Chris A. Baird | August 27, 2020
best font for self-published book

If you are just starting with self-publishing, it is going to be trial and error at first. Let me tell you based on my experience what is the best font for self-published book.

Today's question has three answers and the third answer is a secret as to which font I have used for the 170 plus books that I've published.

So, let's get into it. The question that was sent into me today was, what is the best font for self-published book? I can completely understand what they were wondering about.

Because there are so many fonts to choose from. Now obviously, I remember in the old days, Wingding and some of the crazy-looking font types that you can choose from. Some of them are more appropriate than other fonts.

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So you're trying to figure out which one is going to be right for you. And so when you're getting into it, that could be very tricky with so many options. Just like everything else, lots of options makes it confusing.

Before we get into the answers, check out my free Self-Publishing Checklist. It will help you get started on your self-publishing journey right away.

So, what is the best font for self-published book? When I first started, I had no idea, I was just using Word. Then, when putting the book out there, for my very first paper book I did it through Fiverr.

I had somebody tried to format it and put it together. It sort of looked okay but some of the font or some of the writing was off. I ran through a series of edits.

Fonts That Doesn't Strain Your Eyes

Even when I submitted it in, the table of contents didn't work, it wasn't clickable. That was a little bit of a problem and the pages won't exactly match. And then when I put it into the dark mode, I suddenly couldn't even see the text because they've chosen a color for the font that made it.

So it didn't change with the font type. The program they were using to put together the books was terrible. One of the lessons I have learned here was that if you don't do it yourself or figure out at least the process itself one time, lots of mistakes are going to be made.

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You will then contact the person on Fiverr and say, can you please fix this? And of course, they can for an additional fee. Almost doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the price.

That was when I started testing up programs like Jutoh and Scribner and all of this other software. To see what was going to work best for me. So, what is the best font for self-published book?

The answer is first, avoid Sans Serif fonts. The ones we would like to read are the ones that have a little tinnie, they will call it Serifs on the letter itself.

If you are reading an entire book, it can strain your eyes if you're trying to read the entire book using this exact font. Whereas, other fonts that can be helpful that many people have found very good are Baskerville, Bembo, Garamond, Janson, Palatino, and Times Roman.

Although most of these are for newspaper fonts, they can also work within the book. But you want to be focused on the fact that the person is going to be reading an entire book using this exact font. So you don't want to hurt their eyes.

Georgia Font Gives You The Flexibility

But today's secret answer of the day hits exactly into this issue of what I have found. I personally use Georgia and one of the reasons is since I use the program Jutoh, it gives you that flexibility to create a font that looks fantastic on the page.

When you're pulling the manuscripts together and putting it in there, it will automatically just put it into that format that you're looking for. I use a template from Jutoh that I created then I can put in the Georgia font into the individual templates.

What happens is we have that flexibility and then we put it into eBook or EPUB or Mobi format, the Georgia font looks fantastic. And when they switch fonts inside their device, it also switches with them.

If you want the dark mode, Jutoh makes sure that's coded correctly so it's not hard and the color would then switched to white text on a black background for example. In large books, we don't do paperback or hardback books, we simply don't need to change the font.

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So we could just stick with Georgia. Personally, that's the one I have used for all of these books. I have never had anybody complain about having difficulty reading the books. Or the font is too big or ugly or hard to read on their eyes.

Georgia is an outstanding font that I would highly recommend. So, what is the best font for self-published book? The answer is, well, what have you found?

I would really be interested to hear what you've found. Go and let me know below in the comments and check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.

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