Thread: Book Submission - and the 3 chapter rule

Hi there,

Just had a question re book submissions for novels. I hear a lot of talk about 3 chapters being the standard for submission - but what if your chapters are really short? Do the same rules apply? Should one condense things and push them together to make less chapters - even if there are shifts in the narrative perspective - or will this just get confusing?

In my case, i have a very short opening chapter (almost a prologue - does that counts as a chapter?!), followed by a number of much more substantial chapters then a few more short ones which rounds it off to a yummy cliff hanger at page 40. (that's single spaced). Ideally i'd like to submit this in its entirety - though technically its five chapters! Will some agents balk at the single spacing???

Any advice would be hugely appreciated.

With thanks in advance!

Scott

Scott Sansom
Writer/Filmmaker

Moved to Writing Discussion.

Three chapters is three chapters, I'm afraid. You can condense if you like, and show narrative shifts where they happen by placing three asterisks (* * *). It shouldn't be too confusing.

What do you mean by single spacing? Single line spacing, or single spacing after full-stops? It used to be you needed a double space at the end of a sentence. That's no longer vogue. Single spacing is now accepted by many publishing houses. However, the norm is still double line spacing. It's more to do with ease on a reader's eye. When you spend your entire day reading manuscript excerpts, you tend to get a sore head when there isn't enough of what we call 'white space'.