The best sources for free fonts with commercial use rights are: If you want to find your own cover font, start with Google fonts. The first font we tried out is Route 159, free for commercial use. The serif or sans serif typeface suggests modernity and honesty. The way they broke the title is non-aesthetic, the function word “to” sits oddly before “Paris.” Check out our blog for more in-depth articles on industry news and Using the right fonts on your book cover helps tell the reader what genre your book fits into and elicits an emotional response. For a serif font that projects a clean, professional image, Hoefler is an excellent choice. When you go to an interview or on a date, do you design your own clothes? The options in the right-hand column can help you narrow it down. Don’t know what is better to choose and how to combine images and graphics? The fonts on professionally designed covers are never just typed onto the cover. Figure out how you’ll compensate for any apparent differences in height/size between the two. The added review pieces could also bring extra attention if you keep them subtle enough. For most people, their experience with font begins and ends with the 12-point Times New Roman font. Spacing between the letters is important for aesthetical reasons. For inspiration and good examples, check your favorite bestselling books, go to a bookstore or just search “beautiful covers” (as you most certainly already did). If you would like to suggest a font or point size for your book, you may do so in the design questionnaire. It is not a generator, but it lets you use your own text when previewing the fonts, which is rather useful. This cover is a fantastic example of how a good font supports the cover picture. This is because such a high percentage of sales now occur online. In fact, your subconscious mind makes a few snap judgments about every book based on its typography: Is your brain really getting all that from the typeface? This is because a book cover is a piece of art with a specific purpose: Book covers exist to give visual form to written content. Really boring headers/chapter designs 3. But every bestselling book uses a font that was chosen carefully to be visible and arresting, standing out against other titles. When you see a title on a book cover, you might think you’re just reading the words. The goal of choosing the right font for your book is to create a readable, consistent, and visually satisfying reading flow that works invisibly, without the awareness of the reader. Most books fall into a range of 9–12 point type, so any font that you’re considering has to be legible at these sizes. 2. Bold: Book title. For book covers, choose “Display” under classifications, “Condensed” under tags, and “ebook” under licenses as a good place to start. For book covers, choose “Display” under classifications, “Condensed” under tags, and “ebook” under licenses as a good place to start. To help out, here are 5 typefaces, some of them free, that you can experiment with on your book covers. This complete guide will help you how to choose a font for a book cover. The designer play with space: the emptiness creates the illusion of lightness for the origami butterfly. Color theory has long been studied and applied in everyday situations, from the best colors to paint a baby’s room to color schemes on a website. Here are a few tips to determining which font or fonts could work for you book: 1. “Garamond 10 pt bold” is a font. If you’re working with a good designer, they will have access to thousands of different fonts and can help you choose the right font for your book. Choosing the best font for the title and the author’s name projects your brand to the reader. Which Book Cover Font Is Right for Me? A recommendation that I made in my previous blog posts is to always look at the bestselling book covers in your genre. You don’t want them to compete. They also played with colors: the title is yellow which resembles light. Just because you are not likely to fonts, they still matter. When it comes to titles, size matters. With so many choices, narrowing down the right fonts can feel daunting. Make sure your font is free to use, or pay for the one you really … When you’ve found some options you like, type out your book’s title and your name in each font so that you can see how it will work for your particular project. Most professional designers do for non-fiction. Below the search bar, select the “Display” checkbox for title fonts. There are two different categories of typefaces: text or display. The title font … The very first thing that you need to consider when picking fonts for book cover design is the genre of your book. OK, now that’s settled, let’s dive into the font. Typography tends to suggest a certain genre, so choose wisely there as well. Whether on your spine or your cover, the first line of writing a reader sees is … And your mind takes that in before you’ve even read the title. You should not use more than 3 different fonts in a book and, if you did, at least they should belong to the same font family. There are thousands of fonts on the site. Learn more about publishing with Lulu here: http://bit.ly/2mjacZD Agonizing over the thousands of fonts to choose from for your print book? Its soft embellishments capture a traditional sensibility in a modern look. The