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.