House Style Guide

General

• Please use British or Canadian English. If you write in American English, please send your manuscript to another publisher, as we do not understand the rules of American English style.
• In British English, use a single quote mark for colloquial expressions, and double quote marks for reported speech.
• Please use e.g. and i.e. with periods / full stops.
• Please spell authors’ initials without periods / full stops, e.g. JRR Tolkien.

Capitalisation

• If you’re writing about contemporary Pagans, use a capital P
• If you’re writing about ancient pagans or polytheists, use a lower-case p
• Use a capital letter for Druids, Wiccans, Heathens, Kemetics, Religio Romana (and any other contemporary Pagan tradition)
• Use lower-case letters for the name of a philosophy, e.g. polytheism, animism, anarchism (unless it is a specific named tradition like Stoicism or Epicureanism)
• All proper nouns should be capitalised (unless it’s the name of a person who spells their name in lower case, like bell hooks or e. e. cummings)
• Use all caps for acronyms (e.g. UNDRIP, UNWRA, LGBTQ+) but spell out what the acronym stands for the first time you use it.
• When you spell out an acronym, use title case, e.g. United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Italicisation

• There is no need to italicise foreign words. Just put a translation in brackets after the word.
• Italicise book titles, film/movie titles, TV shows, etc.

Footnotes and endnotes

• Add footnotes with citations to explain the source or the context of your assertions. This saves readers from flipping to the back of the book, only to find a note that says ‘Ibid.‘
• Add the citation in endnotes as well

Citations

• Pick a citation style you like and stick to it throughout.
  • APA Citation Style
  • MLA Citation Style
  • Chicago/Turabian Citation Style
  • IEEE Style
  • any other widely recognised style
• In footnotes, add the citation without the URL to avoid clutter, but link to the source so that ebook readers can click on it
• In endnotes, include the URL so that print readers can access it

Exercises

• Place exercises and reflections at the end of each chapter
• If you really need to place them in the middle of the chapter, provide a list of exercises at the start of the book

Diagrams and illustrations

Please use the highest resolution of image available to you. Bear in mind that the image will be reproduced in monochrome (black and white), so consider whether it will work in monochrome.

For photos, use the JPEG file type. For diagrams and drawings, use GIF or PNG.

Headings

Make sure to use the heading styles provided in your word processing software. This enables us to create a table of contents for your manuscript (important for both the print and ebook versions).

• Heading 1 – the title of each chapter
• Heading 2 – section headings
• Heading 3 – subsection headings
• Heading 4 – if you need a subsubheading!

I personally prefer sentence case for headings, but if you prefer title case, go ahead – just use it consistently!

Font

Please do not use Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, or Comic Neue. This is because I find these fonts aesthetically unpleasing.

Dates and times

• Dates should be formatted as follows:
  • Wednesday, 1 July, 2026
  • 1 July 2026
  • July 2026
  • 2026
• …unless you’re writing a science fiction or fantasy story about a different culture where they use a different system
• Times should be formatted as follows:
  • In a paragraph, write “at eight o’clock in the morning” or “at quarter to eight”
  • In a footnote or an announcement, write the time as 8:45 am / 8:30 pm

Numbers

• In a paragraph, write the number between one and ten as words, but any number higher than that in numerals, unless it is a vague approximation, e.g. “there were dozens of people at the spaceport”
• In a footnote or an announcement, write the number as a numeral