44
Publisher-ready manuscript export
In progress
Sep 19, 2024
When exporting to .docx (but not EPUB) writers would like to follow the style guide for submitting to publishers. This would mean changing chapter headings so they are centred, defaulting to double line spacing, and adding a header with the author's surname, book title and the page number in all caps (e.g. SURNAME/BOOK TITLE/PAGE 2).
Comments
Plus 1 for Shunn. It's the nearest thing to a global standard that exists and a very common requirement of publishers. Though not always asked for, you will never get your manuscript rejected for using it. This is a somewhat different requirement to those asking for additional formatting. Agents, publishers and professional story markets do not want additional formatting like chapter headers, etc. I think some writers misunderstand this. These are added by the publisher. What they want from a manuscript is the opposite: a clean document free of markup. That said, it's easy to imagine some simple additions/tweaks to the current export options that would allow Shunn and/or other preferences to be configured to taste.
The export definitely needs the basics of styling so that chapter titles are exported as heading 1, and body text is exported as body or normal paragraph. At the moment, an exported docx displays differently depending on what app I use to open it.
Mikey can you give me a bit more information on this? The export is already formatted as you describe, so it may be an app incompatibility. Can you let me know what you've tried this with so I can test?
Pamela Koehne-Drube You’re right. I’ve just done a new export and opened the docx in apple pages, and it doesn’t look good. I’ll attach a screenshot. So I tried opening the docx in Textmaker and WPS Office and they are all OK and just as they should be.
Mikey That's good to know, thanks. Because the export is in .docx and not .pages format, some incompatibility is to be expected. But I'll chat to the team and see if there's a way we can do a .pages format in the future.
It would be super helpful. I wouldn’t have to go back and fix it myself it is already there. Maybe have an option for the center or not in the exporting feature.
Agreed. This would make a great feature. Other writing tools, like Scrivener, already have it.
Yes, setting it to Shunn Manuscript format would be great. This is what most SFF short story markets want: https://www.shunn.net/format/