Embedding your first chapter in an e-query

Single space, and to be safe go for plain text. Make sure there's a space between paragraphs so their eyes don't cross. If you have italics, I don't know how you'd personally handle it.

A lot of agents who ask for something like that will say they don't care about the formatting because it'll get messed up anyway. So I don't think they'd care about double spacing so much. When I send a chapter I send it to myself first to see how it turns out. I know this might now really work because people have different email programs, but it makes me feel batter.

Chumplet said:

Single space, and to be safe go for plain text. Make sure there's a space between paragraphs so their eyes don't cross. If you have italics, I don't know how you'd personally handle it.

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That's how I did it. I did this for italics: _italics_

I sent only 5 pages, single spaced and no italics or other stuff- although I used them I removed them for convenience.
I pasted the pages at the bottom of my query letter and referred to it in the first paragraph ("I have included the first 5 pages of LOTTERY at the bottom of this query letter")
I will tell you that they can easily determine from the first couple pages whether they want more.
I would not send the entire first chapter. It makes the email brutally long.
BTW agents know things get messed up in emails.
Good writing and a great premise can withstand mime errors.

Chumplet said:

Single space, and to be safe go for plain text. Make sure there's a space between paragraphs so their eyes don't cross. If you have italics, I don't know how you'd personally handle it.

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That's pretty much it. Make the first chapter look like a plain text single spaced document with an extra line between paragraphs and the first line of each paragraph not indented.

In another thread, it was suggested to paste the chapter first in WordPad (which removes some formatting) before putting it into the e-mail, which is a good idea.

What I do is I save the chapter, synopsis, etc. as a separate file and manually remove all the formatting. I change it to arial (which my plain-text e-mail format understands), put it in single space, add an extra space between each paragraph, remove all paragraph indentations, and do a Ctrl-A and then press bold then unbold and do the same for italics and/or underline to remove such and I'm good to go. I saved this file and just cut-and-paste when I need it.

Finally, it is a good idea to e-mail the query + chapters to yourself first as a draft and then review it so it looks okay to you before you e-mail it out to the agent.