Customizing the biblatex style authoryear

Question

I am aware of the fact that very similar problems have been discussed here before, but sadly I still can't figure out the following:

I need to customize the standard authoryear @book style to look like this:

Last Name, First Name (year): Title. Location, Publisher.

(all non-italic)

Could anyone help me out here with undoing the standard italic title and the colon after the location? Up until now, I only managed to change the period after (year) to a colon with:

\renewcommand*{\labelnamepunct}{\addcolon\space}

Answer 1

The title formatting

You can reliably assume that the basic formatting applied to titles can be affected by \DeclareFieldFormat. In this case it's simple:

\DeclareFieldFormat[book]{title}{#1}

But you may well want to modify it for other entry types as well. In extreme cases you can clear all type-specific formatting with the starred version of the command; but in this case I've assumed you want to leave the formats for, e.g., article titles, unchanged.

The location and publisher

If you look at standard.bbx (which is in turn used by authoryear.bbx) you can work out pretty quickly from looking at the basic drivers that it is a bibmacro called publisher+location+date that formats these elements. If we look at that macro (in standard.bbx we find, in the middle of it, these lines:

 \iflistundef{publisher}
    {\setunit*{\addcomma\space}}
    {\setunit*{\addcolon\space}}%

Immediately before the publisher is printed out. It's the second of these lines that prints our colon. So we can change that so that the entire bibmacro is defined as follows

\renewbibmacro*{publisher+location+date}{%
  \printlist{location}%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \printlist{publisher}%
  \setunit*{\addcomma\space}%
  \usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit}

Don't worry about the reference to the date: it won't be printed because the date bibmacro knows it already has been. But it's a basic rule of changing things in biblatex that you change as little as possible.

This change won't just affect the book entry type of course. But that's probably what you want: one expects consistency.

The punctuation

As you have worked out, the punctuation is changed with

\renewcommand{\labelnamepunct}{\addcolon\space}

In total

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=authoryear,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareFieldFormat[book]{title}{#1}

\renewbibmacro*{publisher+location+date}{%
  \printlist{location}%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \printlist{publisher}%
  \setunit*{\addcomma\space}%
  \usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit}

\renewcommand{\labelnamepunct}{\addcolon\space}
\begin{document}

\nocite{cotton}

\printbibliography[heading=none]

\end{document}