A Few Words About Fonts

To me, readability is critical in a book, and almost nothing is more important than beginning with a decent font.

The world is full of amusing fonts, most of which may be fine for headlines and titles, but are unsuitable for setting large blocks of text. I like to balance readability with density. I'm not a fan of overly-white pages and overly spacey line heights—which tend to bulk up page counts and make books unnecessarily more expensive. Publishers of cheap-and-shoddy books may not care because they're using inferior paper anyway, but SROP tries to maintain some dignity by not publishing on grayish paper that's no better than newsprint. Because I like pages to look "substantial", I squish line heights just a little, attempting to achieve a standard of 395 words per 6×9 page, using 10.5pt fonts. This slightly lowers the page count while maintaining a good aesthetic.

For setting the body text of books, the SROP standard is Warnock Pro which is a pretty expensive typeface if you have to buy it retail. Designed specifically for digital reproduction, Warnock has a clean, dark look especially suitable for printing at low resolutions, such as the 600dpi resolution one gets from print-on-demand (POD) houses and consumer-grade printers.

Occasionally, for inserted block quotations, such as when a story is embedded in another story, SROP may fall back on the old standard Century Schoolbook, Palatino, or similar face. (A couple of our books are fully set in Palatino.)

Another nice face for book setting, especially where lots of unusual "foreign" letters are required, is Gentium Book Basic. Two of our SROP titles are set with this face because of their "special needs". Gentium Book Basic is also the serif face I generally prefer to use on my e-reader, because it has a balanced feel with a tall x-height and uniform stroke widths. And it's a free font, so if you don't already have it in your arsenal, you should add it immediately.

The Embargoed Earth series and the two little Cheesefield books are set in the quite readable Georgia face, which I believe comes standard on the Microsoft platform.

One SROP book, The Typographer's Left Shoe, is set using the English Fell revival types by Igino Marini, giving the text a somewhat rustic, old-fashioned look that is also very readable.

For headlines, title pages, and other display situations, I often use serif typefaces from the P22 foundry, which is usually inexpensive but high quality. A few favorite title/display faces are Californian, Late November, Kennerley, and Stickley Pro Text.

(And of course if you're reading a SROP e-book, most of this doesn't apply. Users usually set their devices to some font they like, and SROP e-books respect that by remaining vanilla and using defaults, not trying to get all fancy by embedding unsuitable fonts or forcing the user into certain sizes and line heights.)