, I'm going to be adding an entire post on how to format a book proposal.

So if there's a principle we've discussed within the last few days that you'd like to see in action, please, don't be shy.

Today, I'm going to be wrapping up my theoretical discussion of standard format. In the interest of having all of the rules listed in a single post, let's recap what we've already covered.

(1) All manuscripts should be printed or typed in black ink and double-spaced, with one-inch margins around all edges of the page, on 20-lb or better white paper.

(2) All manuscripts should be printed on ONE side of the page and unbound in any way.

(3) The text should be left-justified, NOT block-justified. By definition, manuscripts should NOT resemble published books in this respect.

(4) The preferred typefaces are 12-point Times, Times New Roman, Courier, or Courier New -- unless you're writing screenplays, in which case you may only use Courier. For book manuscripts, pick one (and ONLY one) and use it consistently throughout your entire submission packet.

(5) The ENTIRE manuscript should be in the same font and size. Industry standard is 12-point.

(6) Do NOT use boldface anywhere in the manuscript BUT on the title page -- and not even there, necessarily.

(7) EVERY page in the manuscript should be numbered EXCEPT the title page.

(8) Each page of the manuscript (other than the title page) should have a standard slug line in the header. The page number should appear in the slug line, not anywhere else on the page.

(9) The first page of each chapter should begin a third of the way down the page, with the chapter title appearing on the FIRST line of the page, NOT on the line immediately above where the text begins.

(10) Contact information for the author belongs on the title page, NOT on page 1.

(11) Every submission should include a title page, even partial manuscripts.

(12) The beginning of EVERY paragraph of text should be indented five spaces. No exceptions, ever.

(13) Don’t skip an extra line between paragraphs, except to indicate a section break.

(14) NOTHING in a manuscript should be underlined. Titles of songs and publications, as well as words in foreign languages and those you wish to emphasize, should be italicized.

All of those make sense, I hope, at least provisionally? Excellent. Moving on...

(15) All numbers under 100 should be written out in full: twenty-five, not 25. But numbers over 100 should be written as numbers: 1,243, not one thousand, two hundred and forty-three.

I'm surprised how often otherwise industry-savvy aspiring writers are unaware of this particular rule, but the instinct to correct it in a submission is universal in professional readers. Translation: NOT doing it will not help you win friends and influence people at agencies and publishing houses.

Like pointing out foreign-language words with special formatting, this formatting rule was originally for the benefit of the manual typesetters. When numbers are entered as numbers, a single slip of a finger can result in an error, whereas when numbers are written out, the error has to be in the inputer’s mind.

There are only two exceptions to this rule: dates and, of course, page numbers. Thus, a properly-formatted manuscript dealing with events on November 11 would look like this on the page:

ABBOTT/THE GREAT VOYAGE/82

On November 11, 1492, fifty-three scholars divided into eighteen parties in preparation for sailing to Antarctica. It took 157 rowboats ten trips apiece to load all of their books, papers, and personal effects onboard.

And not like this:

ABBOTT/THE GREAT VOYAGE/Eighty-two

On November eleventh, fourteen hundred and ninety-two, fifty-three scholars divided into eighteen parties in preparation for sailing to Antarctica. It took a hundred and fifty-seven rowboats ten trips apiece to load all of their books, papers, and personal effects onboard.

Do I see some hands waving in the air? "But Anne," inveterate readers of newspapers protest, "I'm accustomed to seeing numbers like 11, 53, 18, and 10 written as numerals in print. Does that mean that when I read, say, a magazine article with numbers under 100 depicted this way, that some industrious editor manually changed all of those numbers after the manuscript was submitted?"

No, it doesn't -- although I must say, the mental picture of that poor, unfortunate soul assigned to spot and make such a nit-picky change is an intriguing one. What you have here is yet another difference between book manuscript format and, well, every other kind of formatting out there: in journalism, they write out only numbers under 10.

Unfortunately, many a writing teacher out there believes that the over-10 rule should be applied to all forms of writing, anywhere, anytime. Yes, this is true for newspaper articles, where space is at a premium, but in a book manuscript, it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Did I mention it was wrong? And that my aged eyes have actually seen contest entries knocked out of finalist consideration over this particular issue? More than once? And within the year?

