Prose is a literary Ghost theme for authors, books, newsletters, and personal writing. It gives you a calm, elegant website where your work can breathe, whether you are launching a new book, publishing essays, building a reader list, or presenting a complete writing archive.
Designed with thoughtful typography, flexible homepage sections, and book-focused templates, Prose helps you create a site that feels intentional from the first visit. It keeps the experience simple for readers and manageable for you in Ghost.
Prose is perfect for authors preparing a book launch, writers building a long-term home for their work, newsletter publishers who want a more editorial presence, and independent publishers showcasing multiple titles or serialized projects.
A homepage built around your work
The Prose homepage is modular and easy to shape around the story you want to tell. It can introduce you as an author, highlight a featured book, show multiple publications, surface sample chapters, share praise from readers, and guide visitors toward your newsletter.
The hero section can use your publication title, description, and cover image by default, or you can create a dedicated page for custom copy, rich content, and a call-to-action. From the Ghost design settings, you can choose between multiple hero layouts:
Because the homepage sections are powered by Ghost pages, tags, and theme settings, you can update the page without editing theme code. Use the editor for your copy, upload images where needed, and let Prose handle the presentation.
Showcase books beautifully
Books are at the heart of Prose. Tag any post with #book and it can appear in the homepage books section, the dedicated books collection, and book-specific templates.
On the homepage, you can choose between three layouts for the books section:
- Sections: large horizontal book cards for featured titles or a focused book launch
- Grid: a clean multi-book layout for authors with several publications
- Carousel: a compact browsing experience for larger libraries
You can also control how many books appear on the homepage and enable the optional book cover effect, which adds subtle depth to flat cover images with CSS shadows.
Book pages and chapters
Prose includes custom templates for presenting individual books. Use the book template for a focused title page with cover art, description, and supporting content, or use the book with chapters template when you want to include a table of contents.
The chapters workflow is designed for sample chapters, serialized writing, companion essays, previews, or teaching material. Posts tagged with #chapter can appear on the homepage chapters section, and chapter posts connected to a book can be shown as an ordered contents list on the book page.
This makes Prose useful beyond a simple author bio site. It can support a book launch, a long-running serial, a course-like reading experience, or an evolving library of related work.
Writing and newsletter publishing
Prose gives your ongoing writing a clear place to live. The writing section on the homepage displays recent posts tagged with #writing, and the dedicated writing page can include a topics sidebar based on the tags you add to the page.
For email-driven publishing, Prose also includes a newsletter collection. Posts tagged with #newsletter are organized into a chronological archive, giving readers an easy way to browse past issues and catch up on your work.
Together, these sections let you keep books, essays, updates, and newsletter issues connected without making the site feel crowded.
Build trust with readers
Prose includes dedicated sections for quotes, praise, and newsletter signups. They are simple to manage from the Ghost editor and flexible enough for different kinds of author websites.
Use the quote section for a strong review, endorsement, or memorable line. Use the praise section for multiple testimonials displayed in a clean grid. Both sections are powered by Ghost product cards, so you can add quote text, attribution, rating, and profile images without custom code.
The subscribe section appears near the footer for visitors who are not logged in. Add a short page with the slug subscribe, and Prose pairs your message with a built-in Ghost signup form on a branded background. You can also add a header call-to-action from the design settings.
A calm reading experience
Prose is designed for long-form reading. The typography, spacing, post hero, and content styles are tuned for essays, chapters, announcements, and literary publishing.
For posts, you can enable a table of contents globally or add it to selected posts with the internal #toc tag. You can also use the drop cap setting, choose a divider style, enable Ghost comments, and let readers share posts from the post hero.
The theme supports light, dark, and system color schemes, with a reader-facing toggle that can appear in the header, footer, both places, or stay hidden. By default, Prose uses Outfit for headings and Crimson Text for body copy, giving the site a refined editorial tone.
Customize without code
Most of the important presentation choices are available directly in Ghost Admin. From the theme settings, you can adjust the homepage hero layout, books layout, book limit, book cover effect, default color scheme, UI font family, heading weight, search visibility, header call-to-action, table of contents, drop caps, and divider style.
For deeper brand work, Prose also supports Ghost's typography settings, custom fonts, and color overrides through Code Injection. The documentation covers the setup steps and useful snippets if you want to go further.
Native Ghost features
Take advantage of the native Ghost CMS features:
- Ghost Portal - to manage membership, subscriptions and account
- Native search - an easy way to provide a search function within your content (posts, tags, authors)
- Native comments - add a comment section to your posts with just a few clicks
- Custom settings - the theme comes with custom settings unique for this theme, making basic theme customization very easy
- Hide the page title and feature image - with this you can create landing pages consisting of header cards and sign up cards, or any other cards from the Ghost editor
Ghost Editor cards
Full support for the full range of editor cards in the Ghost editor:
- Markdown card
- Bookmark card
- Gallery card
- Image card with normal, wide, and full width
- GIF card
- Button card
- NTF embed
- Callout card
- Toggle card
- Alternative quote style
- Product card
- Audio card
- Video card
- File card
- Header card
- Signup card
- Call to action card
- Check out the full style guide
Translations
Brief is translation ready. By default, everything is in English (en.json), but
the theme comes with translations in:
- 🇩🇪 German (
de.json) - 🇪🇸 Spanish (
es.json) - 🇫🇷 French (
fr.json) - 🇮🇹 Italian (
it.json) - 🇳🇱 Dutch (
nl.json) - 🇵🇹 Portuguese (
pt.json)
Extra features
- Dropdown menus - add submenus to the menu easily from your Ghost Admin navigation (no-code)
- Accessibility - the theme is validated against the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) passing all relevant rules and keyboard navigation throughout the theme is assured and color contrast recommendations are respected. Accessibility checks
- Performance optimization - WEBP image formats, image lazy loading, and more
- Membership & Subscriptions - full support for the membership feature, including membership tiers
- WEBP image converting - the theme converts images to
.webpformat for browsers that support it
Additional info
- The online documentation covers everything, starting from installation and configuration as well as customizing and theme development.
- You can set up automatic theme deployment using GitHub Actions. Follow our ghost theme deployment tutorial.
- Feel free to reach out if you have any feedback or need support. Twitter: @brightthemes_