Looks matter

Looks matter, sadly.  Before the days of screenwriting software that formats your script in exactly the way demanded by the film industry, there were books dedicated to the strict rules of correct layout.  The warnings in such books were clear: if your screenplay wasn’t laid out perfectly, nobody would even bother to read it.  This sounded harsh at the time but all my various agents over the years agreed with it, wholeheartedly.  If you wanted to be taken seriously as a professional writer, they told me, your output, the only means by which any producer could form a judgement, had to look professional.

So, what about novels?  Looking back at my first effort, Bagman, I can honestly admit that it looked terrible. The first KDP edition that went out in June 2023 had page numbering that I couldn’t seem to get right, thanks to my attempt to paste into a template in sections (there were three page 270s!) and random gaps at the bottom of a high proportion of the pages.  It was also in the format that KDP had helpfully suggested, 6” x 9”, rather than the much more ‘paperback-sized’ 5” x 8”.  I’ve improved the look of the novel over the years (and the others) but as my best friend and fellow writer, Graham Stewart, gently but frequently pointed out, I was still persisting with gaps between the paragraphs, paragraphs that were also not indented.  This was so in everything that I had published.

It seems bizarre to me now, having spent my entire life buried in books, that I had never noticed what the ‘correct’ layout actually is.  As the rest of the world would agree, Graham was right.  Finally, finding myself with some time to do so, I have now corrected the formatting of all nine paperbacks and their Kindle versions.  This hasn’t made the writing any better (sadly) but I have to admit that all nine of them do now, at least, look more professional.

This blog post can’t pretend to offer advice to you, dear reader, because you’ve probably never been dumb enough to do what I’ve done and clearly don’t need to be pointed in the right direction.  However, I guess it’s a gentle reminder that agents and publishers are probably just as harsh (or superficial?) as film producers in that their desire to read a submission is, in part, controlled by whether it looks like a proper piece of writing.  In short, looks matter.

Happy writing (in the correct format)!