Catalogue Production Editing and Proofreading Services

Page 214 gives a bookcase as 180 × 80 × 30. Page 215 gives the next one as H 1800 W 800 D 300 mm. Page 216 says 6ft tall. All three are correct, all three were supplied by different manufacturers, and a customer comparing them has to do arithmetic that the catalogue should have done. Some of them will do it wrong and return the furniture.

We edit what catalogue publishers and retailers produce — product entries and specification blocks, category and section introductions, size and fit guidance, ordering and delivery information, index and cross-reference systems, seasonal and range copy, and the house style documents that keep thousands of entries consistent. Our editors work at the scale where consistency matters more than elegance.

The specification block is the part of a catalogue customers actually use, and its failure is inconsistency inherited from suppliers. A catalogue is a comparison tool, and comparison requires the same units in the same order. We work through these so every entry presents its attributes in a fixed order with fixed labels, since a customer moving down a page is comparing position rather than reading, and a reordered block breaks that; so dimensions are given in one unit throughout, converted from whatever the supplier sent, with the order stated once at the front of the section rather than repeated on every line; so the attribute that decides most purchases in a category leads the block — capacity for storage, seat height for chairs, wattage for appliances — because the ordering should reflect the customer's decision rather than the supplier's data sheet; so any figure that is nominal rather than measured is marked, given that a nominal 1.8 metre bookcase may be 1,784mm and somebody is fitting it under a shelf; so what is not included is stated in the same place every time; so the copy above the block does the persuading and the block itself does not, as a specification with adjectives in it stops being scannable; so cross-references use page numbers rather than product names; and so the house style is a document a temporary copywriter can follow in an afternoon. Catalogues built this way get used rather than browsed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including product data, pricing and unpublished ranges. We are editors rather than product or merchandising specialists, and we offer no view on products, specifications or supplier data. What we can do is make three hundred pages behave like one document.