The Writer's Digest Guide to Manuscript Formats

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference, although a little outdated.
Review: I purchased this book in late 1999, as it was one of the only guides to formatting manuscripts and other writer-related documents I was able to find.
Since then, I've found several others, but not many that were better. The only other book I like as much (okay, maybe a little better) is Jack Neff's book, Formatting and Submitting Your Manuscript. One of the reasons I like it better is that it's newer, and follows some of the changes that have occurred in the publishing industry since this title was written in 1988.
I have used it as my primary reference when writing my novel manuscripts, as well as my query letters, although I've used several other books for them.
If you can get this book used, and save a little $ off the cover price, by all means do it, but if you can't I would recommend Jack Neff's book since, like I said, it's newer and covers the current requirements publishers and agents have.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful Resource for Fiction Authors
Review: The Guide is a template for preparing book manuscripts, magazine articles, short stories, cover letters, proposals, query letters, fillers, poems, plays, movie, AV, TV scripts, photos and illustration for submission to a publisher or agent. The text is mostly diagrams so it's a quick and easy read. This book is helpful but would be better if the authors had more than one example for each type included in the text. One size doesn't always fit all!

Rating:
Summary: Woefully dated
Review: While the formats are helpful, the biggest problem is that ALL the margin settings for the various formats are for typewriters: in other words, settings by the pica or character space, rather than by ruler measurements like inches. (This was fine in early versions of Word and WordPerfect, but most word processing programs these days only have "ruler" style settings.) Given that the whole book is about formats based on margins, it renders the content more difficult and time-consuming to use than it should be.