Manuscript Formatting Guide for Textbook Authors

Manuscript formatting is not about making the pages look like a finished book — the publisher's designer does that. It is about handing over a manuscript whose structure is unambiguous, whose figures and permissions are traceable, and whose files open cleanly on someone else's computer. Get those right and production goes quickly; get them wrong and the first months after acceptance are spent untangling the manuscript rather than improving it. This guide covers standard manuscript format first, then the parts that are specific to textbooks.

Standard manuscript format

Every publisher has house preferences, and their instructions always take precedence. Absent instructions, the conventions below are what editors expect:

• One file per chapter, plus one for front matter (title page, preface, table of contents) and one for back matter (glossary, appendices, references). Name files predictably: Ch07_Sampling.docx, not final_v3_REAL.docx.
• A plain, readable typeface at 12 point, double-spaced, with one-inch margins. Formatting for readability during review, not for beauty.
• Running header or footer with your surname, a short title and the page number on every page.
• Left-aligned text, one space after a full stop, paragraphs indented or separated consistently — pick one and keep it.
• A title page with the working title, your name, contact details and a word count.
• No manual formatting tricks. Do not use spaces to align columns, hard returns to break lines, or blank paragraphs to create space. Use styles (see below) and tables.

Use heading styles, not bold text

This is the single most useful thing a textbook author can do. Apply your word processor's built-in styles — Heading 1 for chapter titles, Heading 2 for main sections, Heading 3 for subsections — rather than making text bold and larger by hand. Styled headings let the publisher generate the table of contents, convert the manuscript to print, eBook and interactive formats reliably, and check that the structure is consistent across chapters.

Keep the hierarchy shallow. Three levels is comfortable for a textbook; four is the practical limit. If you find yourself wanting a fifth, the section probably wants to be a list or a table.

Textbooks also have recurring structural elements: learning objectives at the start of a chapter, key terms, worked examples, "check your understanding" questions, chapter summaries, end-of-chapter exercises. Mark each of these consistently — a custom style, or a bracketed tag such as [LEARNING OBJECTIVES] … [/LEARNING OBJECTIVES] — so the designer can give each element a consistent treatment and, in an interactive edition, the instructional designer can find every self-check question automatically.

Figures and tables

Handle these separately from the text, because they are produced separately.

• Number figures and tables by chapter — Figure 3.1, Table 3.2 — and refer to every one in the text ("as Figure 3.1 shows"). Unreferenced figures get lost.
• Place a callout in the text where each figure belongs ([Figure 3.1 about here]) and put the caption in the text file. Keep the image itself in a separate folder, named to match: Fig03-01.png.
• Supply the best original you have. Vector files (SVG, EPS, PDF from the drawing program) for diagrams and charts; high-resolution photographs (300 dpi at the size they will print) for images. A screenshot pasted into a Word file is rarely usable for print.
• Tables belong in the text file as real tables, not images and not tab-separated text.
• Charts made from data: keep the data file too. The publisher may redraw the chart in the book's style, and an interactive edition may turn it into something students can manipulate.

Exercises, examples and answers

Exercises are where students learn, and they are the part of a textbook most likely to be reused — in a companion site, an interactive edition, a test bank. Make them easy to extract:

• Number exercises within each chapter and give each a difficulty level if the book uses one.
• Keep answers and worked solutions in a separate file per chapter, keyed to the exercise numbers, rather than interleaved with the questions.
• For questions with a definite answer (multiple choice, numeric, short answer), record the answer in a structured way — a table with columns for number, answer and a one-line explanation. This is exactly what an interactive edition needs to give students immediate feedback.
• For worked examples, separate the problem statement from the solution steps; readers and software both need to know where one ends and the other begins.

Citations and references

Use the citation style your field expects and use it consistently — the copy-editor will check every reference. If you use reference-management software, keep the library; if you cite by hand, make sure every in-text citation has a matching entry and vice versa. Textbooks generally cite less than research writing, but what they cite should be exact, because students will follow the references.

The permissions log

Any material you did not create — photographs, figures redrawn from another source, long quotations, song lyrics, poems, data sets, screenshots of software — may need permission from the rights holder before it can be published. Publishers differ in who clears permissions and who pays for them; ask your editor. What every publisher needs from the author is a permissions log: a simple table listing each item, where it appears in your manuscript, the original source, the rights holder if known, and the status (not requested / requested / granted / replaced). Start it on day one. Retro-fitting a permissions log to a finished manuscript is one of the most common causes of production delay.

Two practical notes. Material that is in the public domain or under an open licence still needs an attribution, and the log should record the licence. And "I found it online" is not a source; the log needs the original publication or the site and page that holds the rights.

Index terms

A textbook needs an index, and the best person to identify the terms is the author, who knows which concepts students look up. You do not need to compile the index while writing — page numbers do not exist yet — but you can build the term list as you go: the concepts, names and methods that a student would look for, with the synonyms they might use ("standard deviation; see also variance"). Hand the list to the publisher with the manuscript. If you want to see what an index built from your own text looks like, our free index generator takes a manuscript and a term list and produces alphabetised entries with page references.

Preparing for an interactive edition

If the book will be published as an interactive edition as well as in print, a little extra marking in the manuscript pays off later. As you write, note in the margin or in a bracketed comment:

• Where a student would benefit from doing rather than reading — varying a parameter, running a calculation, watching a process unfold.
• Self-check questions that could give immediate feedback.
• Existing media you have — lecture videos, animations, data sets — and where each belongs.

None of this changes the printed book. It gives the instructional designer a map of where the interactivity should go, drawn by the person who knows the students best.

Handing over the files

When the manuscript is complete, deliver:

1. Text files, one per chapter plus front and back matter, in the format the publisher asks for (usually Word or a compatible format).
2. A figures folder, named to match the callouts, with the best originals and the data behind any charts.
3. Answer and solution files, keyed to exercise numbers.
4. The permissions log.
5. The index term list.
6. A short "read me" describing anything unusual: special characters, equations set in a particular tool, chapters that depend on colour.

Compress the whole set into one archive and send it the way your publisher prefers — Linus Learning authors upload directly through the content submission page, which keeps every file with the project.

Before you submit

Proofread, or better, have someone else proofread. Ask a colleague who teaches the course to read one chapter for level. Check that every figure is referenced, every reference is cited, every exercise has an answer and every borrowed item is in the permissions log. Then follow the publisher's instructions exactly, even where they differ from this guide — a manuscript that arrives in the form the production team expects is the fastest route to a finished book.