A house style for Ledger Press
Writing and editing a forty-page style guide for a small nonfiction publisher.
- Client
- Ledger Press
- Role
- Writer and editor
- Year
- 2025
Ledger Press publishes six books a year, each edited by a different freelancer. The manuscripts arrived consistent in quality and inconsistent in everything else.
Approach
Rather than adopt a large manual wholesale, we collected every query raised across two years of copyedits and answered each one once. The guide is the list of those answers, grouped by where they come up in a manuscript.
What it covers
- Numbers, dates, and units
- Quotations, epigraphs, and permissions
- Notes and bibliography
- The small words — toward or towards, serial commas, and the rest
The guide is now the first document sent to every new editor.