What is the agreed-upon margin width?

Arg.. if I used 1.25 or 1.5 inch margins my ms would be enormous! And I only write YA. I'd never stop buying printer paper and ink!

1 inch margins, 12 pt Courier, double spaced. Turn off the widow/orphan control and try to get as close to 25 lines per pages as you can. Of course, unless the place you are submitting to has other guidelines, then follow those.

Lantern Jack said:

This question has been pestering me for years. A lot of people say you should use one inch wraparound, but it takes a lot more to fill a page that way, even when you're using an editorial word count (250 words per page).

I have a copy of "The Writer's Market" dating back to 1993, which recommends 1.25 inch margins and I even know writers who use 1.5 inches, which would be seventh heaven with Courier New and 12 point font and counting words with an editorial word count.

I know, I know, it's quality, not quantity, but when you have your story and it's lean, mean and hungry to earn some green, it seems ridiculous to have to pad him until he's a wheezy, adipose porker.

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I think you're confused about how word count works. The editorial 250 words per page rule is not an estimate, it's an actual count of spaces per line. So if you widen the margins, you then have to count the actual spaces and adjust accordingly.

Editorial word count only works easily with one inch margins. If you use wider margins, you have to change the number of words you assign each page. Only one inch margins give you the 250 words per page rule.

Margins have nothing at all to do with padding. One inch margins gives you an average of sixty spaces per line. You divide this by six which means ten words per line. You multiply this by twenty-five lines per page, which gives you the 250 word per page count.

You're free to use 1.25 margins, or 1.50 margins, if you like the look, but you then have to count the spaces per line, divide by six, and multiply by twenty-five, which gives you a lower word count per page that the one inch margins.

So if you use 1.25 or 1.50 margins, you then have to write more pages to bring your word count up to what publishers want.

Wider or narrower margins simply don't give you more or less writing, and do not take away or add length.

With one inch margins and Courier 12, 400 pages is counted as 100,000 words. With 1.5 inch margins, you only average 52 spaces per line, so it takes about 461 pages to get this same 100,000 words.

One inch margins just makes the math work easier. It gives you sixty spaces divided by six instead of 52 spaces divided by six, and lets you multiply the lines on the page by ten instead of by 8.6.

So padding has nothing to do with it, and lean writing has nothing to do with it. When a publisher wants a 100,000 word novel, this means 400 pages with Courier 12 and one inch margins at twenty-five lines per page. But if you use 1.5 inch margins because you like the look, you then have to give that publisher 461 pages with Courier 12, 1.5 inch margins, and twenty-five lines per page.

So no matter what margins you use, you still have to write the same amount. The only question is how easy do you want the math to be, and how much paper do you want to use to print the novel.

Jamesaritchie said:

So no matter what margins you use, you still have to write the same amount. The only question is how easy do you want the math to be, and how much paper do you want to use to print the novel.

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All well explained, except that if the house you're submitting to has explicit guidelines for manuscript formatting, FOLLOW THEM. If they say one inch margins, reformat with one inch margins and print. If they say two inch margins and print in 16 point KlingonKursive, do it.

All this applies only to final submission copy, of course. While writing your opus you can use any settings you like.

Widows and orphans are single words or small phrases left at the top or bottom of a page when a paragraph happens to flow that way.

For example, if you have a paragraph that reads:

Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by this son of
York.

And the page break happens to come between the second and third lines, then the "York" will appear all by itself on the top of the next page. This is considered unsightly and sloppy typesetting.

Some word processors have a setting to deal with it, but they fiddle the word or line spacing and upset the word count per page metric, which is probably why James recommended disabling it. I personally don't think it makes that much difference over a long manuscript, but I could be wrong.

I'm very glad you explained it, I was just about to stick that in the stupid questions thread, in case it was something I SHOULD know, and would have made people laugh to hear me ask. Thanks, Sage, for asking before me.

Just to check I was getting it right, I pasted "widows and orphans" into Google and got lucky. The first hit was an about.com article explaining it all.

Google is great for answering "stupid" questions.

As it turned out, I had remembered the bottom of the page part but not the top of the next page part, so it was just as well I googled.

berry said:

16 point KlingonKursive

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Wish I had klingonkursive....I'm sure it's a great font.


