TYPOGRAPHY, or: the part of your book submission you're probably not thinking about enough

No matter how smart your reader is, the typography of your submission will have a *huge* impact on their reading comprehension. Let's dive into an old-school ad design book to learn why.

Unless you work in advertising, fundraising, or graphic design, you’ve probably never heard of this book:

Hell, you might not have heard of it even if you do.

The last, crappy reprint of this once-iconic typography bible came out in 2005, ten years after the final non-crappy edition. And while its advice is by no means obsolete today, I imagine it will strike professional typographic designers under the age of 75 as rather narrow and obvious—especially if they design for mobile web.

Do you know who does not fall into that category, though? Me. And I imagine most of you. What you and I are trying to do here is get book publishing professionals to read and fall in love with our manuscript pages when they read them on a Kindle, Supernote, or printed stack of paper. Our goal is simple: see our words bound into the codex of a commercially published book. Ours is exactly the demo for which Colin Wheildon intended his book: people who want to maximize interest in and engagement with their print writing.

You need to read this book ASAP if you’re an author who’s never thought seriously about typography. If you are not the sort of person who would, say, observe with pleasure upon opening a Substack newsletter the various research-based Best Font Practices the platform’s incorporated—sans serif headings, serif body text, 150% line spacing, simple black-on-white contrast—you will find this book revelatory.

It turns out typography makes a huge HUGE impact on whether and how closely people engage with longform writing. HUGE.

HUGE!

Here’s a little background on this book. (No, this is not sponcon.)

A former editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, Wheildon opened a typography business late in his career. He had learned a lot of general typography rules over the years, but when he tried to suss out where they came from in the first place, he discovered something disturbing: no one had ever tested them with any kind of methodological rigor. The industry consensus on what constituted “good type” had been shaped by little more than a few centuries of influential typographers’ fee-fees.

Mr. Wheildon said he would gather the data himself. After consulting with academics at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of New South Wales to make sure he structured his research as a credentialed scholar would, he assembled a random sample of several hundred Australians. He then spent years assigning these people texts in various formats and typefaces, assessing their relative reading comprehension after each.

Wheildon started these studies in 1982. A cursory googlin’ tells me that scholars have conducted many similar studies in the intervening decades, especially in the era of Big Social Media Newsfeed. Why am I not posting about those? Why am I focusing today on research that is three years older than I am?

Here’s why: Wheildon actually measured his subjects’ reading comprehension, whereas the newer studies I’ve found seem to think they could get away with just measuring the movement of subjects’ eyeballs. For instance, one such study I found measured how many times subjects’ eyes “regressed”—that is, went backward—while reading a text. They interpreted such regression as a sign of poor comprehension and reader engagement.

Dr. Anna, PhD suspects this approach is hooey. My neurotypical ass only regresses like that when I want to comprehend something, sinking into what I’m reading vs. skipping across its surface like a water bug. So we’re going to stick with Wheildon, the OG.

TYPE & LAYOUT, Wheildon’s book, is essentially a padded-out results paper. You can read it in less than an hour. If you’re anything like me, you will be fully screaming from the sheer density of truth bombs as of about minute ten.

Turns out each one of the decisions one can make in a Word toolbar—font, justification, spacing, etc.—has an enormous impact on reader engagement and comprehension.

If you’re submitting a book or proposal, you can’t afford to hemorrhage readers like this. There has of course never been a time in publishing history when doing so was the goal. Still, I’m willing to bet there was also never a time in history when editors’ and agents’ attention spans were quite so fragile as they are now.

At this point in the year of our Lord 2022, I for one need whatever longform material I read to be lightning-rod riveting. Otherwise, I can’t focus at all: too many brain worms. And just about every other editor or agent I’ve talked to is in the same boat. We’re exhausted, distracted, and desperately rationing our chi for our existing professional commitments.

If I read a submission and feel a migraine coming on or my life force evacuating my body, I’m out. I have to be. There are just too many other things I have to get done. And you can go ahead and assume I speak for the entire industry on that front.

It is officially imperative that you not fuck around and find out with book submission typography.

Follow the formatting rules below, and follow them HARD. None of them are Wheildon’s originally, but he’s who gathered the data to back ‘em up: