PenStranding

Glossary and character list

A glossary in each edition's back pages, every name under the chapter where it first appears, with how to say it.

Readers who meet a lot of names, places and words from another world like to look them up, but a list of every name with all that's known about it gives the story away. The studio's glossary is ordered the other way: each entry is listed under the chapter where it first appears, so a reader can stop at the chapter they've reached.

Choosing the entries: on an edition's Back matter tab, tick the entries from the book's story bible that the glossary lists: characters, places, things and terms. For each, write what readers are told about it (without what comes later), and, if you like, how to say it, for that edition's readers: a Polish name is explained one way to English readers and another way to Japanese ones.

Each edition its own: a translation lists its entries as it writes them. By default a name is the story bible's, or in a translation the one your glossary gives it for that language; you can write another. The studio finds each name in the edition's text as it's written there, and in the original's edition by the story bible's other names for it too. An entry the text never names is left out, and the tab says which.

In the book: the glossary comes near the end, before "Also by", in place of any glossary your manuscript has. It's written at every build from the text being built, in the edition's language: in an ebook as a glossary readers' apps recognise, in print in the book's type. Changing an entry makes the builds from before out of date.

What you need: the Author plan, or a Book Pass for the book, and entries in the book's story bible.

With the Author plan, or a Book Pass for one book.

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