Creating A Style Sheet For Your Book

Books are not only hard to write, the manuscripts tend to get long and messy. I’m going through the draft of my book about writing books and my headings are all messed up. I also changed typeface for the body somewhere in the middle. Plus, I started drafting in double space and then, as I got closer to completion, switched to single, except there are three or four sections that didn’t get switched.

As I’m editing and realized it was past time to set up a style sheet for the book. A style sheet simply defines the style, like typeface, type size, header size and placement, how many returns before a new chapter title, etc. etc. etc.

Currently the one for the book about book writing includes the following:

• 8 returns to chapter title
• Quote – Ariel 10 itl, author not itl
• Drop cap first word of chapter
• Body text Georgia 12
• Chapter title Verdana 12 centered
• Heading 2 – Verdana 11, left
• Heading 3 –Ariel 3, itl

Just so you know, in my shorthand, itl equals italics; chapter titles are also heading 1, headings 2 and 3 are what you and I think of as subheads, but tagging them as headings allows Word to create a decent table of contents.

Now that the style is written down I don’t have to try to remember it all. I’ll probably make some additions.

The take-away? Make your life easier with style sheets for book-length manuscripts.

Write well and often,

Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing – a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision – for those who want to get a book written.

Image from http://www.sxc.hu