I'm not exactly over the hill at 26, but I've been doing this writing thing for 10+ years now, so I'm starting to wonder if I'm behind the current times. Before I submit, I always do a quick Google to refresh my memory and make sure that I am doing things right, but I may just be looking at the same old outdated sources.
For formatting my manuscript: 1-inch margins, Courier New, 12 point, double-spaced. Chapters begin half-way down a new page. Scene breaks with #. Underlining for emphasis. Header includes my last name, title, page number.
I had multiple betas call out the underlining as confusing and against the norm of italics. I have only recently heard that Times New Roman is acceptable (thank goodness, I loathe Courier!). Am I going by old-fashioned formatting?
For word count: It was drilled into me by many different sites that Office word count is bunk. To get word count, Courier New, make sure widows and orphans is off and manuscript is properly formatted as above, and multiply pages by 250. But lately I've seen many people referring to their computer's automatic word count, and then I saw on AgentQuery that it is listed as "Obvious Assumption #2: When we talk about "word count," we mean the word count generated by your computer."
So, again, am I following old-fashioned rules regarding word count? Is an agent going to feel mislead when they open a word doc and see the computer's word count? For my MS4 this is a big difference--I've been querying it at 101k based off the traditional method, but it's only 93k by the computer.
Anyway, wanted to get some info from the folks who are actually looking at this kind of thing currently and figure out if I'm committing any faux pas!
Thanks!
For formatting my manuscript: 1-inch margins, Courier New, 12 point, double-spaced. Chapters begin half-way down a new page. Scene breaks with #. Underlining for emphasis. Header includes my last name, title, page number.
I had multiple betas call out the underlining as confusing and against the norm of italics. I have only recently heard that Times New Roman is acceptable (thank goodness, I loathe Courier!). Am I going by old-fashioned formatting?
For word count: It was drilled into me by many different sites that Office word count is bunk. To get word count, Courier New, make sure widows and orphans is off and manuscript is properly formatted as above, and multiply pages by 250. But lately I've seen many people referring to their computer's automatic word count, and then I saw on AgentQuery that it is listed as "Obvious Assumption #2: When we talk about "word count," we mean the word count generated by your computer."
So, again, am I following old-fashioned rules regarding word count? Is an agent going to feel mislead when they open a word doc and see the computer's word count? For my MS4 this is a big difference--I've been querying it at 101k based off the traditional method, but it's only 93k by the computer.
Anyway, wanted to get some info from the folks who are actually looking at this kind of thing currently and figure out if I'm committing any faux pas!
Thanks!