main mistakes I see on homemade, DIY or cheap/amateur book layout are: 1. As the fastest growing digital format, distribute audiobooks to meet book listeners and increase your royalties. If all else fails, type out the name of a book you hate. When designing a book cover the font chosen needs to perform many jobs for the author, it should of course tell the reader what the title, subtitle and author’s name are along with the blurb, bio and (in some cases) quotes/testimonials upon the back page too. That answers how many fonts on a book cover. The black and white of fonts for book covers. As you already see from the examples above, no strict rules are defining the placement of the author and title. Not enough space between lines and between elements like the headers, footer, page edges, and titles. The Kawasaki cover is also simple: one typeface, two main colors, some italic. If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, all the Adobe fonts are free for commercial use. Normal: Book title. Font Selection: Does Your Type Have Character(s)? There are a variety of commercial fonts and sometimes you might have to purchase one, but free ones are out there too (which we list at the end of this read). Some of the biggest and most common mistakes include: That’s why I’m sharing the best book cover fonts for nonfiction books, with important tips on how to use them: so you won’t make this mistake on your book. As mentioned in our article on how to design a book cover, you want to hint at the general mood of your book using the cover. (Further down the article is a list of recommended choices.) It doesn’t have as wide a range of applications as our top 5, but on the right cover, it can be the perfect choice. In general, stick to 1 “fancy” or decorative font, and keep the other fonts very simple. They stretch or condense the spacing to balance the lettering across the cover, giving it the right “weight.”. Shorter titles need a wider font to sit comfortably in the frame. Mouse Memoirs by Astigmatic One Eye Typographic Institute. Book cover designers fall into the same patterns when choosing a color for covers. Display fonts are for titles, as opposed to text fonts, which are better for interior book design. Is your book a thriller? You may have spent hours searching for the perfect eye catching image for your cover, but the readability of your title is just as important. Which can really complicate your decision making, but it can also inform how you simplify the entire process. Graphic designers use shading and effects to give cover lettering the right artistic feel. Textbooks tend to use more complex fonts, projecting a collegiate feel. Make sure your font is free to use, or pay for the one you really need. Based on the cover, they have to be able to guess what to expect when opening your book, or it should be tempting enough to be interested in it. In the following, we help you to find the most beautiful book cover fonts by genre with great examples. Small, weightless words, like “the” is well played out with cursive or a different case. Because your subconscious mind sees everything visual as a conscious design choice that sends a specific signal. Everything about it says “clean,” “direct,” and “professional.”. There is an area where it's like you'd have to manipulate your font: the kerning. Libre Baskerville. The red used for the name does not match the main color scheme. Horror covers usually use dark backgrounds and “spiky” decorations, tall fonts, just like on the cover of the Palahniuk book. A cover font can be serif or sans-serif, modern or traditional, but it has to be eye-catching. A font is a typeface in a certain size and style. The Kevin Brockmeier book is an excellent example of the typeface being unnoticeable. We all know this. Us and Look Who’s Back are perfect examples of how a well-placed title and original typography can be the fundamental (or the only!) This complete guide will help you get started. Cookbooks, self-help books and academic anthologies all work well with sans-serif. How To Get Your Self-Published Book Into Bookstores (Complete Guide), What is Vanity Press? You want your short or long title to be legible even in a thumbnail. Don’t overdo it, though: if the font has some letters with additional drawing, it only looks good if the letter doesn’t repeat within the title (examples below). Font size is the most crucial factor in typesetting a book, but it can be tricky to get it just right. Subscribe to our newsletter and receive self-publishing news straight to your inbox. Or, if you haven’t chosen a font yet, there are plenty of font sites you can browse through. and can find the best fonts for each individual project. Good cover designers are also familiar with book marketing and will make sure your title and author name look great with the cover as a whole. The design of the foreground and background for the fiction book cover may become a devastating process. Like every other rule, there are exceptions, but when you need to guarantee results, a classic typeface will serve you best. They work best between 6pt and 14pt (points) and some fonts are designed to look better while displaying a message, creating a certain feeling or impression. Cocaine Sans is a great font that's free to use. Just browsing through these fonts and imagining them on a book cover