Font choice is where most first books lose a day and gain nothing, because the question is approached as taste when it is mostly constraint. A book has to be read for hours, its file has to be legal to distribute, and its type has to survive being embedded in a PDF and packaged into an EPUB. Those three requirements rule out most of the fonts you were considering, and what is left is a short list of good answers.
The body face does almost all the work
Ninety-five per cent of the words in a book are set in one typeface at one size. That face is the book, visually. The title font is a hat.
For prose, choose a serif. The reasons are older than screens and still hold on paper: serifs give each word a recognisable shape, and a page of them forms an even grey texture that the eye moves across without effort. Sans-serifs are fine for instructional writing, workbooks and anything read in short bursts. For a novel, a memoir or a long argument, a serif is the default and departing from it needs a reason.
Within serifs, look for a text face rather than a display face. Text faces have sturdy strokes, moderate contrast between thick and thin, and open counters — the spaces inside letters like *e* and *a*. Display faces, the ones that look wonderful at 60pt on a cover, have hairline strokes that vanish at 11pt and counters that fill in when printed.
- Lora — warm, slightly calligraphic, very forgiving. A safe first choice for fiction.
- Literata — designed for long reading on screens, and it shows. Good for a PDF that will mostly be read on a laptop.
- Source Serif — plain, clear, a little formal. Suits non-fiction.
- EB Garamond — the classic book face. Beautiful, but its small x-height means you will need to set it larger than you expect.
- Crimson Pro — a Garamond-adjacent face with a slightly larger x-height, which fixes the previous problem.
x-height changes the size you need
Point size measures the body the letters sit on, not the letters. What the eye reads as "size" is mostly the x-height — how tall the lowercase letters are relative to the capitals. Two faces at 11pt can look a full point apart.
This matters because the usual advice — 10 to 12 point for body text — is only true for a face with an average x-height. A small-x-height face like Garamond wants 11.5 or 12 to read as comfortably as Lora at 10.5. Setting Garamond at 10 because a guide said 10 to 12 is how you get the "why does my book look tiny" problem.
| Face | x-height | Set body at | Line height |
|---|---|---|---|
| EB Garamond | Small | 11.5–12.5pt | 1.35–1.4 |
| Crimson Pro | Small-ish | 11–12pt | 1.4 |
| Lora | Average | 10.5–11.5pt | 1.4–1.45 |
| Source Serif | Average | 10.5–11.5pt | 1.4–1.45 |
| Literata | Large | 10–11pt | 1.45–1.5 |
Line height follows the same logic in the other direction: a large-x-height face fills more of its line, so it needs a little more space between lines to keep the paragraph from looking dense. The numbers above are starting points, not rules. Set them, export a page, and look at it printed.
One title face, chosen for contrast
The title face is where a display font belongs. It appears at large sizes, a few times a book, and its job is to be recognisably different from the body without fighting it.
Contrast is the whole principle. A geometric sans over a humanist serif works. A high-contrast Didone like Playfair over a workhorse serif like Lora works. Two serifs that are almost the same — Lora headings over Source Serif body — reads as an error, because the reader can see a difference and cannot tell whether you meant it.
| Title | Body | Feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Playfair Display | Lora | Literary fiction, memoir |
| Inter | Lora | Modern non-fiction |
| Montserrat | Source Serif | Business, how-to |
| Cormorant Garamond | Crimson Pro | Poetry, essays |
| Inter Bold | Inter | Manuals, workbooks — one family, two weights |
The last row is worth taking seriously. One family in two weights is the pairing you cannot get wrong, and for anything instructional it is often the best answer, not a compromise.
A subtitle, if the book has one, takes the body face in italic or the title face at a smaller size. It does not take a third family. Three is where books start to look like ransom notes, and the fourth is never justified.
Licensing decides more than you would like
A font is software, and the licence says what you may do with it. For a book there are two things you need it to allow: embedding the font in a PDF, and packaging it inside an EPUB that you sell. These are not the same permission, and a licence can grant one without the other.
- Open Font Licence (OFL) — what nearly everything on Google Fonts is under. Embedding, packaging, selling the book: all permitted. The one thing you cannot do is sell the font itself. For self-publishing this is the licence that removes the question entirely.
- Desktop licences — what you get with a purchased font or one bundled with an operating system. Usually cover printing and PDF embedding. Often do *not* cover EPUB, which is treated as a web or app use and needs a separate licence.
- System fonts — the ones already on your computer. Their licences vary by operating system and are frequently the most restrictive of all. Georgia and Calibri are not yours to ship inside an ebook.
If in doubt, use an OFL face. The quality argument against Google Fonts was true ten years ago and is not now; Lora, Literata, Source Serif and Crimson Pro are all there, and all were drawn by people who knew what a book is.
bukpress bundles four families on every plan — Inter, Lora, Playfair and Montserrat — and lets you pull any Google Fonts family into your library on Essentials and above. Uploading a .ttf or .otf you have licensed yourself is on Pro. Whatever you pick is embedded in the PDF and packaged into the EPUB, which is why the licence has to allow both.
Embedding, and why it is not optional
A PDF that references a font rather than carrying it will be rendered in whatever the reader's computer substitutes. The line breaks move, the page count changes, and your carefully chosen Crimson Pro becomes Times. Why your PDF looks wrong on someone else's computer covers the mechanism; the short version is that embedding is not a nice-to-have, it is what makes the file a book rather than a suggestion.
Most tools embed by default now. Check anyway, once, by opening the exported PDF on a machine that does not have the font installed. If it looks the same, you are done.
A working method
- Decide whether the book is prose or instruction. Prose gets a serif body; instruction may take a sans.
- Pick a text serif from the list above. Do not audition twenty. Pick one, set a chapter in it.
- Set the size by x-height, using the table, and the line height with it.
- Export a page and print it. Adjust the size by half a point if it is wrong. It will be wrong by half a point.
- Pick one title face that contrasts clearly. If nothing obvious presents itself, use the body face in bold and move on.
- Confirm both licences permit PDF embedding and EPUB packaging.
- Save the combination so the next book does not start from zero.
That whole process fits in an afternoon, and most of the afternoon is step four. For the six other decisions a page needs — measure, margins, hierarchy and the rest — book typography for people who are not typographers has the numbers. If you want to see the pairings applied rather than described, the sample book is eight pages set in two of them.