Document Standards

All Fresh Complaint documents, regardless of what phase they are in, are to be delivered to professional standards.

We want you to be an artistic practitioner of good craft. This means that we want your deliveries to be clean and consistent, and your creative efforts to be spent honoring our clients with good writing.

Formatting Standards

  • Fresh Complaint-owned Google Doc in our Google drive
  • CMOS style unless otherwise specified
  • Title page
  • Table of contents, preferably hyperlinked at delivery
  • Page numbers starting on the first page of writing (not the title page or TOC)
  • Double-spaced
  • Font choice standard to Google Docs (Arial 11pt)
  • .25 indent at the beginning of each paragraph
  • Version control file-naming convention
    • Book title_Phase completed_Your initials
    • I.e. ACCIDENTALVINEYARD_STRUCTURE 2_CH

Professional Standards

Regardless of which draft you’re submitting, all of the work delivered is to be professional quality and presentable both internally and externally.

We expect that your submission to us will: 

  • be spell-checked and generally free of egregious typos
  • be consistent in tense: i.e., present/past
  • be consistent in point of view (first person/third person)
  • use complete sentences, thoughts, paragraphs, chapters, and sections
    • The occasional TK is acceptable if you’re waiting on us or our clients for more information, but this should be the exception
  • be free from filler content, cliches, repetition, and circular reasoning
    • If you need more content, you can ask our authors
  • demonstrate evidence of your BOLD creative choices 
    • A choice that doesn’t work is preferable to being “safe”
    • Boring is boring
  • meet the decided-upon word count (unless research is stalling)
  • have varied sentence length and be interesting/unique to read
  • align with the client’s voice, project expectations, and book plan
  • avoid the famous stories (Apple, HP started in the garage, Zappos paid people to quit, etc.)
  • have chapters of generally consistent length
    • Intros, interludes, and section introductions may deviate from this,
    • Artistic choices can be made
  • get better and closer to “done” with each round of edits you implement
  • be something you’d be proud to put your own name on—that’s the true litmus test of a good ghostwriter!