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Binding a booklet at home is easier than it sounds and harder than it looks. The folding and stapling take twenty minutes. Getting the pages to come out in the right order, and the block to sit flat instead of fanning open like a deck of cards, is where the craft is. This walks through the method most people should start with, then the alternatives.
What you need
- A long-arm stapler, sometimes sold as a saddle stapler or booklet stapler. A normal desk stapler cannot reach the middle of a folded page. Around twenty pounds or dollars, and it is the one purchase worth making.
- A bone folder, or the back of a butter knife. It gives you a sharp crease instead of a soft one.
- A metal ruler and a craft knife, if you plan to trim.
- Paper. Text weight for the interior, 24 lb or 90 gsm is comfortable. Card stock for the cover, 65 to 80 lb.
Optional but useful: a bulldog clip to hold the block while you work, and a scrap of soft eraser, for a reason that will make sense in a minute.
The saddle stitch, step by step
Saddle stitch is the fold-and-staple method, and it is what almost every chapbook you have held was made with. Despite the name, no stitching is involved. It suits anything from eight to about forty-eight pages.
Step 1: Get the page count right
Your total page count must divide by four. One sheet folded in half is four pages. There is no way around this, so if you have twenty-two pages of poems, you have a twenty-four page book with two blanks in it, and that is fine.
Step 2: Impose the pages
This is the step people skip, and then wonder why their booklet reads out of order. When the sheets are folded together, the pages do not print in sequence. On a sixteen-page book, the outermost sheet carries page 16 and page 1 side by side on one face, and pages 2 and 15 on the other. The next sheet in carries 14 and 3, then 4 and 13. The pattern is that each pair adds up to one more than the total page count.
Do not work this out by hand. Word’s book fold setting, InDesign’s print booklet, and most PDF readers with a booklet printing option will all do the imposition for you. Print two pages per sheet, double sided, flipping on the short edge.
Step 3: Check the paper grain
Paper has a grain, the direction the fibres lie, and it folds cleanly along the grain and crackles across it. Tear a spare sheet in both directions: the tear that runs straight is with the grain. You want the grain running parallel to the spine. Get this backwards and every fold fights you and the finished booklet will not lie flat.
Step 4: Fold
Fold each sheet individually, not the whole stack at once. Line the corners up, hold them, then run the bone folder along the crease from the middle outward. Then nest the folded sheets inside one another, working from the innermost page out, with the cover last.
Step 5: Staple
Open the booklet flat, face down, and lay it over the arm of the long-arm stapler so the crease sits on the centre line. Two staples, each about a quarter of the way in from the top and bottom of the spine. Press firmly and in one movement.
No long-arm stapler? Open the booklet face up on a soft eraser or a folded towel, push a standard staple through from the inside by hand, turn it over, and fold the two legs down flat with the back of a spoon. It is fiddly and it works.
Step 6: Trim the fore-edge
On anything thicker than about twelve sheets, the inner pages push out further than the outer ones when you fold them. This is called creep, and it leaves a stepped, ragged front edge. Lay a metal ruler down the fore-edge and trim the whole block with a craft knife, taking a few millimetres off in several light passes rather than one heavy one. That single cut is the difference between a booklet that looks homemade and one that looks made.
Sewing it instead: the pamphlet stitch
Thread instead of staples, and it looks considerably more expensive than it is. The three-hole pamphlet stitch is the simplest version: pierce three holes along the fold, one at the centre and one a couple of inches from each end. Go in through the centre hole from the outside, out through the top hole, back in through the bottom hole (passing the centre on the inside), and out through the centre again. Tie the two ends in a square knot around the long stitch, on either side of it, and trim the tails. Waxed linen thread holds best.
There is a fuller walkthrough on sewing chapbooks by hand.
The other methods, and when to use them
- Staples — the default. Fast, cheap, right for almost every chapbook.
- A sewing machine — a straight stitch down the fold. Very fast once set up, and it gives you a run of identical copies with a nice industrial look.
- Coptic binding — exposed stitching across the spine, no glue, and it opens completely flat. Slow, beautiful, and better suited to a one-off or a small special edition than to fifty copies.
- One sheet, eight pages — a single sheet, folded and cut once, with no binding at all. Perfect for a giveaway at a reading.
Perfect binding, the glued square spine you see on paperbacks, is the one method I would not attempt at home. It needs a proper glue, a clamp and a press to survive being opened, and home attempts tend to shed pages within a year. If you want a square spine, get it printed.
Mistakes worth avoiding
- Folding the stack all at once. The inner sheets shift and every page ends up misaligned. Fold them one at a time.
- Too many sheets. Past about twelve folded sheets the spine bulges and the staples struggle. Split it or have it printed.
- Ignoring creep. Trim the fore-edge, or design with a slightly wider outside margin so the text does not sit at different distances from the edge on different pages.
