Slush report #4
10 o'clock, January 23, 2004
As of last night, 43 submissions, 245,000 words. Less peeved by the continued appearance of Times New Roman (which seems to be approaching the status of an “alternative” standard MS format, despite its inferior readability, probably on account of having pretty close to the same word count as Courier when spaced widely enough) than by the one or two people who have not only used non-standard formatting but neglected to provide a word count.
Just to be clear, none of these MSS are going to be read, let alone accepted or rejected, until late February. And everything that gets in by the deadline (February 16th) will be on an equal footing. (For that matter, if it’s postmarked February 16th and gets in by Thursday the 19th, it’ll probably still make it.) So if you haven’t submitted anything to us yet, there’s still plenty of time.
A friend of mine says that studies have shown that the most readable typeface is the one you're most familiar with.
There are actually editors who ask for subs in Times, and who actively object to Courier. I sympathize with your dislike of Times for such things, but I think it's tough for writers these days—they can no longer just print out one copy of a story and keep sending it around, they have to have copies in different typefaces for different editors.... And a lot of editors (unlike you) don't say what typeface to use.
Note that Vonda's article was last updated seven years ago; my impression is that there's been a shift in editorial typeface desires during the past decade (perhaps boosted by the growing ubiquity of high-quality printers). Although a lot of editors seem reluctant to talk about the question, what I think I've heard most often from editors is that they don't care what the typeface is as long as it's easily readable.
Back in '95 or so, I saw the MS of a long novel by a major author; iIrc, it was printed out entirely in Helvetica, which I felt made it hard to read but was apparently the font this author always used.