I want to submit a manuscript for a children's picture book. Looking at William Shunn's examples on formatting an MS he numbers each page at the top right of each page. The trouble here for me is that some pages of the picture book only have four lines of text, so anyone reading the document would have to keep scrolling down loads of blank, empty page each time to get to the next little bit of text on the next page and so on (hope I've made myself clear). Currently I haven't done it this way. At the end of each page I've just hit the enter key a couple of times and started directly on the next page… I am going to try and attach a jpg of how I have done it because it's going to get confusing (hope it comes out ok) As you can see (hopefully) the text jumps rather untidily over the margin. Does anyone know the correct formatting for children's picture book manuscripts? Many thanks Mark
as you know, i write children's p/bs for a chicago publisher and i mentor many aspiring children's writers, so can help you with this, too, mark... that's not the way it's done... first of all, it's not up to you to design the book, so all you do is submit the text... paging will be done by the publisher's book-styling staff... so, just take out all those header-like inserts and simply leave an extra line space between the sections... are you now thinking of submitting only the text and not your exquisite illustrations?... are you going to query agents, or go directly to publishers?... will you be mentioning your illustrations and status as a well-respected artist?
Hi Maia, Thanks for responding here... Yes I realize I am not expected to design the book myself. I just wanted the MS to look how an agent would expect an MS to look (the less I look like a newbie the better)... It's difficult to explain my problem on a forum because there are page breaks on my MS and page breaks on the pdf document of the MS which makes for a lot of confusion. When you talk about 'those header-like inserts' are you referring to the 'Briscoe / Lunch / 5—6' inserts? Those were also done according to william shunn's formatting and just indicate the next page. Should I do away with them altogether and just let the entire MS run from top to bottom with only an extra space as an indication of a new page? I already have each line of the MS double spaced and a triple space between stanzas... so a new page could be indicated by 4 spaces I suppose? Or not...? (are things getting complicated already?) 'are you now thinking of submitting only the text and not your exquisite illustrations?'...No, I definitely need the illustrations to be seen as soon as possible by the agent, hopefully even before they read the MS... And yes, I will be mentioning all my 'credentials' as an artist with links to my website and to sample jpg's for the picture book.
