I've been asked many times how to format a children's picture book manuscript for submission, so I thought I'd create a blog post with my advice, such as it is. I'm speaking here to writers, not to illustrators, nor to writer-illustrators, who are proposing a book they plan to both write and illustrate. Expectations are very different in those cases. 

For those of us who only write the books, questions surrounding formatting bleed easily into territory where beginning writers often make mistakes ...