Style guide for authors
A short reference to the conventions we follow when editing and typesetting Salt titles.
This guide sets out the house style we apply to every manuscript we publish. It is not exhaustive: for anything not covered here, our default authority is New Hart’s Rules (Oxford University Press), with The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as our reference for spelling. If our house style and Hart’s Rules ever appear to disagree, ask your editor – we may simply have made a considered exception.
Following the conventions below before you submit will save time at copy-edit stage and helps keep every Salt book consistent with the rest of our list.
1. Spelling
We use British English spelling throughout, following the OED as our authority. Where the OED gives more than one acceptable form, we use the first form listed unless a strong convention within the genre or the author’s own established usage says otherwise.
The –ise suffix
Salt uses –ise spellings rather than –ize (e.g. organise, recognise, realise), in line with common British usage, even though the OED itself prefers –ize as its headword form. This is a deliberate house exception – please follow –ise consistently rather than mixing the two.
Correct: The plan was organised at short notice.
Avoid: The plan was organized at short notice.
A small number of words are always –yse regardless of house style (analyse, paralyse, catalyse), and a few are always –ize because there is no –ise alternative (e.g. capsize, seize, and prize in the sense of valuing). Your editor will flag any of these as needed.
2. Punctuation
Quotation marks
We set speech and quoted matter in single quotation marks, reserving double quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation.
Correct: ‘I’ll be there by six,’ she said.
Avoid: “I’ll be there by six,” she said.
Correct: ‘Did he really say “never again”?’ Frank asked.
Avoid: ‘Did he really say ‘never again’?’ Frank asked.
Punctuation belonging to the quoted words sits inside the closing quotation mark; punctuation belonging to the sentence as a whole sits outside it.
Ellipses
An ellipsis is set as three word-spaced full stops ( . . . ), not the single ellipsis character and not three full stops run together. Leave a space before the ellipsis and, if the sentence continues, a space after it.
Correct: She paused. ‘I don’t know . . . perhaps not.’
Avoid: She paused. ‘I don’t know...perhaps not.’
Where a sentence trails off and nothing follows, the ellipsis is not followed by a further full stop.
Dashes
For a parenthetical or interruptive dash, Salt uses a spaced en dash ( – ), not an em dash and not a hyphen. Use it sparingly, as Hart’s Rules recommends – a pair of dashes should feel like a deliberate aside, not a substitute for commas throughout a page.
Correct: The house – empty now for a decade – still smelled of woodsmoke.
Avoid: The house—empty now for a decade—still smelled of woodsmoke.
An unspaced en dash (10–24) is used for number ranges and connections (e.g. pages 10–24, the 1939–45 war, a Manchester–Leeds train), and a hyphen (-) for compound words (well-known, mother-in-law). These three marks are not interchangeable.
Commas
We use the Oxford comma (also called the serial comma): the final item in a list of three or more takes a comma before the conjunction, to avoid ambiguity.
Correct: She packed her notebook, a torch, and a spare battery.
Avoid: She packed her notebook, a torch and a spare battery.
We also observe the vocative comma: a comma before a name or term of address used to speak directly to someone, marking the difference between addressing a person and describing one.
Correct: ‘Let’s eat, Grandma.’
Avoid: ‘Let’s eat Grandma.’
3. Numbers
Spell out numbers under one hundred in running text (one, twelve, forty-seven, ninety-nine); use numerals from 100 upwards (100, 240, 1,066). This follows Hart’s Rules’ general guidance for narrative prose; figures, dates, addresses, measurements, percentages and sums of money are given as numerals regardless of size (3 kg, 4 per cent, £5, 12 Norwich Road).
Correct: There were forty-two people at the launch.
Avoid: There were 42 people at the launch.
Never begin a sentence with a numeral – spell the number out, or restructure the sentence, whichever reads more naturally.
4. Time
Use lower-case, full-stopped a.m. and p.m., with a space before the abbreviation, and figures for the hour (never spelled out).
Correct: The reading began at 7.30 p.m.
Avoid: The reading began at 7:30PM.
Note the British convention of a full stop (not a colon) between hours and minutes: 7.30, not 7:30. Use midday and midnight in preference to 12 p.m. and 12 a.m. where clarity matters.
5. Naming and numbering chapters
Chapter headings should be consistent throughout a manuscript: choose one convention and apply it to every chapter, rather than mixing numbered and titled chapters unless the structure of the book specifically calls for both (for example, numbered chapters within titled parts).
