I'm working on a cover design for my WIP novel. I want to, of course, impart something about the story with the titling font. No Helvetica Narrow Italic for me, nosiree! I'm using GIMP (an Open Source Software alternative to Photoshop; use this if you need such a thing), and it uses system-available fonts (e.g. fonts that are already installed on my system). Nothing there suited my fancy just right, so I went in search of something new. I landed on 1001Fonts, and what a treasure trove it is. Of course, there are dozens of font websites out there, but what I liked about this one is you can put a string of text in the site app and it presents the fonts using that text. So I put in my title and voila: All the fonts I liked happened to be free for commercial use. Click the "Download" button on the right and it grabs a zip file, which contains the necessary TTF (TrueType Font) or OTF (OpenType Font) files, as well as a license description telling you how you can use it. I'm excited about my new font capabilities. Now just to have the mettle to avoid over-using them...
I got some fonts from there, and few other places. Sure opened up my Font potential options immensely. Though you have to check the .txt file, so you know whether you can use it for a Book Title or not, cause some require a license fee first. Happy fonting.
Being a bit of a font fanatic, I have checked out 1001 Fonts and several other on-line sites that offer "free" fonts. Some are more open than others about the actual licensing for the individual fonts. What I have found is that most of the ones I like are free for personal use, but not free for commercial use (which would include using them to typeset a book or a cover for potential sale). In the end, after having downloaded a metric boatload of "free" fonts, I ended up deleting them all from my system rather than risk using a personal-only font for a commercial purpose by mistake. Instead, I purchased a collection of fonts from a German company, SoftMaker. The collection is called MegaFont Now and it includes 7,500 fonts, ALL licensed for commercial use. Most (or all) of them also include web fonts, which means they can be used to create web sites. (I didn't know until recently that, technically, the fonts that come with Windows are not licensed for use on a web site.) MegaFont Now sells for $39.99. It also includes a font manager program (app) to help you avoid being overwhelmed by the proliferation of fonts you get. You can get a quick look at all the fonts on their web site at https://www.softmaker.com/en/megafont Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way with Softmaker. I discovered them when I was looking for a freeware office suite to replace Microsoft Office. I had tried Libre Office and didn't like it, so I went looking for alternatives. SoftMaker has an office suite -- and they also have this font collection.
I made sure the fonts I used (from 1001fonts or FontSquirrel or whomever) were available for commercial use. You can narrow your search parameters to restrict for that. I also got very careful or very overly-elegant and included an "About the Fonts" page at the back of the book.
