Among the many choices that I had to make in preparing my novel for publication, choosing the font was not one I expected. But then I received the first proof copy of Digital Dick in the mail. Holding in my hands that first, real book with my name on it validated my efforts over the previous seven years. I was an author now! I had the book to prove it.

But the text was not very dark. It wasn’t horrible, but it seemed a bit light. I emailed my book’s interior designer. I emailed Create Space.

My interior book designer sent me several other fonts that might be darker, but wouldn’t impact the page count much. If the page count changed significantly, I’d have to redo the cover for the paperback because the spine width depends on the page count. Oh, and my interior designer was booked up and wouldn’t be able to get to my revision until days ahead of my book launch. What to do?

After sending Create Space photos of the text, they responded as follows:

“… our Technical Services Team found that the text in the interior file is not set to 100% black.  To ensure that book text appears as true black in final printed form, the text color in your file needs to be set to “Black,” re-uploaded to our website, and finally, resubmitted for review.”

My book’s interior designer had a colleague check the file. It was set to 100% Black. And, a hole had opened up in her work schedule. She could work on my book immediately.

My book launch: T minus 3 weeks. I bit the bullet and asked my book designer to use Minion Pro, a different font that looked darker to me when I printed out text in a Word document. My designer sent me the revised file later that same day. I uploaded it to Create Space. And waited. Would this be the final proof?

Yes! The Minion Pro font came out darker. It looked great.

I ordered books.