Think About Book Design: A Self-Publisher’s Guide to Covers, Spines, and Endsheets

Why Multiples of 4 Matter

There are simple things like — are your pages divisible by 4? If your pages will be folded at any point in the production process, you’ll likely need to have your page count be a multiple of 4 or 8, depending on your total page count and trim size.

There are a couple of exceptions, however. Some digitally produced perfect binding works with cut sheets of paper instead of folded sheets — in those instances you would only need to worry about increments of 2. This goes for other cut-sheet assembled projects like wire and spiral binding, as well as board books. But I digress. What’s critical for you to know is how many pages of content do you need to account for? Traditional comics are 24 pages because of how well that breaks down into a folded sheet of paper at that trim size. Ever read a novel and notice that the back of the book has a bunch of extra blank pages? That’s because the content of the book didn’t line up cleanly with the number of sheets required to make the physical book. So let’s focus on designing that final product. We’ll walk through the items you’ll need to consider for all of the different kinds of projects. Don’t worry — we’ll start simple.

Designing for a Saddle-Stitched Booklet

Saddle stitch is just an industry term for stapled. On the large-quantity production side, they don’t use staplers like you’d find on your desk — industrial staplers are built to manage high quantities. Often that machine uses a spool of wire and stitches it into the spine just like a sewing machine.

That’s it, really:

1. All of your interior pages. (You should also decide if they will have bleed or no bleed. More on that later, though.)
2. Front cover and back cover.
3. Inside front cover and inside back cover.

How you decide to arrange or distribute the info in those sections is up to you, but oftentimes the credits for the book are included on the inside cover. Legal info is often listed here as well, such as copyright details. If you are unsure what to do with these extra areas, just look at examples of your favorite comics and see how others are treating them. Sometimes it’s an area for extra story content, ads, letters columns, or pinup sketches.

Designing for a Softcover Book

For a softcover project you’ll need:

Our setup guides for covers on softcover books treat the front cover, spine, and back cover as one complete image. This is how the final product will be produced, and those guides will note the margins you’ll need to account for. That comes with a couple of key differences from a saddle-stitch booklet:

1. An area for the hinge of the cover.
2. The area in the gutter of the interior pages that will be obscured by the binding.

The hinge of a softcover book is the area on the front and back covers that gets glued to the interior pages. This is part of the construction and needs to be factored in when designing your final product. For example, our hinge area is about 10 mm. That means the 10 mm area on the far right of your inside front cover will be obscured by the glue. So make sure that any information you put on your inside front cover doesn’t extend too far towards the inside of the image. The same is true for the first interior page — the far left side of that page will have the front inside cover glued to it, so don’t include any important information too close to the edge of that page. The same is true for the inside back cover and the last interior page of your project. Any project that has healthy margins built into the layout should have no issues with this. If you are unsure, we have plenty of templates and layout guides to help you determine these margins.

Softcover books don’t open flat — plan the gutter

Unlike a saddle-stitch booklet, a softcover book will not open completely flat. The binding includes stitching and glue to hold the whole thing together, which means on some pages the area closest to the spine (the gutter) will be obscured. This is more prominent with larger page-count books. Again — if you have healthy margins, this is not a problem. But if some of your interior pages have type or word balloons close to the interior gutter, or if you have images crossing the gutter to continue onto the next facing page, you may see a small portion of your image obscured. This is typically only a couple of millimeters.

An elegant option: the French Fold

An additional option for softcover books to consider: the elegant French Fold. A French Fold is an extension of your front and back cover that gets scored and folded as flaps onto the inside of your book.

If this is something you’d like to include, you’ll need to design that extra real estate into the front and back cover and also account for the inside of those flaps.

Designing for a Hardcover Book

For a hardcover book you’ll need:

Luckily, how margins are managed for interior pages is fairly universal across binding types. It’s also a general rule of thumb that bleeds are .125″ in the industry. In other words, if your interior pages are utilizing bleeds, then the final dimensions of your artwork should be the trim size plus the .125″ bleed.

Since there is bleed on multiple edges of your artwork, you’ll need to take that into account. For example, an 8.5″ × 11″ page that has bleeds on all four sides will be an additional .250″ larger in height and width — that’s .125″ on the left edge, right edge, top, and bottom. So the dimensions with the bleed would be 8.75″ × 11.25″.

The foldover: why hardcover covers need extra artwork

For the covers of your hardcover book, you’ll need to format these in a specific fashion for how they are constructed. This is where the “foldover” comes into play. Hardcover books are made with a layer of thick chipboard underneath the paper that your artwork is printed on. In order for the artwork to wrap around the edge of the board and then get glued to the inside cover, there needs to be 0.9 inches of extra artwork included on the top, bottom, and right edges of the front cover — as well as the top, bottom, and left edge of the back cover. You can see some excellent illustrations on this in our hardcover cover setup guide, but this picture of one of our hardcopy proofs displays the foldover before it’s covered by the endsheets.

