Word on a Whim

Black silk underwear

Sorry, I tricked you.  This is a post about fonts ;>)

I spent some time trying to decide which would be the best font and font size for my novel.

Research on the internet into people’s preferences (for fonts!) revealed conflicting opinions.

One view was that nothing smacks so strongly of self-publishing as the Times New Roman font; yet every novel I have opened appears to be in Times New Roman – or some font with serifs.  Another opinion was that Arial should only be used for IT text books.

I learned that the idea of serifs is to make a page of text easier to read by guiding the eye across the page, whereas a font without serifs is more readable for text on computer screens. Arial was the font I had chosen to work with on my laptop, and I felt it had a more fresh and modern feel than Times New Roman, but I was swayed by the explanation of the serifs.

To get a quote from a printer you have to state the number of pages in the book, and the more pages the higher the price.  Different fonts require more or less pages, so to keep down printing costs I need to format the text into as few pages as possible but without compromising readability. So that the quote would be more accurate, I emailed a printing firm, asking if there was any particular font that worked best for digital printing, and although they did not state a preference I was told that most of their customers use Times New Roman in size 11 point.  I printed off a few A5 pages in different fonts and sizes, and this did seem the most readable, so that’s what I am going to use.