I received a nice review on my revised, re-released EFA Publications booklet, originally published as an ebook only in 2017 with a slightly different title. This was a fun booklet to write, and revising it gave me the opportunity to see whether my own process has remained consistent over the years and make tweaks where necessary. For the most part, though, these six easy steps are the ones I use every time I sit down with a new project.

In 6 Easy Steps to Customize a Style Guide: What’s Your Style? Robin Martin breaks down the process of creating, refining, and maintaining style sheets. While a style sheet helps editors maintain consistency throughout a project, it can be confusing to know what to include. This booklet provides a clear process for creating useful and efficient style sheets. One of the most valuable elements is the sample style sheets. The booklet walks you through how each one is created and customized to the needs and nuances of each project. Beginnering editors wanting to learn about style sheets and editors looking to refine their approach will benefit from 6 Easy Steps to Customize a Style Guide: What’s Your Style?

—Jennifer Yankopolus, editor, Word Collaborative

If you are a writer or project manager and your editor doesn’t ask you about style sheets, your best bet is to go find another editor. I’m serious!

Maintaining consistent style throughout the course of a project is a crucial element of any editorial work, whether you are copyediting the main body of a manuscript, front and back material, charts and tables, or design elements. Sometimes it is necessary to finesse the rules. It has been said, ‘Punctuation is there to serve the writing, not the other way around.’ And though style is much more than punctuation, this idea, the premise that style should serve substance, is why I wrote this booklet. I have found a handful of core best practices that carry over from one project to the next which makes customization of style guides quite simple.

You can buy the booklet anywhere, but when you purchase it at the EFA’s online bookstore, the organization gets all of the profits.