Don’t be fooled by fancy templates that appeal to your vision for the published book versions. Books aren’t designed in Word. Your manuscript will leave Word and be imported into design software in order to design and produce your book versions, whether by a professional designer or while you’re using free tools from sources like KDP. Design elements from fancy templates have to be removed during editing to properly prepare your manuscript for design steps later, and tinkering with font changes can actually add errors into your manuscript. Apostrophes and quote marks randomly losing their curl, em dashes randomly losing their spacing, and etcetera are common issues when manuscripts aren’t properly formatted before design begins. This simple template meets the requirements of editors, agents, publishers, and designers.
