Standard manuscript format: font, spacing, header and how to state the word count

The format at a glance

Standard manuscript format is the plain page that magazines, agents and publishers read fiction on: 12-point type, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, black on white. No body publishes it as a standard. The version most markets point to is William Shunn's Proper Manuscript Format, which Asimov's and Uncanny both name in their guidelines. Its Modern edition was last updated on 13 July 2026, and this guide follows it unless another source is named. Where a market's own guidelines differ, Shunn's last page says it plainly: "follow theirs."

The paper is US Letter, 8.5 × 11 inches, in North America and A4 almost everywhere else; the Wikipedia summary of the format gives both. Most submissions are now files rather than paper: Asimov's and Uncanny take .DOC, .DOCX or .RTF, and the layout is the same on screen as it would be printed.

The first page of a short story

The first page carries who you are, how long the story is, and where it starts. Shunn's page 2 sets it out in four blocks:

1. Top left: your legal name, address, phone number and email. Pronouns are optional, professional writing affiliations go in only when relevant, and a Social Security or tax number is not needed.
2. Top right: an approximate word count.
3. A third to halfway down: the full title, centred on its own line. The empty space leaves the editor room for production notes.
4. One double space below the title: the byline, centred. It is the name the story should be published under, so a pen name goes here while the legal name stays in the contact block.

The story itself starts two more double spaces down, per page 3, and from there everything is double-spaced.

The header on every later page

From page 2 on, each page carries a header in the top-right corner: the surname from your byline, one or two keywords from the title, and the page number. Shunn's page 3 sets it flush right and says the header must not appear on the first page; in a word processor that is the "different first page" option in the header settings. The sample novel in Shunn's novel guide PDF separates the parts with slashes, Slaughter / Silvertide / 1.

Two details trip people up. The surname is the byline one, so a story submitted under a pen name has the pen name in the header. And the header is not decoration: Wikipedia's account of the format gives its purpose as keeping unstapled pages in order if they are dropped or shuffled. Writer's Digest (Brian A. Klems, 2014, from Chuck Sambuchino's Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript) puts the title in capitals, name, TITLE and page number; either form does the job.

How to state the word count, and how to round it

Write an approximate figure in the top-right corner of page one, such as "about 4,900 words", taken from your word processor's count and rounded. Shunn's current rule is to "round to the nearest hundred", or to the nearest 500 "if you're edging into novella territory"; his own example is a story of 1,507 words stated as 1,500 (page 2). Asimov's asks for the count in the same place: it "can, and should, also be indicated in the upper right corner of the first page".

The sources that rank for this question disagree, and the disagreement is mostly age. Shunn's 1993 original rounded in steps that grew with the story: to the nearest 100 up to 1,500 words, 500 up to 10,000, 1,000 up to 25,000, and 5,000 above that. Storyist's novel how-to rounds a novel's estimate up to the nearest thousand. The same four manuscripts, stated each way:

None of these is wrong in a way an editor will mind; the figure tells them the size of the story, and Shunn's novel sample simply reads "about 80,000 words". What matters more is the rule rounding cannot change.

Rounding never moves a story across a limit

A length limit or a category line is applied to the real count. Uncanny takes fiction of 750 to 10,000 words: a story of 10,040 words rounds to "about 10,000" and is still over, so cut 40 words rather than lean on the rounding. Asimov's "seldom" buys stories longer than 20,000 words. The Nebula Award rules draw the lines at 7,500 words for a novelette, 17,500 for a novella and 40,000 for a novel, so a story of 17,400 words written up as "about 17,500" is still a novelette.

Different counters also give slightly different exact counts for the same text, because they split hyphens, dashes and slashes differently; the guide to why word counts differ explains how to write to a hard limit whichever rule the market uses. The word counter on this site gives the exact count and the counts under the stricter rules side by side.

Why 250 words a page is obsolete

The figure of 250 words a manuscript page is a typewriter estimate, and it no longer describes a page typed in Times New Roman. Shunn traced it in a 2021 post: the rule "worked because most everyone was using a typewriter where ten characters took up exactly an inch and about 25 double-spaced lines fit on a page." A proportional font fits more characters on a line, so the figure fails, and "publishers today use the actual computer-generated word count, not the old rule-of-thumb estimate."