AP style differs from standard format in several important respects, not the least being that in standard format (as in other formal presentations in the English language), the first letter of the first word after a colon should NOT be capitalized, since technically, it's not the beginning of a new sentence. I don't know who introduced the convention of post-colon capitalization, but believe me, I'm not the only one who read the submissions of aspiring book writers for a living that's mentally consigned that language subversive to a pit of hell that would make even Dante avert his eyes in horror.

That's the way we nit-pickers roll. We like our formatting and grammatical boundaries firm.

Heck, amongst professional readers, my feelings on the subject are downright mild. I've been in more than one contest judging conference where tables were actually banged and modern societies deplored. Trust me, you don't want your entry to be the one that engenders this reaction.

So let's all chant it together, shall we? The formatting and grammatical choices you see in newspapers will not necessarily work in manuscripts or literary contest entries.

Everyone clear on that? Good, because -- are you sitting down, lovers of newspapers? -- embracing journalistic conventions like the post-colon capital and writing out only numbers under ten will just look like mistakes to Millicent and her ilk on the submission page.

And no, there is no court of appeal for such decisions; proper format, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. So if you were planning to cry out, "But that's the way USA TODAY does it!" save your breath.

Unfortunately, although my aforementioned heart aches for those of you who intended to protest, "But how on earth is an aspiring writer to KNOW that the standards are different?" this is a cry that is going to fall on deaf ears as well.

Which annoys me, frankly. The sad fact is, submitters rejected for purely technical reasons are almost never aware of it. With few exceptions, the rejecters will not even take the time to scrawl, "Take a formatting class!" or "Next time, spell-check!" on the returned manuscript. If a writer is truly talented, they figure, she'll mend her ways and try again.

And that, in case any of you had been wondering, is why I revisit the topic of standard format so darned often. How can the talented mend their ways if they don't know how -- or even if -- their ways are broken?

Didn't expect me to get all philosophical on Valentine's Day weekend, did you? I have a Ph.D. in philosophical musing, you know. Join me in Part II for more insights on the human condition. Or at least the submitter's.

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Drawing some lines in the sand, part II
originally posted: February 13, 2010

To return to our list:

(16) Dashes should be doubled -- rather than using an emdash -- with a space at either end. Hyphens are single and are not given extra spaces at either end, as in self-congratulatory.

Yes, yes, I know: you've probably heard that this rule is obsolete, too, gone the way of underlining. The usual argument for its demise: books no longer preserve these spaces, for reasons of printing economy, so many writing teachers tell their students just to go ahead and eliminate them. An AP-trained teacher will tell you to use the longer emdash, as will the Chicago Manual of Style.

In this, however, they are wrong, at least as far as manuscripts are concerned. (You're starting to get used to that, right?)

Standard format is invariable upon this point: a doubled dash with a space on either end is correct; anything else is not. And yes, it is indeed a common enough pet peeve that the pros will complain to one another about how often submitters get it wrong.

They also whine about how often they see manuscripts where this rule is applied inconsistently: two-thirds of the dashes doubled, perhaps, sometimes with a space at either end and sometimes not, with the odd emdash and single dash dotting the text as well. It may seem like a minor, easily-fixable phenomenon from the writer's side of the submission envelope, but believe me, inconsistency drives people trained to spot minor errors nuts.

Your word-processing program probably changes a double dash to an emdash automatically, but CHANGE IT BACK. If only as a time-saver: any agent would make you do this before agreeing to submit your manuscript to an editor, so you might as well get into this salutary habit as soon as possible.

(17) Adhere to the standard rules of punctuation and grammar, not what it being done on the moment in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet -- including the rule calling for TWO spaces after every period and colon.

In other words, do as Strunk & White say, not what others do. Assume that Millicent graduated with honors from the best undergraduate English department in the country, taught by the grumpiest, meanest, least tolerant stickler for grammar that ever snarled at a student unfortunate enough to have made a typo, and you'll be fine.

Imagining half the adults around me in my formative years who on the slightest hint of grammatical impropriety even in spoken English will work, too.

The primary deviation I’ve been seeing in recent years is leaving only one space, rather than the standard two, after a period. Yes, printed books often do this, to save paper (the fewer the spaces on a page, the more words can be crammed onto it, right?). A number of writing-advice websites, I notice, and even some writing teachers have been telling people that this is the wave of the future -- and that adhering to the two-space norm makes a manuscript look obsolete.

