The Making of a Book: Choosing a Font
- Ashley Bodette
- Apr 28, 2016
- 2 min read
I've always known that I wanted my book to be available as both an e-book and in paperback. I thought I was going to pay someone else to format my book (there are some AMAZING formatters out there) but after doing a ton of work in InDesign for projects in my masters degree program, I decided to give it a go on my own. (This also satisfies my need for control.) :)
When I began working on the formatting of my book I made a conscious decision to choose a font that was hopefully dyslexia friendly. This in itself was hard to make myself do, even though I felt so strongly about it, because if you randomly pick a YA novel off the shelf at a bookstore, odds are it's been printed in a serif font. Sometimes it's hard to go against the norm, but as a former teacher, I just couldn't let something as simple as changing the font to make for easier reading for dyslexics go.
But then the real struggle began. I dug around on the internet looking for dyslexia-friendly fonts that I already owned. There wasn't a TON of information, but I did find some. I had a few fonts that the pages said should work, and took a peek at them, and had thought I decided on one. Then I got to the chapter with a four or five page flashback...and you just couldn't tell that it was meant to be italic. It just looked like I had screwed up my font somehow.
So, back to the drawing board. At this point, I drew in the help of my mother. As a person who doesn't read a lot of books, I knew her knee-jerk reactions to fonts would be useful. I Skyped her and shared my screen, and basically just kept going through sans serif fonts from the lists I had made until I found one that I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with.
As of right now, that's Franklin Gothic Book...but I make no guarantees that it will stay that font!
