For when you need a pause or a shift in your narrative.
When you need to indicate a pause, a passage of time, or a scene change within a chapter of your book use a paragraph separator. This is a visual cue to your reader that something has changed. A paragraph separator can be as simple as an extra line space between two paragraphs, a series of three or four asterisks (*) separated by an em or en space, or they can be a little more graphic with the use of an ornament.
Margaret Turner Taylor's latest book, Traveling Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is a historical fiction spy thriller set in WWII Germany. When choosing an ornament to use for paragraph separation in this book I chose the ornament below that also seems representative of the style of the subject matter.
Ornaments are like little Easter eggs hidden within many common fonts. To find them you'll need to view the full set of characters, known as glyphs, contained within the font. If you have a layout program such as Adobe InDesign the ornaments can be found in the glyphs panel. In Microsoft Word they can be found in the Insert > Symbol menu.
For the ornament used in Margaret's book I used a font that I purchased called Type Embellishments Two. This set, as well as Type Embellishments One, is made up only of ornaments. I love scrolling through them to choose just the right look for the book that I'm working on. Below is a sampling of some of the ornaments found in this typeface as well as some that you will find hidden in common fonts that may already live on your computer.
Without some direction, your designer has to make assumptions about what they think you will like. Sometimes it works out and you get a cover that is acceptable, but more often than not, without a proper set of expectations and guidelines, it misses the mark and they have to go back to the drawing board and begin again. This can be frustrating to both the author and designer as it inevitably adds more time and cost to the project.
