I always thought if you gave a title and then said "by" and gave the author or creator's name, that "by" was lower case. However, lately I've been seeing it capitalized. Is there any hard and fast rule for this?
You can use upper and lower case any way you want. Many authors prefer using all upper case for their title and by-line.
This is half true. If you are using mixed case, you should not be capitalizing by, any more than you would write it as bY. Although you can opt to use all caps or all lowers, if you use mixed case you should follow standard capitalization rules.
I was speaking more from an artistic standpoint. I do agree, from the professional end of writing, you want to present yourself in a specific way. What I was getting at with my original post was that the title and by-line can be modified in any way to best suit the piece of work it is attached to, much the same as font and size. A perfect example of this is published novels that use newspaper clippings, numbers in place of letters, or even alternating upper and lower case letters to create attraction to their cover or title.
i've never seen a pro use all-caps for the by line... and i doubt any would... lower case 'by' is the mandated standard for submitted mss, though a publisher may opt to do something different on the printed book, for styling reasons... u/l case is also the standard for ms titles... the only mss i see having titles typed in all-caps are by new writers, who don't know any better...
