How to Design, Print & Bind Your Own Book

If you're looking to save some money on your book layout and design, you'll probably opt to do it yourself from beginning to end. Perhaps, you're looking to make a book with those delicious family recipes that have passed from one generation to another or maybe need to make it as a design project for college or a client. Inexpensive and Elegant DIY Book & Booklet Printing Is not only possible, but easy to do! Whichever the reason you may have for wanting to print your own book, the final product will always be an original creation of yours, something nobody else has and that you'll value even more than any other product you can buy at stores. This is why we decided to show you how to create your own book design and print it properly, to look as pro as you wish.

1. Remember: It's All About Content

Choose your main theme and develop the information. You can create a book of almost anything you can imagine, but remember doing your research first. People may judge a book by its cover, but they keep reading it for its useful or interesting content.

• Divide your content into sections or chapters to separate main ideas, create an index that can help readers find a specific part in the book. Always include quotes and cite authors when you need to reference something you investigated.
• In cookbook and children's books add an extra touch with your personal tips or interesting sections for kids to learn.

2. Layout and Design

After the first step has been taken care of, you need to decide how you want to diagram your book, if you want full pages of content or pictures, combine both, use columns, to name a few items.

• You'll need to consider what type of pagination you want to use, depending on your content, you can choose from roman numbers to numerical, page according to chapters or only the right pages.
• There's also the pagination style factor in which you have to decide if you want to keep orphans and widows, which are those lines that appear lonely at the top or bottom of paragraphs. In case you don't want them around the result will be an uneven number of lines on each page, so you'll have to consider the alternatives.
• Then choose if you want the pages to have a background, theme or main design and include it before you put the content into the book layout.

3. Book Cover and Back Cover

Make an original design that represents the content of the book for your cover, it could be an illustration, picture, sculpture's photograph or anything you can imagine that actually draws attention to your product. For the back cover you can include a short text, teaser, description or an author's biography if you wish.

4. Printing like a Pro

Nowadays there are many options to make your work look professional. Choose a printing firm that offers a wide variety of printing and binding options that go accordingly to its thickness and type of paper of your choosing. (Check out these Free templates) From saddle-stich to wire-O biddings, the important thing is that you can print your own book in a way that fits its theme and content. For example, children's activity books can benefit from wire-O biddings, making it easier for kids to turn pages without causing any damage to the book or ripping its pages off.

• For a professional, historic or something directed to an adult audience, saddle-stick is highly recommended due to the actual book appearance, it'll give to your finished product, while side-stitch binding will look better for specialized magazines or lighter reading material.

Bonus tip: If you're not a professional designer and you are not familiarized with conventional design softwares, there are many online apps and softwares that can make the whole process of design easier for beginners, and some of them even combine word processors and book layout in one. Choose the one that adapts to your particular needs before starting, because they tend to have very limited features. Are you planning on publishing your book or is a personal project? Let us know how your process went. We'd love to help you and see the results.