A question about presentation and fonts

[DAgent]

Okay, I've got a template all setup with the "proper measurements" for font size double spacing, indenting and so on. But one thing I've been thinking about is presentation in term of fonts for cover pages, book and chapter titles.

Is it best to just leave these all in the same font as the rest of the work, or is it alright to mix things up a bit here? In other words, maybe make the book and chapter titles all show up in Bold and/or Italics, or even a different font if that font helps sell an aspect of the story? ie a font that looks "Sci Fi" for a Sci Fi story or a "Medieval Font" for a Fantasy tale?

Has anyone tried this and been told it's okay to do so, or just been advised not to?

And if you have used it, has the work been published using those other fonts for the titles?

The reason I ask is because whenever I have seen movie posters for Sci Fi movies in Japan, there just seems to be something far more "Sci Fi" about the titles when written in Japanese rather than English, and I'm wondering if the same effect could be made with a font that resembles Japanese writing.

 

[Mouse]

For submissions use all the same font. And use the font the agent/publisher has asked you to. For self-publishing do what you like.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

Are you querying or going indie?

If you're planning to approach an agent in order to trad pub, then, as Mouse said, check what fonts the agent/publisher has asked for. Selling the genre in terms of fonts isn't important at this stage, presenting a readable manuscript that follows the submission guidelines for your agent or the publisher that you are approaching is. Besides, if you book does get picked up, they will be the ones determining the final font anyway and not you.

If you're going indie though and publishing it yourself, than you can do whatever you think looks best and best reflects your book/genre. I'd look around though at other indie books that are comparable to yours first to see how they approach it. It'll help you pick up on genre cues/styling to make sure that your book well fits into its target market well.

 

[DAgent]

Are you querying or going indie?

If you're planning to approach an agent in order to trad pub, then, as Mouse said, check what fonts the agent/publisher has asked for. Selling the genre in terms of fonts isn't important at this stage, presenting a readable manuscript that follows the submission guidelines for your agent or the publisher that you are approaching is. Besides, if you book does get picked up, they will be the ones determining the final font anyway and not you.

If you're going indie though and publishing it yourself, than you can do whatever you think looks best and best reflects your book/genre. I'd look around though at other indie books that are comparable to yours first to see how they approach it. It'll help you pick up on genre cues/styling to make sure that your book well fits into its target market well.

Really it's more a case of trying to figure out how it all works and seeing what other peoples experiences have been. And maybe trying to manage my own expectations.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I use Arial 12pt double spaced, but have a bigger font size in bold & italics for titles and chapter headings. It's never been a problem with submissions.

My publisher used a completely different font and style on both my published books and I just make sure my submitted manuscript is clean, tidy and consistent.

 

[Brian G Turner]

If you go the self-publishing route then the fonts in the ebook will be limited to those available in the reader.

If you go the traditional published route you I don't believe you'll have input on the fonts, as the design team will make those decisions.

 

[tinkerdan]

Based on the OP and mention of double spacing I assume that this is a review manuscript for either agents, editors or queries.
As some others have said, you should first find out what the person receiving the document is expecting. Most have some sort of rule of thumb or requirement that they prefer.

The problem might come with sending to publisher(this could be any of the forms of self-publishing and likely includes any time you directly work with a printer)it's quite different.

I made the mistake of sending a document with 12pt font-Garamond type with double spacing to Xlibris for publishing--assuming that since they had editors to edit the document that that was the way they wanted it. However they shortly informed me that my novel was too long and exceeded the 800 page limit they had. Of course this was because when reducing it to 6x9 format and keeping the double spacing it filled more than the limit because it was over 250k words.

After a confusing phone conversation, I finally figured it out and told them to hold everything and I would send an altered document. I stripped out the double spacing and sent that and then spoke to an overjoyed person on the other end when they determined that it would be 600 plus pages and would work.

In self publishing such a large book is also a large price--over 30.00 us dollars for the hard version and about 24.00 for the soft version.

When I moved to Amazon I decide, for the paper books, I wanted to keep the price reasonable, I changed to working with 11pt font and pushed the margins to their limit so I could print in an 8.5 by 5.5 book format and try to keep a 110k word novel at less than 300 pages.

So now I do the entire interior design myself.

The interior text is 11pt Garamond font

The front material:
Titles are 18pt Arial
Copyrights page and dedication and acknowledgement are 11pt Garamond though the pages with
Dedication and Acknowledgement
Those words are in 18pt font

All chapter titles or numbers are in 18pt font

There is no double spacing.

I keep these parameters as my template file and that way when I am finished and ready to print I don't have to go back and painstakingly change things.

Also in word if I do want to change the size or font type of titles and chapter titles or even the internal design fonts I can do so quickly because everything is done with specific styles.