The style sheet: how a series stays consistent
Nobody has ever enjoyed making a style sheet. It is a list. It has no voice, no structure worth admiring, and no reader. It is also the single document that decides whether your series still agrees with itself three books in.
A style sheet is a running record of every decision in your book that could legitimately have been made two ways. Not right against wrong — either against either, settled once and then applied everywhere.
What goes on it
Anything a careful reader could catch you changing your mind about.
- Spellings you have chosen. Which dictionary you follow, and every word where you have picked a side: toward or towards, OK or okay, email or e-mail.
- Invented names and terms, with their capitalization. Is the metal starsilver, star-silver or Starsilver? Is the order the Watch or the watch? Write it once, exactly as it should appear.
- Hyphenation. Compound modifiers are where consistency dies. Half-empty, half empty. Bestselling, best-selling. Record each one as you decide it.
- Numbers. Spelled out or in digits, and where the line falls — many books write out numbers under a hundred and use digits above. Note the exceptions you allow.
- Time and dates. Three o'clock, 3 p.m., 3pm, 1500. June 4, 1943 or 4 June 1943. Pick, and note it.
- Characters. Eye color, hair, height, age, birthday, scars, the hand they write with. Every physical detail you have stated in print.
- Place names and spellings. Including the ones you invented and the ones you altered.
- Dialog punctuation. Quotation marks or dashes, how interrupted speech is broken, whether you use a serial comma, how thoughts are set.
- Your reference works. The dictionary and the style manual you defer to when the sheet is silent.
Who it actually serves
You, six months later. Consistency is memory work, and memory is the thing that fails. You decided starsilver in chapter four of book one, in a single sentence, eighteen months ago. You will not recall it. You will guess, and you will guess differently.
Your copyeditor. A copyeditor's job is to make several hundred of these decisions come out the same way across the whole book. Without your sheet they either ask you — a long list of questions you now have to answer — or they decide for you, correctly and not necessarily as you would have. Handing over a style sheet converts that into ten minutes of reconciling two lists. See The editing passes that have to happen before typesetting for where the copyedit sits in the sequence.
Book three. This is the one that costs real money. An invented term quietly acquires a second spelling somewhere in the second book, nobody notices because nobody is comparing across volumes, and by the third it is in print both ways. Readers who have read all three do notice, and they say so in reviews.
Building one without ceremony
It is a plain document. No template, no software, no system.
Open a file beside the manuscript and add to it as decisions happen, in the moment you make them. Alphabetize it enough that you can find an entry — a rough A–Z, or just a document you search. That is the entire method. Every attempt to make it a proper project with categories and a schema dies in a fortnight; a scrappy list you actually add to survives the whole series.
Two habits make it work. Write the entry the instant you decide, because the decision is cheap now and expensive to reconstruct later. And write the form, not the rule: starsilver (lowercase, one word) beats be consistent with invented metals.
In the Interior Formatter. It reads your .docx and keeps only structure — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — so consistent styling in the manuscript is what it has to work from. A book where every chapter title is a real heading and every scene break is the same marker comes through without guesswork. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
What a copyeditor returns
If you hire a copyeditor, a style sheet comes back with the edited file. Expect it to be more thorough than yours: an alphabetized word list of every term they settled, a character list with the physical details they found in your text, place names, a note of the dictionary and manual they worked to, and a list of the decisions where they chose for you.
That document is yours. Keep it somewhere you will find it in two years. It goes to your proofreader, who then checks the typeset pages against your rules rather than a general standard, and to whoever edits the next book.
The series part
A series needs two things a single book does not.
A character bible. Names with their exact spellings, ages at each point in the story, birthdays, family relationships, physical description, and what each character knows and when they learned it. Add entries as characters appear; the alternative is re-reading two novels to check an eye color.
A timeline. Dated events across the whole series, including the ones that happened before book one opens. Seasons, ages, how long a journey took, how much time passed between volumes. Most cross-book continuity errors are arithmetic: a character who is nineteen in a book set two years after one where she was sixteen.
Continuity errors inside one book are caught by the copyeditor. Errors across books are not — nobody re-reads volume one while editing volume three, unless you pay them to. The bible and the timeline are how you avoid paying for that.
The typesetting angle
Consistency in the manuscript is also what lets a typesetter keep your structure without guessing at it. One paragraph style for prose, one heading style for chapters, one scene-break marker used everywhere: those decisions belong on the style sheet too, and they are the ones that decide whether the import comes through clean. Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly covers what survives and what does not.
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: Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly · Also: The editing passes that have to happen before typesetting · Punctuation that typesets badly · Series covers: the same shelf, three books along