I grade lots of papers. The papers in my classes have to be of a particular format:

• Typed, double-spaced
• 12 point Times New Roman
• One inch margins
• Last name and page number in the top right header

It is very easy to see when someone is not following the guidelines, mostly because I've graded hundreds and hundreds of papers and I know the format I want and because the papers that break from these guidelines look different from the other essays. Is this a good thing? No.

Follow the standard guidelines or the guidelines stated at a certain publisher's/agent's page. Anything different will come off as careless. It's not fair, I'm sure, but we all make judgements based on first impressions.

Although I hate it, you hate it, and everyone else in the world hates it,

first impressions are very, very, very important.

That's what you are ultimately selling either to the agent/publisher or on the shelf.

Don't be the one who looks like they've padded the work or tried to be creative with the formatting. Most likely, you'll be filed in place where no work deserves to be filed (well, maybe some work...).

Great explanation of the widow/orphan control. Turning it off also helps you achieve that 25 lines per page much easier. You get a big giant blank space at the bottom of the page if you leave it on and the sentence breaks, no matter what your margin.

With W/O switched off, I get 24 lines per page in standard manuscript format...does that matter, or is it okay as long as it's consistently 24-per-page?

I'm not an editor, but I think that if you tell a terrific story, no one's going to care whether you have 24 or 25 lines per page, or one or two spaces after a period, or minor things like that.

Good point. I should remember to take my OCD medicine* more often.







*Chocolate biscuits.

In MSWord, it's in the >format >paragraph >line & page breaks menus.

Yeah, you'll see a difference. See, in WP, I can adjust the line spacing to 1.8 rather than 2, which will give you the 25 lines/page. In Word, I can't figure out how to make it work, so I just turn of the W/O, set my margins and font... and pray.

I get the feeling we're all being a little picky. I'll switch off W/O, 1" margins, Courier New, 12pt, pages x 250 words, then round it down to the nearest thousand, perhaps five thousand. If the book's good enough, no agent will turn it down because it's a few pages long or short, I reckon.

In Word, you can get 25 lines per page by doing the following:

1. Format->Paragraph
2. Set "Line Spacing" to "Exactly"
3. Set "At:" to 25 pt.

That'll give you 25 lines per page when using Courier 12.

I could kiss you!

I won't, though.

Berry said:

All well explained, except that if the house you're submitting to has explicit guidelines for manuscript formatting, FOLLOW THEM. If they say one inch margins, reformat with one inch margins and print. If they say two inch margins and print in 16 point KlingonKursive, do it.

All this applies only to final submission copy, of course. While writing your opus you can use any settings you like.

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True, but no matter what margins guideliens say to use, you still have to count the way I described, and one inch margins are something no print publisher I know argues with.

scarletpeaches said:

I get the feeling we're all being a little picky. I'll switch off W/O, 1" margins, Courier New, 12pt, pages x 250 words, then round it down to the nearest thousand, perhaps five thousand. If the book's good enough, no agent will turn it down because it's a few pages long or short, I reckon.

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You're right, but there can be a big page count difference, depending on how you count words, and agents aren't the concern, pubishers are. Paper is the most expensive part of publishing a book. Say a published novel has twenty pages more than a publisher would like. Doesn't sound like much, but multiply those twenty pages by a print run of 20,000, and suddenly you're dealing with 400,000 extra sheets of paper.

Lantern Jack said:

Thanks for the data shower!

Okay, my bosses never said anything concerning word count. I just assumed 70,000 words because that seems the universal minimum. But I keep reading memoirs and novels that don't even clear 300 pages, from "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," to "Lucky," to "Girl, Interrupted, and on and on. I keep trying to hit 70,000 words, but I find myself inserting a lot of lard to swell out this wiry creature.

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I don't know who your bosses are, but word count is usually very important. What the minimum acceptable length is depends on the publisher, and 70,000 is not a universal minimum. You have to know who you're writing for, and exactly what range of word count they accept.

But no matter what length you write at, you shouldn't be adding lard. If you have a story that should come in a 50K, you can't puff it up by adding lard. Even if someone wants it, the lard would all have to be cut.

Sounds like you either need to add a thread to the novel that will expand it without lard, or find a longer story to write.