The estimate was once the official method, which is why it lingers. The 1993 original told writers "You do not calculate the wordage of your story by counting actual words": take the characters in a full line, divide by six, and multiply by the number of lines (page 4). Robert J. Sawyer's manuscript checklist still bases the count on "ten words per 6.5-inch Courier 12-point / 10-pitch manuscript line". As late as 2006, Anne Mini's blog told writers that "the industry does not use exact word counts", a claim Shunn's 2021 post contradicts for publishers today.

How far off is it now? Carol Saller, writing for the Chicago Manual of Style's Shop Talk in 2021, put the accepted guideline for a double-spaced Letter or A4 page at 250 to 300 words, and her own example manuscript, 62,000 words on 202 pages, comes to just under 307 a page. This site's words per page calculator measures 12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced on Letter with 1-inch margins, at about 328 words a page with paragraphs of about 100 words, and Courier New at about 221. Turned back into words with the 250 rule, a page count lands well wide in both directions:

The novel in Times New Roman is the case that matters: estimated from its pages, an 87,000-word book looks like a 67,000-word one. Fiction with a lot of dialogue has short paragraphs and fewer words a page than the 328 above, which is why Saller's real manuscript came in at 307, but no ordinary Times New Roman page comes down to 250. Count the words; never multiply the pages.

Where page counts still matter

Pages still count when an agent asks for them. Saller notes that agents and editors usually request a number of pages at the submission stage, and there the font changes how much they read: by the calculator's figures, 50 double-spaced pages are roughly 16,000 words in Times New Roman and 11,000 in Courier New. Send the pages asked for in the format asked for, and the words per page calculator shows how many words that is for your own text.

Novels: the title page and chapter openings

A novel manuscript adds a separate title page, starts each chapter on a new page, and numbers the pages from the first page of text. Shunn's novel format says a novel "requires a separate title page", that "page numbering begins with 1 on the second page of the manuscript", the first page of actual text, and that "each chapter begins on its own page". His sample title page holds the contact block top left and, centred, the title, the byline and "about 80,000 words".

Writer's Digest adds the spacing: don't number the title page, start each chapter "one-third of the way down the page", and begin the chapter's text four to six lines below its title. Storyist's how-to also starts chapters about a third of the way down. The header runs on every page of text, chapter openings included, as Shunn's sample shows.

A manuscript's pages are not the book's pages. Editors talk about a manuscript in words, Saller writes, and a publisher's designers estimate the printed page count from the word count, the trim size and the layout. The book page count calculator makes the same estimate for a self-published book, chapter openings and front matter included.

Modern or Classic: Times New Roman or Courier

Shunn's guide has come in two editions since 16 April 2020: Modern, in "a proportional serif font with one space between sentences", and Classic, in "a monospaced font with two spaces between sentences". The text of the two is identical; a market that asks for "Shunn Classic" wants Courier. In the Modern edition Shunn says he still prefers Courier New himself, but that it is "probably on its way out, at least in fiction circles".

Underlining stood in for italics because typewriters could not set them; Shunn's page 4 keeps it only for the minority of markets that still ask. Sawyer's checklist still asks for underlining but concedes that many writers now submit in Times Roman and "can probably get away with that, too". Writer's Digest accepts Times New Roman, Arial or Courier at 12 points.

When a market's guidelines say something else

The guidelines of the magazine, agency or publisher you are sending to override every rule above. Most agree on the core of the format and differ on spacing, file type and what to send. As checked on 4 November 2026:

The UK agencies show the common differences: A4 rather than Letter, 1.5 spacing accepted at some, and a sample measured in chapters or words rather than pages. Note too that DHH wants the total word count in the covering letter, where a manuscript format would put it on the first page; a submission can need both.

What this guide does not cover

This guide covers fiction submitted to English-language magazines, literary agents and publishers: short stories, novellas and novels. It does not cover:

• Screenplays and stage plays, which have their own layouts.
• Academic essays and theses, which follow a style guide such as MLA or APA; the words per page calculator covers the MLA heading and the APA title page.
• Non-fiction book proposals, which agencies ask for as a proposal and a writing sample, at Madeleine Milburn 5,000 to 10,000 words.
• The interior of a printed or self-published book, which is typeset single-spaced in a book face at a trim size; the book page count calculator estimates its pages.

Simple Online Counter is a free, browser-based set of counters and writing tools. Its word counter gives the exact count to round for the first page, and its words per page calculator turns words into pages, and pages into words, for the font, spacing and paper you choose. Neither formats a manuscript; a word processor template does that, checked against the market's guidelines.