Submission
Will an agent read a handwritten submission?
No. Not one. It isn't a matter of preference or house style — a handwritten manuscript simply isn't a format any agent, publisher or self-publishing platform can work with. Here's why, and what to do instead.
Why the answer is always no
Submissions are read on screen, passed between colleagues, marked up digitally, and — if things go well — sent on to a publisher for the same process to happen again. None of that is possible with a physical, handwritten page. It isn't that agents are being precious about presentation; a handwritten manuscript genuinely cannot enter the pipeline a submission needs to travel through.
This catches out more people than you'd expect, usually because the question feels a bit obvious to ask outright — so it doesn't get asked, and the manuscript sits finished but unsent.
What "handwritten" covers
This applies to more situations than just longhand in a notebook:
- A novel or memoir written out by hand, whether in notebooks, on loose paper, or across years of exercise books.
- A dictated book that only exists as an audio recording so far.
- An old typescript — typed decades ago on a typewriter, which produces a physical page rather than a digital file.
- A scanned or photographed manuscript — closer, but a photograph of handwriting still isn't typed text an editor can work with directly.
What you actually need
A Word document. That's it, fundamentally — everything else (font, spacing, title page, chapter breaks) is about how that document is laid out, which is a separate question from the format itself. Once your book exists as typed, editable text, you can submit it, format it, or self-publish it. Until then, none of those things are possible, no matter how finished the writing is.
The good news
Getting from handwritten to typed is entirely mechanical — it doesn't touch your writing at all. The words, the voice, the story are exactly what you wrote; only the format changes.
What happens once it's typed
Once your manuscript exists as a Word document, the standard rules of submission apply — properly formatted, double-spaced, with a title page and running headers. That's a separate step from typing, and worth reading about on its own if you haven't already.
If your manuscript is already typed and you're only unsure about the layout agents expect, that's a much smaller job — see the formatting page for that instead.
Get it typed, then get it read
Send a few sample pages and I'll tell you what it would cost and how long it would take.