Nobody sells a style sheet on its own — it arrives as part of a copy-edit at £800–£1,600. That makes it the most valuable deliverable authors routinely ignore: it records every decision about your book, and it carries forward into the next one.
What it costs
What style sheet costs — and what you're actually buying
What good looks like
- Built as the edit proceeds, not reconstructed at the end
- Includes proper nouns and invented terminology
- Handed to you, so the next editor inherits it
- Notes the reason for unusual choices
What your book will actually cost
Four questions — genre, length, what you have already, what you want at the end — and we send a costed plan for your book.
What you are actually buying
A style sheet records every decision made about your book's language — spellings, hyphenation, capitalisation, number style, character names, invented terms — so that chapter twenty is consistent with chapter one.
Why it costs that
Nobody sells a style sheet as a standalone product — it arrives as part of a copy-edit, which is why the only real price attached to it is the copy-edit itself at £800–£1,600. That makes it the most valuable deliverable authors routinely ignore: it records every decision made about your book, it makes the proofread cheaper and better, and it carries forward into your next book.
How to spend less
Build it yourself as you write. Every time you pause over a spelling, a hyphen or a capital, write the decision down before you carry on — eight seconds, and it is the eight seconds that saves the fortnight of reconstruction at the end. Start it even if you are 60,000 words in; retrospective is better than never.
What good looks like
- Built as the edit proceeds, not reconstructed at the end
- Includes proper nouns and invented terminology
- Handed to you, so the next editor inherits it
- Notes the reason for unusual choices
Questions to ask them
- Will I get the style sheet at the end?
- Do you record why, or only what?
Red flags
- No style sheet offered — this is a signal about the whole engagement
- A style sheet that is only spellings
Honestly
This is normally bundled into a copy-edit rather than bought separately, and it arrives at the end. Built from chapter one it prevents the problem instead of documenting it.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
This is normally bundled into a copy-edit rather than bought separately, and it arrives at the end. Built from chapter one it prevents the problem instead of documenting it.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Normally bundled into a copy-edit | No separate charge | Standard practice — the style sheet is a copy-edit deliverable |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Build your book dictionary
Get my costed planQuestions people ask
- What is a style sheet?
- The document recording every decision about your book: spellings, names, hyphenation, numbers, capitalisation and continuity. Copy-editors build one as standard.
- Is it the same as a style guide?
- No. A style guide — New Hart's Rules, Oxford, Chicago — is a general standard. A style sheet is specific to your book and records where you depart from the guide.
- Should I share it with my editor?
- Always, at the start. It saves them hours, stops them correcting your deliberate choices, and usually reduces your quote.
- Do I need one for a short book?
- Under about 20,000 words you can probably hold it in your head. Beyond that, drift is nearly guaranteed.