A style sheet is the record of every decision made about your book: how each name is spelled, which conventions you follow, how numbers and hyphens are handled, what colour the dog is. Copy-editors build one as a matter of course. Authors working alone almost never do, which is why consistency drifts across 90,000 words.
What is a style sheet?
What goes in a style sheet
Build it as you write and it takes two minutes a week. Build it at the end and it takes a fortnight. This is the list a professional copy-editor works from.
- Every character name, with spelling and any variants (nicknames, married names, titles).
- Every place name, exactly as you spell it.
- Organisations, ships, streets, pubs, schools — anything named.
- Spelling convention: British or American; -ise or -ize; and stick to it.
- Words you have chosen a spelling for: judgement/judgment, grey/gray, whisky/whiskey.
- Hyphenation decisions: email or e-mail, co-operate or cooperate, half-hour or half hour.
- Capitalisation: the Government or the government, Mum or mum, the War or the war.
- Numbers: spelled out to ten? to a hundred? Digits for ages? Dates in what format?
- Punctuation: serial comma or not; single or double quotation marks; em dashes or en dashes.
- Dialogue conventions: how interruptions, trailing off and internal thought are marked.
- Continuity: eye colour, ages, the year things happened, who was where when.
- Timeline: a dated list of events in the book, especially for memoir and historical work.
- Anything you have deliberately done 'wrong', so nobody helpfully corrects it later.
The style sheet template
The full list a professional copy-editor works from, as a printable template you can fill in — plus the continuity and timeline sections most authors forget.
Why consistency drifts, and why it is not carelessness
You will write your book across months or years, in different moods, in different rooms, after reading different things. Somewhere in month four you will spell judgement without the e, because you read a book that did.
By the end you have a manuscript with two conventions running through it, and no memory of which you started with. That is not sloppiness; it is a memory problem across 90,000 words, which no one is equipped to solve by attention alone.
A style sheet solves it by not requiring memory. You look it up.
The most useful deliverable of a copy-edit
When a copy-editor returns your manuscript, they return a style sheet with it. Most authors glance at it and file it.
It is arguably worth more than the tracked changes, for three reasons. It tells you what decisions were made about your book, so you can disagree with any of them. It makes the proofread cheaper and better, because the proofreader now has a standard to check against. And it carries into your next book — series authors with a good style sheet from book one save real money and real embarrassment on book four.
Ask for it explicitly if it is not offered.
Building one yourself, cheaply
A single document, alphabetical, added to as you go.
The habit that makes it work: every time you pause over a spelling, a hyphen or a capital, write the decision down before you carry on. It takes eight seconds and it is the eight seconds that saves you the fortnight.
For fiction, add continuity as you invent it — eye colour, the dog's breed, the year the shop opened. For memoir, build a dated timeline alongside, because chronology contradictions are the errors readers catch most reliably.
Start it even if you are 60,000 words in. Retrospective is better than never.
What it protects beyond spelling
Deliberate irregularities. If your character says we was because that is how she speaks, the style sheet records it as intentional — otherwise a copy-editor or a well-meaning reader corrects it, and the voice goes.
Invented terms. Fantasy and sci-fi authors need this most: your world's vocabulary, capitalised consistently, pluralised the same way every time.
Series continuity. By book three, nobody remembers what colour the door was, and readers do.
Regional and dialect spellings. Which are choices, not errors, and need to be recorded as such.
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.
The Book Dictionary is your style sheet, held for you and applied across the whole manuscript. Every name, place, term and convention your book uses, checked consistently through 90,000 words rather than remembered chapter by chapter.
It is what makes the other tools safe on a long book. Proofread checks against your style sheet rather than a generic one, so your deliberate choices are not flagged as errors. Transcription returns your names spelled the way you spell them instead of guessing. Light Edit knows which irregularities are intentional.
This is the difference between a tool that helps and a tool that quietly homogenises. A book that has had its dialect corrected and its invented terms normalised is a worse book, and the author usually notices too late.
And it carries forward. Book two starts with book one's dictionary already built.
Build your book dictionary
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Email me the templateQuestions people ask
- Who creates the style sheet?
- A copy-editor builds one as a standard deliverable. If you are working alone, you build it — and starting it early is far cheaper than reconstructing it at the end.
- Is a style sheet the same as a style guide?
- No. A style guide — New Hart's Rules, the Oxford or Chicago manuals — is a general standard. A style sheet is specific to your book, and records where you follow the guide and where you depart from it.
- Do I need one for a short book?
- Under about 20,000 words you can probably hold it in your head. Beyond that, consistency drift is nearly guaranteed and a style sheet is the only real defence.
- What if I change my mind about a convention?
- Change the style sheet, then apply the change across the whole manuscript in one pass. What you must not do is change it going forward and leave the earlier chapters as they were.
- Should I share it with my editor?
- Always, at the start. It saves them hours, prevents them 'correcting' your deliberate choices, and usually reduces your quote.