Manuscript fonts for MG

[jonny_555]

Hi gang,

Hope someone knows the answer to this question!

You get books like those by Roald Dahl, David Walliams, or Cressida Cowell (or many other MG authors) where the text on each page varies. For example.

Little Roger was ANGRY! He started to hyperventilate. _{Low breath}. Normal breath. ^{High breath}. And then . . . W-A-A-A-A-A-A-H!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes they add handwritten words, crayon scribbled words, anything really. How is this put through in a manuscript though? Do they send normal TNR 12-font for it all?

[MegTravelz]

I don't have an answer for this, I'm just highly impressed you managed to get the fonts to appear like that 
I'd forgotten books do this!

[littlewritings]

As far as I know, things like fonts and font sizes are decided by the publisher. When it's just the basic manuscript, I usually use italics to indicate something looks different, e.g. when my characters are texting. (In YA in particular, that sometimes gets turned into a graphic that looks like actual text bubbles, or it'll get formatted differently.)

But like MKWrites_318 said, at the querying stage it's mostly about readability, so I wouldn't recommend playing around with fonts and font sizes. That's something that can be brought up once the book has sold.

[jonny_555]

Thank you gang

I will trust the agent's vision in this case and hope they can see where the words can be all prettied up. These sort of books tend to sit between 20k and 40k in length, which is spread out nicely into a 300 page novel with drawings and things like that. I'm not an artist though so might not help my cause. I know you still get many MG books without drawings.

For those who wanted to see a real life example, check this link out (scroll a couple of pages in): https://issuu.com/childrensbooks/docs/ice_monster_-_chapter_1