- Skipping the proof copy. Make one complete booklet, all the way through, before you print fifty. You will find a mistake. There is always a mistake.
If you have not laid the interior out yet, do that before you touch a stapler: DIY book design for beginners covers the margins, type and imposition settings you need. And if the whole booklet is still an idea rather than a stack of paper, start at how to make a chapbook.
Common questions about DIY book binding
What do I need in a bookbinding kit?
For booklets, less than the kits sold online suggest. A long-arm stapler, a bone folder, a metal ruler, a craft knife and a cutting mat will cover every method on this page. If you plan to sew, add a bookbinding needle, waxed linen thread and an awl to pierce the holes. You do not need a binding press, and you do not need a guillotine.
What are the main book binding methods?
For short books there are four worth knowing. Saddle stitch, which is folding and stapling through the spine. Pamphlet stitch, the same fold sewn with thread. Coptic binding, an exposed stitch that lets the book open completely flat. And perfect binding, the glued square spine you see on paperbacks, which is the one method that really needs equipment. Saddle stitch is the right default for almost every chapbook.
Can I bind a book at home without a long-arm stapler?
Yes. Open the booklet face up on a soft eraser or a folded towel, push a standard staple through from the inside by hand, turn it over, and fold the legs flat with the back of a spoon. Or skip staples and sew it, which needs nothing but a needle, thread and something to make the holes. Both work; the stapler just makes it faster if you are producing fifty copies.
How do I bind a book with string?
Use the three-hole pamphlet stitch. Pierce three holes along the fold, one at the centre and one a couple of inches from each end. Go in through the centre from the outside, out through the top hole, back in through the bottom hole passing the centre on the inside, then out through the centre again. Tie the two ends around the long stitch and trim. Waxed linen thread holds far better than ordinary string, which stretches and frays.
What glue should I use to bind a book?
PVA bookbinding glue, which stays flexible when it dries. Ordinary white school glue goes brittle and cracks along the spine within a year or two, and a hot glue gun fails faster than that. Honestly though, if you are asking about glue you are attempting perfect binding, and that is the one method I would send to a printer rather than try at home.
by | Uncategorized
Designing a book yourself is mostly a matter of making a handful of decisions in the right order and then being consistent about them. You do not need a design degree and you do not need expensive software. You do need to stop treating the page like a word processor document and start treating it like a piece of paper that will be cut, folded and held.
Here is the order I work in.
1. Decide the trim size first
The trim size is the finished page after the printer cuts it. Everything else, margins, type size, line length, depends on it, so choose it before you design a single page.
For poetry, 5.5 x 8.5 inches is the workhorse. It is half a sheet of US letter, which means you can fold and staple it at home with no trimming at all. 5 x 8 and 6 x 9 are both common for slightly roomier books. Long lines need a wider page, so if your poems run wide, do not force them into a narrow trim and let them wrap. A wrapped line is a broken line.
2. Set margins, and respect the gutter
This is where most home-made books give themselves away. The inside margin, the gutter, has to be wider than the outside one, because part of it disappears into the fold when the book is bound. Set them equal and your text will look shoved toward the spine on every page.
On a 5.5 x 8.5 booklet I use something like 0.75 inch at the gutter, 0.6 at the outside, 0.7 at the top and 0.8 at the bottom. A slightly deeper bottom margin looks right to the eye even though it is not symmetrical; a page with equal top and bottom margins reads as though it is sliding downward.
Set the document up in facing pages, or spreads, so you can see the left and right pages together as a reader will.
3. Choose type, then leave it alone
Use a serif face for the body. Garamond, Caslon, Minion, Palatino, Sabon, any of them will do the job. Serifs are easier to read in long stretches on paper, whatever they look like on a screen.
- Size: 10 to 12 point for the body. Poetry often sits well at 11.
- Leading (the space between lines): roughly 120 to 140 percent of the type size. 11 point type on 14 point leading is a safe setting.
- Alignment: left-aligned, ragged right. Do not justify poetry. Justification stretches the word spacing to force a straight edge and it will wreck the rhythm of a line.
- One family. Pick a face for the body, use its italic for emphasis, and stop there. Two typefaces in a chapbook is already one more than you need.
4. Put the front matter in the usual order
Readers know this order without knowing they know it, and getting it wrong makes a book feel amateur before the first poem:
- Half title (just the title), optional in a short book
- Title page: title, your name, the press if there is one
- Copyright page, on the back of the title page
- Dedication, if you have one
- Contents, if the book needs one
- The poems
- Acknowledgements and a short biography at the back
New sections start on a right-hand page. Right-hand pages always carry odd numbers. If that leaves a blank left-hand page, let it be blank; that is what it is for.
