The series bible, and what it saves you
By book four you are no longer writing one book. You are maintaining a set, and a set has a property a single book does not: every volume can be checked against every other volume, by readers, at their leisure.
A series bible is the working file that makes that survivable. One document, open beside the manuscript, holding everything about the series that could have been decided two ways and was decided once.
The story half
This part is well understood, and it is the part most authors build.
Names and their exact spellings, including the ones you changed in draft and the ones a search-and-replace half-changed. Physical descriptions. Ages, birthdays and the timeline that ties them together. Place names. Invented terms with their capitalization settled — starsilver, not Starsilver or star-silver. The rules of your world: what the magic costs, how far the ships travel in a day, what the law does about it.
The style sheet: how a series stays consistent covers how to build that list and hand it to a copyeditor. Do not build two documents. The style sheet is the story half of the bible.
The half nobody writes down
Then there are the production facts, and these are the ones that get reconstructed from memory eighteen months later, badly.
- Trim size, and which printers you set it up for. Changing trim between volumes is the most visible break there is.
- Interior style and body face. Which of the six faces you set the book in, and which style you chose, with any adjustment you made to type size or leading.
- Margin and gutter decisions, including the page-count band you were in. A longer book four legitimately needs a wider gutter; that is not an inconsistency, but knowing you changed it deliberately is worth a line.
- The scene-break ornament. One mark from a library of more than fifty, and nobody remembers which one at this distance.
- Front and back matter wording. The copyright page boilerplate, the also-by list, the dedication format, the author bio you keep current.
- Cover typefaces and colors. The face used for the title, the face used for your name, and the hex value of every color in the palette. Not "the dark blue".
- Imprint name, spelled and capitalized as it appears on the spine and in the metadata.
- Series name and numbering, exactly as they appear — Book Two, Book 2, #2, or The Ashfall Cycle II. On the cover, on the title page, and in the store metadata, which do not have to match each other but should each be consistent down the run.
- ISBNs, one line per format per volume, so you never have to work out which one went where.
Why the production half matters more than it sounds
A reader who notices that a character's eyes changed color is a reader who is paying close attention, and there are not many of them. A reader who sees that book three is a different height, in a different font, with the series number in a different place on the spine, is every reader who owns the first two.
That is the asymmetry. Story continuity errors are caught by a handful of people and mentioned in reviews. Design inconsistency is caught by everyone, instantly, without effort, and it reads as a different publisher — which is the one thing an indie series cannot afford to look like. Series covers: the same shelf, three books along covers what has to stay fixed on the cover itself.
In the tools. My Books can duplicate a finished book, copying its design and settings into a new book id. The next volume then starts from the last one's trim, style, face and cover layout rather than from your memory of them, and you replace the manuscript and the title. Start a book → · about the tools
How to keep it
One file. Not a wiki, not a database, not a project with a schema. A plain document beside the manuscript, added to at the moment each decision is made.
The failure mode is always the same: you decide to write the bible properly once the draft is done, and what you produce then is not a record of your decisions but a reconstruction of them, assembled by re-reading your own book and guessing. Reconstruction is slow and it is wrong. Recording is ten seconds and it is right.
Two habits carry it. Write the form, not the rule — Ashfall, one word, no hyphen beats be consistent with place names. And date the entries you change, so that when book three disagrees with book one you can see which decision came later and whether it was on purpose.
The cheapest version that works
If you will not maintain anything larger, maintain this: one page, at the front of the document.
The trim size. The body face and style. The two cover typefaces and the hex colors. The imprint name. The series numbering format. The scene-break mark. Below that, a running A–Z of names and invented terms, alphabetized only enough to be searchable.
That page is perhaps two hundred words and it prevents most of what goes wrong between volumes. Everything else — full character sheets, the timeline, the rules of the world — earns its place when the series gets complicated enough to need it, and not before.
The test is whether you could hand the file to somebody else and have them produce the next volume so it matches. If they would have to ask you a question, the answer to that question belongs in the bible.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The style sheet: how a series stays consistent · Also: Series covers: the same shelf, three books along · Box sets and omnibus editions · Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book