Why You Should Create a Style Guide for your Book

A style guide is a guide or a manual that creates a set of standards or rules for the writing, formatting and design of a document. If you're writing a book, your editor will, or should, use a style manual when editing your book. For example, many books are edited using the Chicago Manual of Style. Down the line, I'll go more into these types of style manuals. But today, I want to focus on you creating a guide or a manual for your work for you and your editors to use.

Why is this important? It's important because it establishes rules from the outset so that you and your editor can stay consistent. Again, your editor will use a style manual to guide them when editing your book. But the rules that you want to put in your guide fall outside of what would be present in that manual.

These guidelines are unique to your project. For example, I've edited several school and organization publications, where words like alumni or faculty or trustee that wouldn't normally be capitalized in any style manual are capitalized to give weight to those titles.

I've also edited publications where the primary goal was to fit the text within a certain page count. In that case, we abbreviated states or used numerals where we would have spelled out words if we were following a style manual.

Another example is how you refer to certain things for branding purposes. For example, if everyone calls your restaurant Joe's and in the text you always want it to be called by its real name, which is Joe's Burgers of Baltimore, set that standard and document it. If your business already has a branding guide, keeping it consistent will also help you save time.

In a style guide, you'll want to keep track of factual information for consistency. This can be vitally important for fiction writers. You'll want to include your characters' full names with correct spellings and ages and even background information like where they come from. You would be surprised how often people start off spelling a character's name a certain way and then forget and start spelling it differently down the line. It's even more common when authors are writing books in a series. Imagine writing book one and including someone's last name that you only use once. By book three, hundreds of thousands of words later, you forget, and suddenly you're calling them something else. Documenting it early saves you the time of having to go back and do research.

This also happens in nonfiction. Sometimes people are use numbers, percentages or names. It's all factual information, but when you're fatigued or you've been working on the project for a long time, you will forget. It happens a lot more than you would think.

Think about whether you have aspects of your writing that fall in line with this. If you don't think about it before the writing phase, that's okay. Determine it before the editing phase, so your editor has guidance. It will save you and your editor the time of having to keep circling back and having to make decisions about these things down the line.