Whether you’re self-editing or hiring a copy editor for your novel, at some point someone is going to have to make an effort to create consistency of style throughout the entire book. It may sound simple, but remembering how you treated a wide variety of situations across 200+ pages becomes more complex the further you dig into your prose.
Enter the style guide for your novel, series, or universe. It’s essentially a list of preferences for how you would like to see certain situations formatted or corrected, but it can also be a useful tool to keep descriptions for characters or settings unique and consistent throughout. It’s honestly a lot easier to explain once we get into some examples. So, keep reading.
Spelling & Grammar Preferences
Many of us think of grammar and spelling as the mathematics of English; they have very specific rules that when followed exactly lead to a correct answer. This is… mostly true. But if you think hard, I’m sure that you can think of some rules that you disagree with or have preferences on. The Oxford comma, (parenthesis) or–em dashes–for asides, how you format your dates, contraction usage, % or percent. Write these down! By handing over a style sheet for your novel, your copyeditor and proofreader will have definitive answers instead of having to search for examples and hope they are choosing correctly—or worse yet choose their preference without considering yours.
Character List
Write everybody’s name down. Choose a definitive spelling, and list out other important information that may be useful like their title or nicknames. You don’t have to do this for every single character. But a good rule of thumb is if they are a dynamic character that shows up in more than one scene, it should be written down. It’s likely you wrote those scenes days or, as is often common for me, months apart. The details get lost in that time. Don’t let them get lost during your line edit.
Settings
This is basically ditto the character list. Give us the official name and the acronym. Add a brief description if you think it will help. Tell us who is in charge there. Is there anything else highly important? Stick it in.
Styles Specific to Your Novel
Novels come in a wide variety of content. So should their style guides. It may be that you have a new language for your text that requires basic grammar or even that it should always be italicized. Perhaps many species occupy your books that have specific rules for capitalization. If you have a complex magic system, this could be a good place to briefly explain it and create guides for use.
By having a style sheet for your book, you can make definitive answers to a wide variety of questions that will crop up during the line editing and proofreading of your work. The more detailed the styles, the more professional your prose will be, and the less likely you’ll be angry later for opening up your published book to a typo.
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