Setting a long title without shrinking it
Short titles are easy to set. Two or three strong words go large, centered, done. A nine-word title is a different job, and most authors solve it the same wrong way within about thirty seconds of opening a design tool.
Smaller is the wrong direction
The instinct is to reduce the title until the whole thing sits on one line. It fits. It also now fails the only test that matters, because a cover is first seen at the size of a postage stamp in a store listing, and a single long line of small type at that size is a gray smudge. See The thumbnail test.
There is a second cost. Shrink the title far enough and it stops being the loudest thing on the cover — the author name, the image, even the series line start to win. A title that has lost the hierarchy fight is worse than a title that takes three lines.
Keep the type large. Give it more lines. Everything below is a way of buying room without paying for it in size.
Break the lines by sense, not by width
Layout software breaks a line wherever the next word runs out of room. Readers break a line wherever the phrase ends. When those two disagree, the title reads as a stumble.
Take a title like The Quiet Hours Before the Storm. Broken by width you get The Quiet Hours Before / the Storm, which strands a preposition and an article at the ends of the lines. Broken by sense you get The Quiet Hours / Before the Storm. Same words, same size, and the second one reads in two clean beats.
The working rules:
- Keep an article with its noun. A line that ends on the, a or an dangles.
- Keep a preposition with the phrase it introduces. Before belongs to the Storm, not to Hours.
- Never split a name. A first and last name stay on one line, always.
- Read each line aloud. If a line is not something you would say as a unit, move the break.
Vary the size inside the title
Not every word in a title is doing the same work. Nouns and verbs carry the meaning. A, the, of and and are grammar, and they can be set much smaller — often less than half the size of the key words — without losing a thing.
This is the single biggest gain available to you. The small words drop into the gaps, the important words stay big, and the title occupies far less area than it did. Set on its own tucked short line, a small of is invisible as a problem and reads as a decision.
Two or three sizes is the working range. Beyond that the title starts to look like a ransom note.
Close up the leading
Default line spacing is built for paragraphs of reading-size text. At display size it leaves canyons between the lines, and a title with canyons in it reads as three separate things rather than one.
Tighten the leading until the lines feel like a single block — at large sizes that often means lines close enough that an ascender nearly touches the descender above it. Then check for actual collisions: a g on one line hitting a cap on the next. Fix that one line rather than reopening the whole block.
Use the full width you have
Long titles are usually set in a timid column down the middle of the cover with air wasted on both sides. The safe area runs about 0.25 inch inside the trim, and a line may run right up to it.
Aim for lines of roughly equal length. Because your words are different lengths, that means adjusting size line by line until the block looks square-edged — a short line set slightly larger, a long line slightly smaller. Judge it by eye, not by the numbers.
In the Cover Maker. The title is live vector text you can break into lines and size line by line, with trim, bleed and safe-area guides drawn live so you can see exactly how far a line may run before it is at risk. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Consider a condensed face
A condensed cut gives you narrower letterforms at the same cap height. That is real width, bought without losing any visible size, and for a long title it is often the difference between three lines and two.
A true condensed face is drawn that way, with the stroke weights and counters redrawn to suit the narrower shape. That is not the same as squashing a normal face, which is covered below. Many families ship a condensed cut — check the one you already chose before going looking, and see Pairing typefaces on a cover.
The subtitle is a separate problem
A subtitle is not more title. It belongs in its own block, smaller, with clear separation from the title above it — white space, a rule, a color change, or a quieter face.
For nonfiction the subtitle carries the promise. It is frequently the line that decides the sale, and it must stay readable, which means it cannot be squeezed into whatever strip is left over. If it will not fit at a size a reader can actually read, the fix is editorial: shorten the subtitle. Twelve words that nobody reads are worth less than six that they do. See Choosing a title that can be found and remembered.
Four things not to do
Do not hyphenate. Breaking a word across two lines is normal inside a paragraph and wrong on a cover. Move the break to a word boundary.
Do not curve or arc the title. Text on a curve is harder to read at every size, and it is one of the fastest ways to make a new book look like it was made in 1998.
Do not stretch or squash the letterforms. Horizontal scaling thins the vertical strokes and thickens the horizontals. Readers cannot name what is wrong, but they see that something is.
Do not shrink the title until the author name competes. The title reads first. If the name is winning, the answer is to make the name smaller, not the title.
Then check the result small, before anything else — that is the view most readers will ever give it.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Typography and hierarchy · More: The thumbnail test · Pairing typefaces on a cover · Bleed and safe area, explained once