What font should you use for your book?

One of the most common questions asked by aspiring self-publishers who intend to design and compose their book themselves is: “What font should I use?”

I’m always relieved when someone asks the question. If nothing else, it means they’re not blindly going to use the ubiquitous default fonts found in most word processing programs.

However, there is almost no way to answer the question. It’s like asking: “What is the best model of car to go to work every day?”

You’ll get a different answer from almost everyone you ask. And they may all be correct.

However, I am willing to offer a strict rule: do not use Times New Roman or Times Roman. That will mark your book as the work of an amateur at first glance. And there are other, very practical, reasons not to use it. Times Roman and Times New Roman were designed for the narrow columns of newspapers, originally for the London Times in the 1930s. Today, almost no newspaper still uses it. How or why it became a word processing standard I have no idea. The font tends to be very tight, making the block of text on the page dense and dark.

Here are two caveats before proceeding with some recommendations:

  1. The font you choose may depend on how your book will be printed. If you look closely at most serif fonts (like Times), you’ll notice that there are thick and thin parts of each letter. If your book will be printed digitally, you should avoid fonts with very thin segments. They tend to become too dim and affect readability.
  2. Don’t be swayed by the thousands of font options available. Most are special fonts suitable for titles, headlines, advertising, emotional impact, etc. And never use more than a few sources in a single book; we generally choose a serif font for the body of the main text, a sans serif for chapter titles and headings within chapters. Depending on the book, we can select a third source for the captions, graphics, tables, etc. (or maybe just a different size, weight, or style from one of the other two). We can select a special font to use on the cover for the title and subtitle.

For 90% of books, any of the following sources are excellent choices:

  • Palatal Linotype
  • Book Antiqua (tends to get tight so you may need to loosen it up a bit)
  • Georgia
  • goudy old style
  • Adobe Garamond Pro (Tends to be short x-height so may appear too small at typical sizes)
  • Bookman (the name gives it away, right?)
  • Century Schoolbook (tends to be a bit wide, creating extra pages)

You should look at several paragraphs of each font to see what, if any, adjustments you may find necessary to things like character spacing and kerning. You want to avoid little confusions, like:

  • “vv” (double v) which looks like the letter “w”
  • “cl” (cl) which looks like the letter “d”

Such things can make the reading experience annoying.

If you ask other designers, you’ll likely get other suggestions, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least some of the above included in their recommendations.

You may find some books with more unusual font choices, but there are often good reasons for this. Maybe the book is a humor book for which the designer chose a cheerful font, for example. Such decisions must be made with care and careful consideration of the effects on readability.

Never decide your font or font size based solely on how it looks on your monitor. Most trade paperbacks are printed in 10 or 11 point size, but some fonts require larger, or even smaller, sizes. If 12 points seems too big and 11 too small, you can try 11.5; you don’t need to stick with integers. You might be surprised at the difference a half point (or even a quarter point) can make to the overall “feel” of the page.

You also need to decide on the proper leading (pronounced metal), which is the distance from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the next line, measured in points. The result is usually expressed as a ratio between the font size in points and the selected heading in points. So you can say that you have set your body text to Georgia 11/14 or Bookman 10/12.5 (size 11 point with 14 point leading and size 10 point with 12.5 point leading, respectively). .

Word processing programs tend to work in decimal inches, forcing points to be converted to inches. One standard point is equal to 0.0138 inches. Professional typesetting/design programs (such as Adobe InDesign) allow you to use points and picas to define all type measurements and settings. although you can also specify those settings in various other units (including inches).

Usually, book designers will develop more than one design for the inside of each book, using different fonts, sizes, and line spacing. They should write a few pages of the actual manuscript and print them using the same page setup they plan to use in the final book (eg, 6″ x 9″ pages). This allows the customer to compare them side by side and assess their readability and overall appearance.

And don’t forget your target audience. Very young readers and very old readers do better with a larger typeface. Books that are very textually dense with long paragraphs often need more leading and a wider font.

Ultimately, you have to choose based on what your knee-jerk reaction to composite samples is. It never hurts to ask other people to read it and tell you if one option is easier to read than another.

If you want to gain an appreciation of typography and how to make proper design decisions, I highly recommend the following excellent books:

the complete handbook of typography by James Felici

Elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst

Design and production of books by Pete Masterson

For those who insist on using Microsoft Word to write books, you should really buy and study PerfectPages By Aaron Shepard. He is the reigning guru of how to do it.

It’s much better to buy professional desktop publishing software and then learn all you can about typography and how to apply those principles to book design…or hire a professional to do it for you. This final course will give you more time to develop a dynamic marketing plan for your latest book and start writing your next one!

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *