How to plan the font size in a fiction?

Question

I have planned my book to be around 250 pages. Because that is my target audience. In my country I can sell the book of that length for around 250-300 rupees. (*Its just my plan, I don't know yet how will it work out in reality). I have finished 80 pages which is the complete rough draft of my book. My ending is reached, now I am just going to fill in the blanks with major plots. Its still a meaningful writing.

I want to ask, what should be my font size? If my novel is 250 pages on hard copy then it means I should have written 500 pages on a word document. I am writing with font size 14 and font of Calibri...15 words/line...28 lines per page...(In case I am fortunate...) Will the publisher change this? What should be the font parameters for fiction of that length?

Answer 1

Assuming you aren't self-publishing, all concerns about the font-size and typography belong to the final publisher (unless you're playing fancy games with fonts, which is rare, and probably not a good idea for most authors). Instead of worrying about pages, you should focus on word count. 50,000 is generally considered the bare minimum for a viable novel (for adults), with more novels averaging 75-100K words. Longer than 125K can be problematic, particularly for an unproven author.

The reasons are all economic. Readers often feel cheated if a novel is too short, and are less likely to buy a slim novel, but a lot of the costs of producing a book that short are the same as producing a longer book. On the other end of things, there's an upper limit to how much people will pay for a book, no matter how long, and the cost of raw materials starts to pile up. And while some people are drawn to ultra-long books, other people are turned off by them.

As far as your manuscript itself, the standard is still 12pt Times New Roman, double spaced, 1 inch margins. The usual estimate is 250 words/page for 12pt double-spaced, which makes 250 typewritten pages a good target to shoot for (about 62,500 words). But all modern word processing programs will count words for you. If you'd rather estimate words by page that's up to you, but the number of pages in your manuscript really means nothing other than the word count it represents