Much of that artwork will be obscured, but if that area is left blank, the white edges will look unfinished and unprofessional. You can find the correct details of how to set up your cover files on our website, along with a spine width calculator that will help you determine the thickness of your spine. This is calculated by inputting your page count along with the paper being used — the thickness of the sheet of paper is multiplied by the page count. So now you might be thinking, is “thickness” a word? But you might also be thinking — what about those inside covers? Didn’t I just say the front cover is going to be wrapped around and glued down to my inside front cover? That’s true, but it will only be glued to the raw chipboard. Once the front cover is in place, the inside covers will be glued into place, thus covering the edges of the wrapped-over front and back covers. Based on your page count, that will be managed in two different ways.

Non-separated endsheets (60 pages or below)

If you are producing a low-page-count children’s book, the first sheet of your inside pages will be glued directly to the front cover. That is why when you are producing your interior pages, the first page will be on the left side of a two-page spread. The reverse side of that page will be blank and used to attach to the cover. As the designer of your project, you can decide how you want to treat these pages. You can treat them the same way you would for a saddle-stitch or perfect-bound project, or you can treat them like you would for a higher page-count hardcover book. See details of some traditional endsheets designs below.

Separated endsheets (over 60 pages)

If you are producing a high-page-count book, the addition of separated endsheets will be necessary for the construction. This adds to the durability of the final product, as the interior book pages are only held in place by how they are attached to the cover. When designing for separated endsheets, you’ll need to account for six pages of additional material. Even if you don’t know what separated endsheets are, you’ve definitely seen them. These are the sheets of paper on the inside cover and the first page of larger hardcover books. They’re often ornately patterned, or in a solid color, and are distinct from the other interior pages.

Separated endsheets are, on one end, attached to the interior pages — and on the other end, attached to the inside covers. So while there are actually eight sides of paper in the endsheets, only six of them are visible. The other two sides are glued to the inside front and inside back covers. The design for these can be anything you like, but be aware that traditionally, separated endsheets are printed on heavy uncoated paper. If your interior pages are printed on a coated sheet (either gloss or matte), be aware that the ink — even with the same images — will reproduce differently between the two. Uncoated paper will absorb the ink and dull the vibrancy of the colors, while a coated sheet is designed to retain the vibrancy of the ink’s pigment.

Designing the Spine

Just like a softcover book, a hardcover book will need a design specifically for the spine. This isn’t something to overlook — oftentimes the spine is the part of the book that people see the most when it’s shelved.

After you’ve calculated the width of your spine, you’ll want to consider these three factors:

1. Do I want the design to match the front and back cover in style?
2. How much space do I have for my design?
3. What orientation should I use?

The simplest way to treat the spine is to have it be a unifying element of the overall design. Oftentimes that means the background color you’re using for the front and back cover is simply extended to the spine for a clean overall cohesion. By contrast, you could treat your spine as a unique element. A word of warning, though. Because of manufacturing variance — when everything is printed, trimmed, folded, and bound — each copy of your run will display slight differences in how well all of your margins hit exactly the right spot. This is just part of the manufacturing process. Instead of expecting perfection in each and every copy, a smart designer will not place important design functions in the hands of this variance. They’ll avoid placing elements too close to edges, they’ll have respect for margins, and instead of risking the design element looking like a mistake because of production variance, they will design a package that reduces that risk. That all being said, if you feel strongly about your design choice, you should go for it. Most variance is only a couple of millimeters. If you’re willing to accept that each book will be its own unique piece that might display minor imperfections, then you can freely embrace some decisions that will make your book more distinctive.

Thin spines: don’t force type that doesn’t fit

We have a minimum spine width for all of our hardcover books. Meaning that below a certain page count, the spine will not get any smaller — it needs to be a certain dimension in order to function properly. Now this is pretty small: about 0.314 inches thick. That’s not a lot of space for a design, or for text. So instead of treating that spine like you would for something two inches thick, consider eliminating type even though this is the traditional space to put the name of the book and the author. From our experience, when you reduce the type so small to fit on such a narrow spine, the legibility suffers and you end up with a product that looks unprofessional. Opt instead for a simple design element, or just leave the background elements from the front and back cover.

Orientation: how your spine reads on the shelf

Orientation is something that seems obvious, but make sure you consider how your books will look on the shelf next to other books. Most books design the type on the spine to lead from top to bottom. Meaning that the example title “Bobby’s Pet Cat” would display “Bobby” at the top of the spine and “Cat” towards the bottom. If you flip this orientation and the title reads from bottom to top, your spine will look odd compared to the other books on the shelf — although in certain countries this is the standard.

A design note on spines: special treatments

There are a couple of options you can add to spines to give them some special treatment. You’ll most typically see these on a traditional leather-cover, library-style edition. Rounded spines are just that. Instead of the traditional square spine that is the default and most common for hardcover books, the spine is manipulated so the edges are rounded over.

The other option that is often combined with this is a raised band spine. Think about those fancy classic-literature editions of books, and you’ll recognize this option.

This is actually a feature that served a practical function at one point. Back when books were mostly assembled by hand, the raised bands on the spine were there to hide the gathered threads that were used to hold all the sheets together with the smyth-sewing process. Those bands of threads were covered by the leather in the final binding. Modern book construction eliminates this need, and the raised bands are simulated with either pieces of wood or heavy chipboard. They serve no practical purpose in modern construction, but they preserve the look of traditional bookmaking.