10 Things to Check Before You Send Your Manuscript to an Editor

September 23, 2026

Finishing a manuscript feels like reaching the top of a hill. Then you remember there's a descent, a gate to close and a bag you left at the bottom. Before you attach the file and send it to an editor, there's a short list of jobs worth doing. None of them take long. All of them save you money, time and a certain amount of quiet embarrassment.

Decide What Kind of Edit You're Asking For

Editing covers several different jobs, and they happen in a particular order. A structural or developmental edit looks at the whole thing: plot, pacing, character arcs, whether the ending earns itself. A line edit works at sentence level — rhythm, clarity, voice. A copy-edit deals with grammar, punctuation, consistency and factual wobbles. A proofread is the final pass, on a document that is already finished.

Getting the order wrong is expensive. If your middle third sags, a copy-editor will polish a sagging middle beautifully, and you'll pay twice when you restructure. If you aren't sure what you need, say so in your enquiry and ask what the editor includes. A good one will tell you plainly — including if your book isn't ready for the stage you've booked.

Formatting: The Basics Your Editor Will Notice

Most editors will work with whatever you send, but a tidy manuscript saves them time, and that time is what you're paying for. These are the settings most editorial guidelines assume:

One plain font throughout, 12pt — Times New Roman, Garamond, Arial and Calibri are all fine.
Double spacing for fiction and most prose, unless single spacing is requested.
Margins of about 2.5cm on all sides.
Page numbers, plus your surname and the book's title in the header.
Chapter headings on their own line, styled identically every time.
Either a first-line indent or a blank line between paragraphs — not both. Most fiction uses indents, with no indent on a chapter's opening paragraph.
Curly quotation marks and apostrophes used consistently. If you began with straight ones, convert the whole document rather than mixing.
A single space after a full stop.

Two practical notes. Use your word processor's paragraph styles for chapter headings instead of tabs or repeated returns; it makes later fixes far easier. And if the editor has sent a style guide or checklist, follow it. It exists because their process depends on it.

Consistency: The Quiet Killer of Good Manuscripts

Small inconsistencies don't ruin a book, but they interrupt a reader, and a 90,000-word draft will contain hundreds of them. Catch the obvious ones before an editor has to charge you for finding them.

Names, places and invented terms

Is your protagonist Marianne in chapter one and Marrianne in chapter nineteen? Is the pub the White Hart on page forty and the White Horse on page two hundred? A simple search for each name will catch most of this. Decide, once, whether you're writing British or American English, and keep to it in the narration — dialogue can break the rule when a character's background calls for it.

Time, tense and point of view

Check the arithmetic of your timeline: ages, seasons, how long a journey takes, whether a character is at work on a day you've already established was a Sunday. Then check that the narration holds steady. A scene that slips from past to present tense, or from one character's head into another's mid-paragraph, is one of the things editors flag most often, and it's much easier to fix calmly than to argue about.

Build a Style Sheet

A style sheet is a one- or two-page document listing your decisions so nobody has to guess. Include the correct spelling of every character and place name, invented words and whether they take capitals, how you render numbers and dates, which characters have particular speech habits, and any recurring term that might otherwise drift — the Ministry, the North Quarter, tea versus dinner. Send it with the manuscript. It takes an hour to write and saves an editor several.

Permissions, Quotes and Real People

Anything you didn't write and want to reproduce needs permission, or a reasonable belief that it's free to use. That includes song lyrics, lines of poetry, long extracts from other books, epigraphs, maps and photographs. Quoting a short line is not automatically safe, and "it's on the internet" is not a licence. If you're not certain, cut it or ask the rights holder.

Real people need care too. Characters based on living individuals can cause genuine problems if they're identifiable and shown doing something damaging. For anything with legal risk — defamation, privacy, contracts, rights — take proper legal advice rather than relying on a writing blog, this one included.

Files, Front Matter and the Cover Letter

Send what was asked for. If there are no instructions, a .docx file is the safest default, and most editors prefer it to a PDF because they need to work in the text. Name the file clearly: Surname_Title_Draft3.docx beats finalFINALreally.docx. If one file was requested, don't send twenty. Put a title page at the front with the title, your name, the word count and your contact details, and keep a backup of exactly what you sent.

The cover letter

Keep it short and useful. Two or three paragraphs is plenty.

What the book is: genre, audience, and a sentence or two that captures it honestly.
Practical facts: word count, whether it has been edited before, and any deadline you're working towards.
What you want from this edit, and what you already suspect is wobbly. Flagging weak spots directs attention where you need it.

Don't summarise the whole plot, and don't apologise for the manuscript. Editors read hundreds of these; clarity is the kindness.