One of the most common questions asked by aspiring self-publishers who intend to design and typeset their book themselves is, “What font should I use?”
I always feel relieved when someone asks the question. At the very least, it means they won’t be blindly using 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 car model to go to work every day?”
You will get a different answer from almost everyone you ask. And they may all be correct.
However, I am willing to offer a strict rule: don’t use Times New Roman or Times Roman. That will mark your book as the work of an amateur at first sight. 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 cramped, making the block of text on the page dense and dark.
Here are two caveats before proceeding with some recommendations:
- The typeface you choose may depend on how your book will be printed. If you look closely at most serif fonts (such as 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 get too dim and affect readability.
- Don’t get carried away with the thousands of font options available. Most are specialty fonts suitable for titles, headlines, advertising, emotional impact, etc. And never use more than a few fonts 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 font for captions, graphs, tables, etc. (or maybe just a different size, weight, or style than 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 great choices:
- Palatine Linotype
- Book Antiqua (it tends to get tight, so you may need to loosen it up a bit)
- Georgia
- goudy old style
- Adobe Garamond Pro (tends to have a 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 mix-ups, 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. Perhaps 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 print at 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 have to stick with whole numbers. You might be surprised at the difference a half point (or even a quarter point) can make in the overall “feel” of the page.
You also need to decide on the appropriate line spacing (pronounced like 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 of the font size in points to the selected heading in points. So you can say that you have set the body text to Georgia 11/14 or Bookman 10/12.5 (11 point size with 14 point margin and 10 point size with 12.5 point margin, respectively) .
Word processing programs tend to work in decimal inches, forcing you to convert points 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 measurements and type settings. although you can also specify those settings in various other units (including inches).
Typically, book designers will develop more than one design for the interior of each book, using different fonts, sizes, and line spacing. They should write a few pages of the actual manuscript and print them with the same page settings 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 about your target audience. Very young readers and very old readers do better with a larger typeface. Books that are very text dense with long paragraphs often need more line spacing and a wider font.
Ultimately, you should 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 Felicia
The elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst
Book design and production by Pete Masterson
For those who insist on using Microsoft Word to write books, you really should buy and study Perfect Pages by Aaron Shepard. He is the reigning guru of how to do it.
It’s much better to buy professional page layout software and then learn as much as 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!
