Questions About Formatting Epistolary Elements

My WIP is a novel written in the form of a memoir, and about 25% of it is in the form of epistolary elements (letters, notes, news articles, radio transcripts, etc.)

I have formatted it so that the narrative portions (the majority of the book) are in a serif font with first-line indented paragraphs, while the interspersed epistolary pieces are in a sans serif with block paragraphs. Note, the majority of these are not written letters but "published" pieces, news items, etc. On the whole this works really well, but as dictated by the story there is a lot of it in the third act.


Questions:

"Too many fonts" is a big no-no from a design standpoint. Would serif for narrative sections and a complimentary sans serif for epistolary elements be considered too many fonts?

Sans serif is considered less easy to read. Is having the majority of the third act in sans serif going to be too much?

Should I rely on format at all to call out the epistolary sections?

Al X. said:

I do not know the answer to that, but, since you are bringing this up in the self-publishing forum, are you talking about an ebook, or a paperback POD edition? Fonts are generally beyond your control anyway in an ebook (unless you embed them, which is generally inadvisable.)

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Paperback edition.

You make a good (perhaps unintentional?) point that I would not have much luck relying on formatting to call out the epistolary elements in the ebook version.

lizmonster said:

No idea if this is helpful, but: I'm writing a book that's half epistolary. The non-epistolary chapters have ordinary chapter headings. The epistolary chapters are only labeled with the recipient's name and a date. I use the same font for everything. I've had a few betas, and FWIW nobody's mentioned confusion.

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I had popped an earlier version up on Google Docs for beta critiques (no formatting differentiating narrative v epistolary) and there was no confusion there, either. Hmm.

But as for chapters, mine are a mix of narrative and epistolary. The epistolary parts do have headings, though.