Pasting Your Manuscript Into a Form
Some agencies and contests do not accept file attachments at all. Instead, their submission form (or their instructions) ask you to paste your query, synopsis, or first pages directly into a text box or the body of an email. If you paste from a Word document, the formatting rarely survives the trip: fonts, indents, and page breaks turn into stray characters or vanish unpredictably, and the pasted text can look worse than typing it by hand.
Use Plain Text or Markdown
Export your pages as Plain Text (.txt) or Markdown (.md) instead of Word, PDF, or Rich Text (all are format choices in the same export step, the same place you'd pick to save a Word document as a .docx). Both are built to be copied and pasted: open the exported file, select the text, and paste it into the form or email. There is nothing left to strip out because neither format keeps fonts, indents, or page breaks.
- Plain Text drops all formatting completely. Bold and italic words are not converted to anything; the emphasis (the bold or italic styling itself) is simply gone, so a line that mattered because it was italicized will read as an ordinary line.
- Markdown (a way of writing bold and italic using plain symbols like asterisks, used by some websites and forms) keeps a record of emphasis using those characters: an italic word becomes *word* and a bold word becomes **word**. That is useful if the form reads Markdown and displays it as styled text, but if it does not, the reader will see the asterisks themselves sitting in the text. If you cannot tell which kind of box you are pasting into, choose Plain Text: it never leaves stray symbols behind.
Chapter headings and scene breaks still appear in both formats as plain lines of text (a chapter title on its own line, a scene break marker like a row of asterisks), just without any special styling. That is exactly what a paste-in-a-textbox destination needs.
Tip: Most agencies asking for pasted pages want only the first few, not the whole manuscript. In the chapter selection step of the export wizard, select just the chapters you need before exporting, rather than exporting everything and trimming afterward.
Note: Formatting requirements vary a lot between agencies, and many state none at all. Always check the specific submission instructions on the agency's own page for how many pages they want and where to paste them.
See Exporting Manuscripts for the full export wizard walkthrough, including title pages, chapter selection, and other formats.