- Numbered only: Chapter One, Chapter Two – spelled out, not Chapter 1.
- Numbered and titled: Chapter One: The Departure.
- Titled only, unnumbered: The Departure (used where chapters function more like named sections, as in some memoir and short-story collections).
Whichever convention is used, apply it via Word’s built-in Heading styles (see Section 6) rather than manual formatting, so that chapter breaks and any generated contents list remain reliable through editing and typesetting.
6. Preparing your manuscript in Word
A cleanly prepared manuscript makes copy-editing faster and reduces the risk of formatting errors surviving into the finished book. Please follow these principles when submitting your typescript.
Submit one integrated file
Please submit your manuscript as a single Word file, rather than as separate files for front matter and text. Include any dedication, epigraph(s) and acknowledgements within that same file, positioned where you would like them to appear – typically dedication and epigraph before Chapter One, and acknowledgements at the back of the book.
Submit your final manuscript
Please submit the final version of your manuscript – the version you are happy with, with all structural changes and revisions already made. Once a manuscript has moved into copy-editing and typesetting, we prefer not to receive rewrites or further structural changes during these cycles: each pass of changes at that stage carries a real cost in editorial and production time, and risks introducing new errors into a text that has already been checked.
If you are still working through significant revisions, do let your editor know rather than submitting a manuscript you expect to substantially rework once it is with us.
Use paragraph styles, not manual formatting
Apply Word’s built-in Heading 1 style to chapter titles and the Normal (or a custom Body Text) style to running text. This lets us navigate the manuscript, generate a contents list automatically, and carry formatting through to typesetting cleanly. Please do not apply bold, large font sizes or centring by hand to fake a heading.
Do not use tabs or spaces to indent paragraphs
Never press Tab or the space bar to indent the first line of a paragraph. Instead, set a first-line indent within the paragraph style itself (Home tab → Paragraph dialog launcher → Indentation → Special → First line), and let every paragraph using that style indent automatically.
Manual tabs and spaces look consistent on screen but cause uneven, hard-to-remove artefacts once a manuscript is reflowed into typeset pages – they multiply the work at proof stage rather than saving it now.
Do not use paragraph returns to start a new page
Never create a new page for a chapter, part-title or section such as Acknowledgements by pressing Return repeatedly until the text drops onto the next page. Instead, insert an actual page break, or – better still – set ‘Page break before’ on the relevant heading style (Home tab → Paragraph dialog launcher → Line and Page Breaks → Page break before), so the break travels with the style rather than sitting as a run of empty paragraphs.
Correct: Apply ‘Page break before’ to the chapter heading style, or insert a page break at that point (Insert → Page Break).
Avoid: Press Return repeatedly until the heading drops onto a new page.
A page made this way only holds by coincidence: it depends on exactly how much text precedes it, and the first edit anywhere earlier in the file shunts the heading out of place, leaving stray blank pages or a chapter opening that no longer starts where you intended.
Other conventions
- Use a single space after a full stop, not two.
- Do not insert an extra blank paragraph to create space between paragraphs; set space-before or space-after within the style instead.
- Reserve italics (via the Italic style) for titles of longer works, foreign words, emphasis and internal thought – do not use underlining as a substitute for italics.
- Number pages using Word’s automatic page numbering, not typed page numbers.
- Keep one file per manuscript where possible; use Word’s built-in Track Changes and Comments for any editorial exchange, rather than colour-coded text.
- Save the final file as a standard .docx rather than a legacy .doc or a PDF.
If you are unsure how any of this applies to your own manuscript, or you are working from a template inherited from another publisher, do get in touch with your editor before submission – it is far easier to adjust styles at the outset than to unpick manual formatting later.
7. Proof corrections
At proof stage, please mark corrections directly onto the Word file using Track Changes wherever possible – this lets us see exactly what has changed and why.
If you are not able to use Track Changes, please submit your corrections instead as a separate Word document listing each correction individually, citing the page and line number, for example:
- Page 42, line 6: change ‘recieve’ to ‘receive’.
- Page 108, line 14: delete the comma after ‘garden’.
Please avoid marking corrections directly onto a PDF, or sending them as running prose in an email – an itemised list by page and line number is far easier for us to apply accurately and to check off against the proof.
