There is a particular silence after you type the last line of a first novel. The draft is finished, the tea has gone cold, and the next step — sending it out — feels both enormous and strangely administrative. It is administrative, at least in part. A manuscript that arrives looking like a professional submission gets read differently from one that arrives looking like a document nobody has opened twice.

Before you attach anything to an email, work through the checks below. None of them will make a weak book publishable. All of them will make sure the strong parts of yours are actually visible.

Formatting: The Boring Details That Do Real Work

Standard manuscript format exists so that a reader can forget about the format entirely. Get it right and nobody notices. Get it wrong and it becomes the first thing an agent sees.

• A common serif font at 12pt — Times New Roman, Garamond or similar. Not Calibri, not Arial, not a display font you downloaded.
• Double line spacing throughout, including indented passages and block quotations.
• Margins of around 2.5cm on all four sides.
• Left-aligned text with a ragged right edge. Full justification opens up rivers of white space and reads as amateur.
• The first line of each paragraph indented with one tab; no blank line between paragraphs.
• Page numbers, plus your surname and the book's title, in the header or footer.
• Each chapter beginning on a fresh page, with the heading set a third of the way down.
• A title page carrying the title, the genre, the word count rounded to the nearest thousand, and your contact details.

Save as a .docx unless the guidelines ask for something else. They ask for something else more often than you would expect.

Does Your Word Count Sit Where It Should?

Word counts in publishing are conventions rather than laws, and plenty of fine novels ignore them. Debut authors get less leeway, because no one yet has evidence that readers will follow you somewhere unusual. As a rough guide:

• Literary and general fiction: about 70,000–100,000 words
• Crime, thriller and suspense: about 80,000–100,000
• Romance: about 70,000–95,000
• Science fiction and fantasy: about 90,000–120,000, with debuts usually at the lower end
• Young adult: about 50,000–80,000
• Middle grade: about 30,000–60,000

If your manuscript sits well outside its band, ask why. Sometimes the answer is "because that is the book". More often it is a sagging middle, a subplot that could be folded into the main line, or three chapters of research you enjoyed writing more than anyone will enjoy reading. A first draft that needs to lose 30,000 words is a perfectly normal first draft.

The First Ten Pages Do More Work Than the Other Four Hundred

Most submissions are judged on a sample: three chapters, fifty pages, or whatever the guidelines specify. That sample is doing an enormous amount of persuasion, so give it your attention rather than your affection.

Read your opening as though you had never seen it. Does something happen, or does someone wake up, drive somewhere, or study themselves in a mirror? Is the voice audible on the first page, or does it take a chapter to warm up? Is backstory being explained before there is any reason to care? Are the stakes visible, even if they are small ones?

A test worth running: cut the first three paragraphs of chapter one and read from there. If the story reads better, the cuts stay. They often do.

Write a Synopsis That Spoils the Ending

A synopsis is not a blurb. A blurb teases; a synopsis tells. It covers the whole plot, in order, including the resolution — agents and editors need to see whether the structure holds all the way down.

One page is the usual request in the UK, roughly 500 to 700 words. Write in third person and present tense, name your viewpoint character early, and use the same names throughout rather than referring to "the protagonist". Sketch the setup, the inciting incident, the midpoint turn, the crisis and the ending, and say what it costs your character to get there. Avoid rhetorical questions, avoid describing themes, and avoid the phrase "little does she know".

If the guidelines ask for two pages, send two. If they ask for one, do not send three.

Proofread Like It Belongs to Someone Else

You cannot proofread your own novel in the state you finished writing it. You know what each sentence is supposed to say, which is precisely why you will read what you meant rather than what is on the page.

What actually helps

• Change the format. Read it on a screen in a different font, or print a chapter at a time.
• Read aloud, or have it read to you. Dropped words and clumsy rhythms surface immediately.
• Use Find to hunt your crutch words — just, really, suddenly, seemed, felt. Count them. Then halve them.
• Check consistency: spellings of names, eye colour, distances, timings, and whether you have settled on UK or US spelling throughout.
• Check dialogue punctuation separately. It is the single most common error in otherwise clean manuscripts.
• Ask two or three trusted readers for the specific things you want to know, not for general encouragement.

If you are considering paying for a professional proofread before submitting, that is a reasonable investment in a manuscript you believe in — but make sure you understand what you are buying and from whom. For submission purposes, a clean, careful self-edit is usually enough.

Know Who You Are Sending It To

Most large UK trade publishers do not accept unagented submissions from debut novelists; the usual route is through a literary agent. Smaller independent presses frequently do read submissions directly. Both routes require the same discipline: read the guidelines, then follow them to the letter.

• What do they want — a query only, sample chapters, or the full manuscript?
• How do they want it — attached, or pasted into the body of an email?
• Do they accept simultaneous submissions, and do they ask for exclusivity?
• What response time do they state, and when is it fair to follow up?
• Are the guidelines current? Check the date on the page.

Keep a simple record of everything you send: who, when, what, and when a reply is due. After twenty submissions, memory stops being reliable.

Before You Press Send

1. Title page complete, word count rounded and accurate.
2. Manuscript formatted, paginated, and free of comments and tracked changes.
3. Synopsis written to the length requested.
4. Covering letter running to three short paragraphs: what the book is, who you are, and why this reader.
5. File names sensible — Surname_Title_Synopsis.docx, not finalfinal2.docx.
6. Email subject line as specified in the guidelines.
7. Guidelines read once more, slowly, immediately before sending.

Then send it, note the date, and start something else. The waiting is far easier to bear when you are midway through the next thing rather than refreshing an inbox.

Photo: borevina / Pixabay