I am currently preparing to submit a children's manuscript and I'm having trouble with the format. I submitted it to a few publishers last year, but now that I've revised and polished the story I feel my cover letter and manuscript could use a LOT of work. Here's what I'm confused about: I've read that the manuscript should be double-spaced. However, my story is a rhyming story and therefore is broken up into rhyming segments. Should I format the manuscript so that these segments are chunked together...and if not, how should I format it? How nitpicky are publishers about the formatting of a typed manuscript?
i both write rhymed children's books and mentor many writers of same, so if you'll email me i can show you how to format the text in your ms, plus help you with the query/cover letter and let you know if the ms itself is actually ready to be submitted... basically, you still double-space, but also double the space between stanzas/pages... publishers are quite nit-picky about formatting, since if the writer doesn't bother to learn how to format a ms, it's most likely the writing will be poor quality as well... which is why readers for agents and publishers will usually dump improperly formatted mss unread, since they look for any reason to cull the piles of submissions down to a managable size... love and hugs, maia maia3maia@hotmail.com
