Don’t leave your manuscript without style . . . at least put some “clothes” on it!
I receive a lot of manuscripts from self-published authors that have been manually formatted. That is, the manuscript is littered with unnecessary extra returns, spaces, tabs, etc., all used in an attempt to format.
If you want your book to look like a professional publication, you need a consistent and cleanly formatted book. The best way to do that, if you are using Microsoft Word, is by taking advantage of MW’s Built-in Styles. (Click here for a video tutorial.) Plus, formatting with Styles means you can create a Table of Contents using MW’s TOC feature, which automatically creates hyperlinks to each chapter or section—great for eBooks, amirite?
Most professional editors know how to use MW’s Styles and will happily format your manuscript using Styles for you. However, if you have a limited budget, you can shave hours off the editing process (and thus, the cost of editing) by formatting your own book before you send it to your editor.
Even if, in the final stages of editing, you want to (or you want your editor to) customize the format, it is so much easier to modify the Style already in place than to go into the manuscript, delete all unwanted paragraph returns, spaces, tabs, etc., and then add and modify Styles.
Think of it this way, if MW’s Styles were clothes, then without them, you’d be sending your editor a naked manuscript. . . .
I CAN EDIT 