Worth reading: a one-page author brand style guide
Writers collect brand advice the way they collect notebooks: sincerely, and then not at all. A style guide that runs to twenty pages becomes another manuscript. A style guide that fits on one sheet gets used, because you can put it on the desk while you are tired and still tell whether the thing you just made belongs to the name.
The Publishing Times ran a short walk-through of the five-step version of this job: values, palette, voice, images, and the habit of writing them down. I am not going to repeat that list as if I had invented it. What I can do is say what a single page has to survive on a shelf like mine, where the books do not share a genre and the reader still has to feel one attention behind them.
Why one page, and not a manual
A manual is where decisions go to hide. You write the rules when you are calm, and you break them when a cover is late, because finding the rule takes longer than guessing. One page means you already threw out every rule you cannot check in a minute. If a line does not change a yes or a no — this cover, this sentence, this letter — it does not earn the sheet.
The page is not a mood board. Mood boards are private weather. The page is a filter. Someone who has never been in the room with you, including a future version of you who has slept badly, should be able to hold a draft against it and reject the draft for a reason you would still accept in the morning.
I keep mine to four headings, written in sentences rather than adjectives. Adjectives swell. "Warm but serious" means whatever the afternoon wants. A sentence can be failed on purpose, which is the only way a rule stays honest.
The four lines that have to be true here
What the name notices
The first line is the attention, not the merchandise. On this catalogue the attention is a person under a force that would prefer them to be a unit: an optimization system, a clock city, a workplace that steals credit, a historical record that would rather have a type than a name. The Chinese Room puts Dr. Katherine Marsh in front of ARIA and asks whether correct outputs are the same as understanding. Middle-Finger Management puts the same refusal in an office, sarcastic and specific. If a new project does not notice a person who could be flattened, it does not go on the sheet as a "Wooster book" just because I wrote it. It can exist. It does not get to borrow the promise.
That line also tells me what the voice essay is for. Voice is not a palette. The palette can change because the clock city and the Mojave do not look alike, and they should not. The noticing should survive the change of clothes.
What the page will not spend
The second line is a ban. I do not put a ranking, an award, or a reader's praise on a public surface unless the about page or the book record already points at it. Launch week is when this line gets tested, because silence feels like failure and a borrowed superlative feels like help. The sheet says no. A claim you cannot point at is not branding. It is a correction waiting for a reader who checks.
The ban includes other people's lives. A style guide that only talks about fonts will still let you publish a cruel specificity about a living person, then call the cruelty "voice." The second line says the work may be sharp about systems and invented characters, and stingy about anyone who did not agree to be material. That is a brand decision as much as a moral one. Readers learn what you are willing to spend.
How the shelves are allowed to differ
The third line names the families so they do not impersonate each other. The Paradox novels may be cold and may not soothe. The desert and Civil War histories may be particular and may not invent a quotation. West of the War already says every quotation is from a primary source. That sentence belongs on the one-pager, because it is a promise a reader of the novel When the Birds Go Silent needs in a different form: events from the record, interiors imagined, and the difference labeled by the fact that one is a novel.
A Wound in Time is young adult. The sheet says the sentences may be younger and the moral attention may not get cute. Horologium treats a late second as nearly a public failing. Wren's lateness is not a mascot. If a cover or a newsletter line turns the clock city into a punchline, it fails the page even if the colors match.
Humor gets permission to be rude about a structure — a meeting, a script, a stolen credit — and no permission to be cruel about a body or a subordinate who cannot answer. History: Un-Attached may smile and must show when it is interpreting, which is why the chapters end on a choice rather than a diagnosis delivered as fact. Write those permissions as verbs. "May smile." "Must label an interpretation." "Must not invent dialogue in the nonfiction." Verbs can be audited. A cloud of approved adjectives cannot.
Where a stranger is sent
The fourth line is the path. A new reader who liked one book needs a next door that tells the truth. The book catalogue is that door. The reader list, for this name, means The Examined Life — ten questions on consciousness, identity, memory, and living deliberately — not a surprise file from another genre. The one-pager says so, so a tired announcement does not invent a new gift.
Put the actual addresses on the sheet: the book page pattern, the list, the contact door for clubs and readers. A brand that cannot tell a person where to go is a mood. A brand that sends them to a broken link is a mood with a reputation. Check the three addresses when you check the sheet, not when someone writes to say the door was shut.
What you can see, and what you should not pretend is the brand
Covers matter, and they are the easy part to overbuild. A philosophical thriller, a Route 66 history, and a YA clock city should not share one illustration style. They should share a standard of finish: type you can read at a small size, a title that is the book's title, no claim on the jacket that the interior cannot support. Desert Eccentric can look like the road. The Paradox books can look like a colder room. If you force one texture across all of them, you have a costume, and readers notice the costume before they notice the care.
Images of the author, if you use them, should be the person, not a stock of a person writing near a window because the stock tested well for someone else. I am not going to prescribe a lens or a wardrobe. I am going to say the picture fails the sheet if it implies a life the books do not claim. The about page already says what this career has included — classrooms, history, other trades. The picture does not get to add a mythology.
Letters and short posts are where guides go to die, because they feel too small to count. They count more than the guide. A reader meets the one-pager's promises in a note about a book, not in the document itself. Read the last three things you sent. If they could have been sent by any writer with a release this month, the sheet is decorative. Put one sentence of the actual attention back in. Katherine unsure of her test. A woman defending a driveway. A girl a beat behind a city of clocks. Specificity is the brand. The hex codes are housekeeping.
How to know the page is finished
The page is finished when you can fail a sample with it. Take a sentence you like and a sentence you do not. The sheet should reject one of them for a reason you can say aloud without adding a new rule. If both pass, the sheet is too polite. If both fail, the sheet is a mood you had on the day you wrote it, and it will bully the next book that legitimately differs.
Revise the page when a book teaches you a permission you did not have. I did not know, before Wren, that a younger sentence could carry the same refusal to treat people as units. The sheet changed. It did not change because a platform preferred a different tone that month. Platforms are weather. The page is the instrument. Weather does not get a vote unless you want the name to mean "whatever was rewarded last Tuesday."
Keep the old page for a month when you change it. If you cannot remember why you changed a line, change it back. Brand drift usually arrives as a small improvement that nobody can explain. Explanations are the point of writing the thing down.
Then stop. A one-page guide that needs a second page of commentary has failed its own test. Use it on the next cover, the next letter, and the next chapter opening. If it does not change those three objects, you wrote an essay about branding, which is a pleasant way to avoid the book. The book is the brand. The sheet only keeps you from contradicting it when you are in a hurry.