Manuscript formatting guidelines: the standard submission format, and how KDP differs

There are two different manuscript formats and confusing them causes real problems. Standard manuscript format exists for human readers — agents, editors, contest judges. Publication format exists for a rendering engine. What is correct in one is wrong in the other.

Standard submission format: 12pt Times New Roman or Courier, double-spaced, one-inch margins on all sides, left-aligned with a ragged right edge, first-line indent of half an inch, no extra space between paragraphs, and a header carrying surname, keyword from the title and page number.

The first page carries your contact details in the top-left corner and the approximate word count in the top-right, with the title roughly a third of the way down. Chapters start on a new page, about a third down, with the chapter heading centred.

Scene breaks are marked with a centred hash or asterisk, never with blank space alone, because blank space does not survive a format conversion. Italics should be actual italics in a digital submission; underlining is a typesetting-era convention that is now obsolete for most publishers.

Publication format for KDP differs on almost every point. Single or 1.15 line spacing, justified text for print, first-line indents applied through a paragraph style rather than tab characters or spaces, and no manual page breaks except at chapter starts.

For reflowable ebooks, fixed measurements are the enemy. Fixed page sizes, hard-coded page numbers, manual line breaks used for spacing and absolute image positioning all break the moment a reader changes font size. Use styles for everything.

The single most valuable habit is using named paragraph styles rather than direct formatting. A manuscript built on Heading 1, Heading 2, Body Text and Block Quote converts cleanly to EPUB, generates a working table of contents, and can be reformatted for print in minutes.

When converting from submission format to publication format, do it with find-and-replace and style redefinition, not by hand. Replace multiple consecutive returns, strip tab characters at paragraph starts, and convert straight quotes to typographic quotes in a single pass.

Manucheck reads DOCX, PDF, EPUB and TXT and reports on exactly these mechanics — heading consistency, manual spacing, table-of-contents integrity, quotation marks, image resolution and front and back matter completeness — before the file reaches a publisher or a retailer.