Novel How long was your first novel?

No. Most publishers prefer a fixed width serif font. Courier or Courier New are often mentioned. Timnes New Roman is a proportional width serif font, meaning that narrower characters are packed closer together. Proportional fonts are preferred for published works, but a fixed width font makes it easier to spot (and mark) mistakes.

Compare Times New Roman:

with Courier New:

The extra letters are easier to spot in the Courier New sample, and easier to mark with a red pen in hardcopy.Times New Roman is also more cramped at the same point size than the Courier family of fonts.

 

My first manuscript, which I thought would be long enough for a novel, turned out to be only about 40,000 words long. I had no sense of word estimation back then. The story was terrible, too. I never even tried to get it published.