helps give you a sense of how the fonts you choose influence the look and tone of your book. The 1001 fonts website is worth mentioning. It’s preloaded on just about every computer, but make sure you have a commercial use license before you use it on a book cover. Common Elements of the Best Book Title Fonts, The Best Book Cover Fonts For Nonfiction Books, Using text fonts instead of book title fonts, Not integrating the lettering into the book cover design, Applying the font straight “out of the can”, Making the font too small for the Amazon thumbnail. Designers use fonts every day for everything from body text to movie posters. Italics: Book title. With book cover fonts, however, there’s so much more. Test the Readability at Small Sizes. They understand font styles (thin, bold, narrow, condensed, etc.) Follow the genre. It's also important because poor kerning cause letters or even words to mess up. You can see this clearly with a few quick examples. The point size the designers use is between 9-12pts. You don’t want your body to be distinctive or st… This is true whether you are an author self-designing your cover or a book cover designer designing a book cover for a client. They put countless hours into writing a good book and then put almost no effort into the first thing people see: the cover, and specifically, the words on the cover. The font on the left is modern and professional. You get one chance to make a first impression. We already wrote about how important it is to get your book design right: first impressions count, as you might not get a second chance. The subscription itself is not free, but most designers have one. Commercial Free Only. The author’s name is almost unreadable due to the small spacing. Have your ebook, print-on-demand, or audiobook file corrected by publishing pros and distributed globally in just two days. The display version seems much lighter. It is free for private use but must purchase for commercial use. Book cover fonts can make or break your book cover, so you should choose carefully. If your search results in a link that leads to a different website, you’ll have to check that site for license information. Just because you have a font on your computer doesn’t mean you can use it on a cover. Fonts are a form of art and are protected by copyright. The Light Between Oceans shows the same font used for the author’s name as for the title. If you want to use a font on your cover, you have to get the right to use it. That’s what typography is: the artistic design of the letters themselves. Most fonts come with different weights, more than just simple bold or italic; if your font can’t do what you want from it, use a different one. Serif vs. Sans Serif These body fonts have been chosen for their clarity, readability, and friendly professional style. Finding fonts like … Font Family: Book Antiqua. To get you started, I’ve collected 5 great fonts for book cover … Adobe. Use black at your peril. How To Pick The Perfect Book Cover Font Choose a font that is associated with your genre or related content inside your book to show readers what it’s about. share royalties with PublishDrive, How The type of font you should use will largely depend on the genre that your book is written in. It has tons of great fonts, and you can type in your own title while searching to see how it would look. The best book cover fonts are clear sans serif. In the following, we show you great book cover examples where the uniqueness lies not in the selection per se, but in other typographic solutions. Most importantly, it needs to be chosen on purpose for that particular book. Consider fonts that have sister fonts within the same family (such as Monsterrat and Monsterrat Sans, or Roboto and Roboto Slab) as they have been designed specifically to work together. (But note that the rules are different for non-fiction book covers; more on this with examples later.). Look for fonts that have a wide variety of weights and styles so that you have plenty of option to play with contrast between headings and body copy. The font is just one of many page design considerations you must balance when creating your book interior. The revised covers, also published by Penguin, for classic titles such as Moby Dick use Wile, a lovely serif font with a clean, classic look:. to promote ebook with PublishDrive. In part 2, we cover comic book cover fonts, romance book cover fonts, sci-fi book cover fonts, fantasy book cover fonts, children’s book cover fonts, and a list of fonts we recommend for you. We go over what we’ve done so far in Q3 of 2020. 3. Book Cover Fonts. Every font is free to download! The most important thing is that the font you choose for your cover contributes to the emotional response you want to stimulate in readers. General rules for book cover fonts. Even the perfect cover font will look unprofessional unless it is worked into the overall design. Your cover needs to be visible in a thumbnail, on a mobile device. The least we can give is a simple rule: use sans-serif font. The first step to determining which font to use is how it stands up at smaller sizes. Do not use any effect either. As for font color choices, well, white, white, and white. The Google Fonts catalog includes some fonts that are not actually on the site. 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