Formatting Paranormal Romance

Due to popular demand, this week we're looking at paranormal romance. We've changed the questions around a bit and are now looking at:

• Format of book (size of book in inches).
• Indents (depth of indent on first line of new paragraph).
• Chapter headings (whether the books used just numbers or titles as well).
• Headers (whether the book has a header at the top of a page).

To do this, we looked at a randomized selection of paranormal romance. Normally we'd want to look at 100 or so titles published by the major publishing houses. This week though, we've had to limit ourselves to 50 books. Still, there are some clear messages we can glean from the sample.

Format Size

Paranormal Romance titles seem to be smaller on the whole than other genres. 56% in our sample were 4.1" by 6.8". 26% were 4.25" by 7". These two formats combined fall within the scope of 'mass market paperback'. 14% were 5.06" by 7.81". This would be a traditional B format. 4% in our sample were traditional trade paperbacks, or 6" by 9". 

This poses some issues for self-published authors, who on the whole stood out for their larger book sizes. CreateSpace (one of the most popular print on demand services) does not offer mass market paperback as a size. IngramSpark does (4" x 6", 4" x 7", 4.25" x 7”), but they charge a setup fee. The most practical option, to fit in with the majority of traditionally published paranormal romance, would be to opt for 5.06" by 7.81".

First Line Indents

Next we wanted to look how the paranormal romance books used indenting. In particular, in this case, we looked at the depth of the indent on the first line of each new paragraph. 84% of the books used an indent of approximately 0.15". 12% used 0.2" and 4% used 0.25". Unsurprisingly, the larger indent sizes correlated with the larger formats. 

As is normal, 100% of those books sampled did not indent the first line of a paragraph when there was a space between them (for example with a scene change).

Chapter Titles

As in previous weeks, we wanted to see whether paranormal romance authors used chapter titles (ie. “Deception”, “Turning Point” etc…), or just numbers (ie. Chapter 31, 31, #31, Chapter Thirty-One etc…). The results here were overwhelmingly in one direction. 100% of those books sampled (we are very wary about ever going 100% with such a matter of taste) used numbers without any other title or name given to the chapter. You can compare this to the fantasy genre where 53% of books give names to their chapters.

Headers

We also looked to see if headers ran across the tops of pages. Previously we'd found 49.5% of general fiction had headers. With paranormal romance this was way different. 76% of our sample had headers.

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