5. One poem, one page
Start each poem on its own page unless it is long enough to need two. Do not run two short poems down a single page to save paper, and do not let a poem spill three lines onto the next page if you can avoid it by cutting elsewhere. White space is not waste in a book of poems, it is part of how the poem is read.
Number the pages, but leave the numbers off the title page, the copyright page and any page that is deliberately blank.
6. The cover, and the spine problem
A stapled booklet has no real spine, so a wraparound cover is one flat piece: back cover, fold, front cover. A perfect-bound book does have a spine, and its width depends on the page count and the thickness of the paper. Do not guess it. Ask the printer for the spine width for your page count and paper stock, and they will give you a number.
Keep the front cover simple: title, your name, one image or none. Small type and busy artwork both fall apart at thumbnail size, and a thumbnail is how most people will first see it.
7. Bleed, if anything touches the edge
If a colour or an image is meant to run right to the edge of the page, it has to extend past the trim line so the cutting blade has somewhere to land. That overhang is the bleed, and it is conventionally 0.125 inch on every side that bleeds. Printers cut in stacks and the blade wanders by a hair, so a design without bleed comes back with a thin white line along one edge.
If nothing on your page touches the edge, which is true of most poetry interiors, you do not need bleed at all.
8. Export a print-ready PDF
Whatever you designed in, the printer wants a PDF. Export it with the fonts embedded, at 300 dpi for any images, as single pages rather than spreads unless the printer explicitly asks for spreads. Send the interior and the cover as two separate files. If the printer names a standard such as PDF/X-1a, use it.
Then open the PDF and read it. Fonts that were not embedded properly, images that dropped out, a page that shifted, you will see all of it in the exported file and none of it in your design software.
9. Print a proof on paper
Print the whole thing on your home printer, fold it, staple it, and read it as a book. Type that looked fine on a monitor is often too small on paper. Margins that looked generous look mean. You will catch things in ten minutes with a physical copy that you would not catch in an hour on screen, and it costs you a few sheets of paper.
What to design it in
Use what you have. The software matters far less than the decisions above.
- InDesign is the professional tool and handles facing pages, master pages and booklet imposition properly.
- Microsoft Word will genuinely do it, and its book fold setting handles the page shuffling for you.
- PowerPoint is an odd choice that works surprisingly well, because you are laying out fixed-size pages.
- Photoshop is the wrong tool for text but the right one for a cover.
- Affinity Publisher and the free Scribus both do everything InDesign does for this purpose.
Once the interior is designed, you still have to fasten it together. That part is over on DIY book binding for beginners. And if you would rather hand the PDF to someone with a real press, what chapbook printing costs has the numbers.
Common questions about DIY book design
What software do I need to design a book myself?
Whatever you already have. Adobe InDesign is the professional tool, but Microsoft Word will genuinely lay out a booklet and its book fold setting handles the page imposition for you. Scribus is free and does everything InDesign does for this purpose; Affinity Publisher is a one-off purchase rather than a subscription. The decisions about margins and type matter far more than which program you make them in.
Is there a free book design template?
Most print shops publish free templates for their standard trim sizes, and that is the set worth using, because they are built to that printer’s exact margins and bleed. Ask whoever will print your book before you download a generic one. If you are printing at home on letter paper folded in half, you do not need a template at all: set a 5.5 x 8.5 inch page with the margins described above and you have one.
What trim size should I use?
5.5 x 8.5 inches for a stapled booklet, because it folds out of letter paper with no trimming. 6 x 9 if the poems have long lines and need the width. Choose it before you design anything, because margins, type size and line breaks all follow from it.
How do I work out the spine width?
Do not calculate it yourself. Spine width depends on the page count and the exact thickness of the paper stock, which only the printer knows. Give them your page count and paper, and they will give you a measurement. A stapled booklet has no real spine at all, so the question only arises for perfect-bound books.
What is bleed, and do I need it?
Bleed is the extra image area, conventionally 0.125 inch, that extends past the trim line so the cutting blade has somewhere to land. You need it only if a colour or image is meant to run right to the edge of the page. A typical poetry interior has white margins on every side, so it needs no bleed. Covers usually do.
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A chapbook is a small booklet, usually somewhere between eight and forty pages, holding a short run of poems or prose. It is stapled down the spine or sewn with thread. You can read one in a sitting. That is really the whole definition, and most of what people will tell you about chapbooks beyond that is convention rather than rule.
Where the word comes from
Chapbooks were the cheap print of their day. From the sixteenth century onward, peddlers called chapmen carried them from town to town and sold them for a penny or two: ballads, folk tales, crime stories, almanacs, religious tracts, whatever people would part with a coin for. The “chap” is not short for chapter. It comes from an old word for trade, the same root that gives us the word cheap. These were books made to be affordable and passed hand to hand, not shelved and admired.