At the risk of sounding like the harsh grammar-mongers of my youth, poppycock. Although some agents and editors do now request eliminating the second space at the submission stage, the doubled space is still the norm. Agents, very good ones, routinely submit manuscripts with doubled spaces to editors, also very good ones, all the time. Successfully.

So when in doubt, adhere to the rules of English. Unless, of course, you happen to be submitting to one of those people who specifically asks for single spaces, in which case, you'd be silly not to bow to their expressed preferences. (Sensing a pattern here?)

Fortunately, for aspiring writers everywhere, those agents who do harbor a strong preference for the single space tend not to keep mum about it. If they actually do tell their Millicents to regard a second space as a sign of creeping obsolescence, chances are very, very good that they'll mention that fact on their websites.

Double-check before you submit. If the agent of your dreams has not specified, double-space.

Why should that be the default option, since proponents of eliminating the second space tend to be so very vocal? Those who cling to the older tradition are, if anything, more vehement.

Why, you ask? Editing experience, usually. Preserving that extra space after each sentence in a manuscript makes for greater ease of reading, and thus editing. As anyone who has ever edited a long piece of writing can tell you, the white space on the page is where the comments -- grammatical changes, pointing out flow problems, asking, “Does the brother really need to die here?” -- go.

Less white space, less room to comment. It really is that simple.

Oh, and it drives the grammar-hounds nuts to hear that time-honored standards are being jettisoned in the name of progress. "What sane human being," they ask through gritted teeth, "seriously believes that replacing tonight with tonite, or all right with alright constitutes progress? Dropping the necessary letters and spaces doesn't even save significant page space!"

Those are some pretty vitriol-stained lines in the sand, aren't they?

Let's just say that until everyone in the industry makes the transition editing in soft copy -- which is, as I have pointed out many times in this forum, both harder and less efficient than scanning a printed page -- the two-space rule is highly unlikely to change universally. Just ask a new agent immediately after the first time he's submitted to an old-school senior editor: if he lets his clients deviate from the norms, he's likely to be lectured for fifteen minutes on the rules of the English language.

I sense that some of you are starting to wring your hands and rend your garments in frustration. "I just can't win here! Most want it one way, a few another. I'm so confused about what's required that I keep switching back and forth between two spaces and one while I'm typing."

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but inconsistent formatting is likely to annoy both sides of the aisle. Whichever choice you embrace, be consistent about it throughout your manuscript; don't kid yourself that an experienced professional reader isn't going to notice if you sometimes use one format, sometimes the other.

He will. So will a veteran contest judge. Pick a convention and stick with it.

But don't fret over it too much. This honestly isn't as burning a debate amongst agents and editors as many aspiring writers seem to think. Both ways have advocates, and frankly, there are plenty of agents out there who report that they just don't care.

As always: check before you submit. If the agent's website, contest listing, and/or Twitter page doesn't mention individual preferences, assume s/he's going to be submitting to old-school editors and retain the second space.

And be open to the possibility -- brace yourselves; you're not going to like this -- that you may need to submit your manuscript formatted one way for a single agent on your list, and another for the other nineteen.

I told you that you weren't going to like it.

(18) Turn off the widow/orphan control; it gives pages into an uneven number of lines.

That one's pretty self-explanatory, isn't it? Think of it as my Valentine's Day present to you.

What, too practical? You would have preferred something made out of lace or chocolate?

There you have it: the rules. Practice them until they are imbedded into your very bones, my friends: literally every page of text you submit to an agent, editor, or literary contest (yes, including the query letter and synopsis) for the rest of your professional life should be in standard format.

Okay, so maybe that's not the most romantic view of the future imaginable, but we're all about practicality here at Author! Author! That, and drawing some much-needed lines in the sand.

Keep up the good work!

P.S.: should you be interested in my explication of the earlier rules on this list, the explanatory posts start here.

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Anne Mini grew up in the middle of a Zinfandel vineyard in the Napa Valley. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, writing for Let's Go, and composing back label copy for wine bottles, she spent several years teaching Plato and Confucius to frat boys at a large, football-oriented university. She has since gratefully given up academia in order to write and edit full-time. Her memoir, A Family Darkly: Love, Loss, and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick, won the 2004 Zola Award. She has also won numerous writing fellowships, as well as being a finalist for an NEH Fellowship. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She currently lives in Seattle, writing and book doctoring for good writers.