Literary agents and traditional publishers receive thousands of manuscripts. If your formatting doesn’t meet current book industry standards, it may be ignored. The formatting you do may not carry when you send a document, unless you use a template. A template guarantees your manuscript formatting will hold when agents and publishers open your document.
Begin by locating templates in Microsoft Word (see below). Then you simply follow the steps in the image. Once you create it, the template can be used over and over!
For Mac:
In the Finder, open /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/My Templates. Note: If you are using Mac OS X 7 (Lion), the Library folder is hidden by default. To show the Library folder, in the Finder, click the Go menu, and then hold down OPTION.
For PC:
The default location of the User Templates Folder remains C:\Users\ user name \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates. The User Templates folder will still contain the Normal. dotm template. The location of that folder can be modified (or discovered) using File -> Options -> Advanced -> File Locations.
