Select best typeface for your book

Before self-publishing your book, you’ll need to format the manuscript. Formatting involves getting the manuscript to look on your computer screen exactly as it will look if printed on paper. That means adjusting the page width and height so that it matches the size and margins of the book that will be printed, adding page numbers, and placing the text in a typeface. During this entry, we’ll focus on that last element: typefaces.

A typeface is the design of letters. There are thousands of typefaces to choose from.

Each of these typefaces can be modified. When they are, you are using a font. For example:

This line is regular.

This line is bold.

This line is italics.

Generally typefaces can be divided into two categories. One is serif typefaces. These typefaces have slight projections coming off the ends of the strokes of letters (Look at the Courier example below, which has a base line at the bottom of the small r). Some common serif typefaces include Times, Courier and Georgia.

Sans-serif typefaces lack these projections (This blog is in a sans-serif typeface). Some common sans-serif typefaces are Arial, Helvetica and Verdana

Which typeface you select is vital. It needs to be easy on the eyes for readers, and it needs to match the book’s tone. Because of this, you should avoid typefaces that are too gimmicky for your text, though you might use them on the cover – for example, a children’s crayon font might work well on the cover of a book about parenting children but probably not for its text.