The modern poetry chapbook kept the shape and, I think, the spirit. Still short. Still cheap to produce. Still meant to be handed to someone.
What makes a chapbook a chapbook
There is no committee enforcing this, but a booklet that gets called a chapbook usually has most of these traits:
- Short. Eight to forty pages. Twenty to thirty-two is the sweet spot for poetry.
- A page count that divides by four, if it is folded and stapled down the middle. One sheet folded in half gives you four pages, so the arithmetic is not optional.
- Simply bound. Staples through the fold, or thread. No glued spine, no case binding.
- Coherent. One voice, one thread, one preoccupation running underneath. A chapbook is not a sampler of everything you have ever written.
If you want the distinction between a chapbook and its neighbours, the pamphlet and the zine, I go through it on chapbook vs pamphlet vs zine. The short answer is that the lines are blurry and nobody will arrest you.
Why poets make them
A full-length collection is a long wait. You need seventy pages of poems you can defend, a publisher willing to take them, and then a year or two while the thing crawls through production. A chapbook is the answer to wanting to put work in a reader’s hands before all that.
It is also a real object to sell at a reading, a credential when you submit elsewhere, and a way to find out whether a group of poems actually holds together. Plenty of full collections started as a chapbook that refused to stop growing.
What goes inside one
Twelve to twenty-four poems, in an order you have thought hard about. A title page. An acknowledgements page if any of the poems appeared in journals first, which is a courtesy and also quietly tells a reader you have been publishing. A contents page if it helps; plenty of chapbooks skip it.
The sequence does more work than beginners expect. It is the difference between a stack of poems and a book. I wrote a separate piece on ordering the poems in a chapbook because it deserves the room.
Two ways to get one made
Make it yourself. Copy paper, a printer, a long-arm stapler, an afternoon. This is how most first chapbooks come into the world and there is nothing second-rate about it. Start with how to make a chapbook, then design the interior and bind it.
Have it printed. A print shop gives you square edges, a proper cover stock, and fifty identical copies you are not ashamed to sell. You will need a print-ready PDF and a page count that works. What it costs depends mostly on how many you order; I break the numbers down in what chapbook printing costs.
Before either route, settle the physical shape of the thing: trim size, page count, margins. That is covered in chapbook format, size and page count.
Getting one published
The other route is to let a press do it. Small presses run open reading periods and contests for chapbook manuscripts, and a good many of them are worth your postage. Contests usually charge an entry fee and pay a prize; open reading periods often charge nothing. Read what the press has published before you send anything, because a chapbook press has a taste and you can usually see it in two minutes on their website.
I keep a list of places taking manuscripts on the chapbook publishers page, and the process itself, from manuscript to contract, is on how to publish a chapbook.
Where to start today
Print out every poem you think might belong. Spread them on a table. Take away the ones that are only there because you like them, and keep the ones that are talking to each other. If you are left with twelve, you have a chapbook. The rest is paper and staples.
Common questions about chapbooks
What is a chapbook in poetry?
A short collection of poems, usually 8 to 40 pages, bound with staples or thread rather than a glued spine. It holds a single sustained idea or voice instead of a poet’s complete work, which is what separates it from a full-length collection. Most poets publish one or two chapbooks before a first full book.
How many pages is a chapbook?
Between 8 and 40 pages, and most often 20 to 32. If it is saddle-stapled, the total has to divide by four, because a single folded sheet produces four pages. Publishers running chapbook contests usually ask for a manuscript of 16 to 30 pages of poems, not counting the title page and acknowledgements.
What size is a chapbook?
5.5 x 8.5 inches is the most common, because it is a sheet of US letter paper folded in half, which means you can make one at home with no trimming. 5 x 8 and 6 x 9 are also standard. A5 is the usual equivalent outside the US. There is more on this in chapbook format, size and page count.
What is the difference between a chapbook and a zine?
Mostly intent and finish. A chapbook is usually a curated literary work, typeset with some care and often sold or submitted to presses. A zine is self-published by definition, frequently photocopied, and prizes immediacy and a handmade look over polish. Physically they can be identical booklets. I go through it properly in chapbook vs pamphlet vs zine.
What were chapbooks and chapmen in history?
Chapbooks were cheap, small, popular booklets printed from roughly the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, carrying ballads, folk tales, almanacs, religious tracts and sensational stories. Chapmen were the travelling peddlers who sold them, going village to village with a pack of goods. Because chapbooks were affordable and did not require a bookseller, they were how printed stories first reached ordinary readers, which is why they matter in the history of print culture and literacy.
Do you get paid for publishing a chapbook?
Rarely in any meaningful way. A press will typically give you author copies and sometimes a small royalty or a contest prize. Chapbooks are not a source of income; they are a way to get a body of work into the world, sell a few copies at readings, and build a publication record. Anyone promising you money for one is selling something.
