I took a break from editing today to look at fonts for the cover. I made the mistake of starting with dafont.com because they have a lot of fonts there. I mean a lot. As near as I can tell they have about 700 billion fonts on that site. Every time I found one I liked, and bookmarked it, I would find another that I liked even better. I also like the features of that site because you can browse by theme (such as Sci-Fi), and you can enter your sample text (like your title) and it will display page after page of typeface goodness. Hours of fun. Too many hours. Seriously, I’ve got editing to do.
So of course I had to download a few and play around with them a bit. I really like this Infinium Guardian font (at left), although I may need to tweak it a bit to improve readability. I also like this one called Gears of Peace – it’s a bit cleaner. I can’t decide. Choosing a font is like choosing a genre because the font combined with the cover image is going to suggest a genre to the reader. And what if I pick the wrong combination? It will either be confusing, or the reader will feel cheated if they buy a political thriller and discover it’s actually Sci-Fi. Despite what some may think, it is by no means fool-proof. Somehow I need to find a way to bend or blend the genres. I’ll work on it. Right after I’m done editing.