Bob the poetry intern again, this time with my graphic designer’s hat on. (I got lots more hats, so we’ll see how many I get to wear before issue 23 comes out.) I am filing this under “Submission Guidelines” even though what I’m about to say is really more “advice” than “guidelines.” You might not consider typeface an important consideration when sending in manuscripts, but it really is.
Consider the following scenario: a large pile of manuscripts on a table with a bunch of student volunteers reading them. One reader might be on page 2 and say “I’ve read this sentence five times and it still doesn’t make any sense.” Hypothetical reader then votes “no” on hypothetical manuscript, and moves on to the next. Now imagine that the manuscript in question is really the perfect story, the piece that would help our hypothetical literary review draw together all the disparate elements they’ve collected into a cohesive whole. In other words, by voting no, our reader has caused a catastrophe for the magazine as well as the submitter. Is this a case of an overworked student getting tripped up in a sentence that is beautifully intricate but extraordinarily dense? Possibly. But more likely, the culprit is a bad typeface.
There is a science and an art to typography, and while I’m not going to bore you with the details, I did want to give a few pointers:
- Kill the Courier—Many of the manuscripts we receive are set in Courier New. Courier New typeface is known as a “Typewriter” or “Fixed Width” font, because—amazingly—each character is the same width. It is easy to read in short bursts, which is part of the reason Courier New is the industry standard for screenplays, with their snappy dialogue and sparse descriptions. However, in prose, Courier New is bulky, hard to read, and (and this is a highly technical term:) butt ugly. If you’re sending us a screenplay (I don’t know why you’d send one in, it’s not really our line, but if you do, we’ll take a look) then by all means, set it in Courier New. Otherwise, get with the Times.
- Get with the Times: Times New Roman, 12 pt, double spaced. Yes, I know it looks boring. It looks just like every paper you ever wrote in college. There’s a reason it’s an academic standard: it is eminently readable. Professors who have to read dozens or hundreds of papers in a very short time don’t want to see how pretty your paper is set in a decorative typeface, they want to read it quickly, grade it, and move on to the next one. Readers for literary magazines have an almost identical goal. Times New Roman is designed to be an invisible face. Readers do not even notice it, but can instead focus on the words. The fact that it is boring is it’s greatest strength.
Well, that’s all for now, so until next time,
Happy Writing!
Your article was very well-written and made sense. I just assumed that everyone writing sends out material printed in Times New Roman 12 pt.
Thanks.
I agree that Times is much better than courier. However, do realize that many fiction markets used to require courier – some may yet. I think it gives them a better sense of how much space it will ultimately take on their page than any other font.
You get lots of courier submissions because courier has been the standard submission font not because the writers want to hurt your eyes with an ugly font.
Thanks for your insightful comment, Jonathan. I am relatively new to the publishing “game” and had not considered what standards may have existed in the past.
However, I can say with regard to last year’s edition of BMR, that one manuscript page (in Times, 12 pt, double spaced) tended to come out to around 7/8 of a page in the final edition. In other words, converting a MSS set in Times to our layout standards slightly decreased the number of pages. Since Courier is a much wider font than Times, this reduction in pages is actually greater for a Courier MSS than a Times one. In case you’re wondering, one manuscript page in Courier will come out to about 2/3 of a page. A 32 page Times MSS will be about 28 pages in the final release; while 32 pages in Courier will shrink to just over 21 pages when the book goes to press (at least that’s how it worked out with BMR issue 22).
Since modern typesetting programs make it easy to move text around, knowing the exact number of pages a story will take up is not as important as it would have been in the days of the linotype. Therefore, the font a submitter chooses has very little impact on the production process.
For any potential submitters out there who may be reading this, Jonathan has brought up a good point: it is important to know the submissions guidelines of whoever you’re sending work to and follow them precisely. However, most places (BMR included) do not have a required typeface. In that case, it is highly recommended that you have a care for your readers’ eyes and “get with the Times.”