Book Creation Guide

1. Your book is two files

The interior is everything except the cover: title page, front matter, body, appendices, index. One PDF, first page to last, at your finished page size.

The cover is a single flat spread — back cover, spine and front cover laid out side by side as one page. Not three files, and not a front and a back. Its width depends on your page count, because that is what sets the spine.

Spiral, wiro, comb and saddle-stitched books have no spine, so their covers are just a front and a back at trim size.

2. Choose the page size before you typeset

Changing trim size after the book is laid out moves every page break in it. Decide first.

Set the page size in your layout software, not at export. Exporting an A4 document “scaled to A5” shrinks the type along with the page and produces a book that reads small and looks wrong.

3. Page count

Your page count must be even, because pages print on both sides of a sheet. If your content ends on an odd page, add a blank — otherwise the printer adds one for you, in a place you did not choose.

For a saddle-stitched booklet it must be a multiple of four, because one folded sheet makes four pages. 32 works, 34 does not.

Minimums by binding: soft cover and hard binding need about 32 pages to form a spine. Below that the glue has too little to grip; use a centre staple at Rs 25 or a spiral at Rs 40 instead. A lettered spine needs about 60 pages before there is enough width to read it.

Remember recto and verso: odd-numbered pages are always right-hand pages. If a chapter must open on the right, the page before it has to be blank or filled.

4. Margins and the gutter

This is where more books go wrong than anywhere else.

A perfect-bound or hard-bound spine takes roughly 15 mm off the inside edge of every page. Text set with symmetric margins — which is what most templates default to, and which looks correct on screen — disappears into the binding on one side of every spread. It cannot be fixed after printing.

Set a mirrored gutter, so the wide margin swaps sides between left and right pages:

• Inside (gutter) edge: 15 mm minimum for perfect or hard binding, 20 mm on a thick book.
• Outside, top and bottom: 12 to 15 mm is comfortable.
• Spiral, wiro and comb: the punch holes take about 12 mm from the binding edge. The book opens flat so nothing is lost to a spine, but text set to the edge will be perforated.

Full margin and gutter guide →

5. Bleed — and why you do not need it here

Most printing guides tell you to add 3 mm of bleed around your artwork so that images can run off the page after trimming. That instruction does not apply to us, and following it will not help: a file built with bleed is printed with the bleed area sitting inside the margin, which is not what you designed.

Design to the trim size and work with the margin instead. A deliberate border reads as a design choice; an accidental white edge around a full-page photograph reads as a mistake. If your book is image-heavy and the images must fill the page, we are the wrong printer for it, and it is better to know that now.

6. Images and resolution

Work at 300 DPI at the size the image will be printed. That means a photograph filling an A5 page needs roughly 1,750 × 2,480 pixels, and one filling A4 needs about 2,480 × 3,510.

Enlarging a small image does not add detail — it spreads the same pixels over more paper. A logo pulled from a website will be 72 DPI and will print soft at any size; get the original from whoever designed it. Line art and diagrams are the one exception where vector artwork beats any DPI figure, because it is resolution-independent.

7. Colour

Presses print in CMYK — cyan, magenta, yellow and black, mixed by removing light from white paper. Screens display in RGB, which adds light. Every file has to cross that gap at some point, and modern workflows do it predictably, so either colour space will print.

What actually causes problems is inconsistency:

• Do not mix colour spaces inside one file. Pick RGB or CMYK and apply it to the document and every placed image.
• Keep black text pure black rather than a four-colour mix. Four-colour black on small type looks fuzzy if the plates shift even slightly.
• Set grayscale images to grayscale. A black-and-white photograph left in a colour space can pick up a cast.
• Expect colour to sit slightly deeper on paper than on a backlit screen, and contrast to read a shade softer. Lift the shadows a little on very dark images.

Colour versus black and white →

8. Paper, and show-through

Thin paper is cheaper and lighter; it also lets the previous page show through, which is most noticeable on double-sided text with heavy ink.

Coated paper is smoother and slightly thinner per sheet than uncoated at the same weight, because the coating compresses the fibres — 130 gsm matte comes out at about 0.122 mm a sheet against 0.125 mm for 100 gsm bond. That matters when you calculate the spine.

Paper GSM guide →

9. The spine

Spine width is (page count ÷ 2) × sheet thickness + binding allowance. Sheet thickness in millimetres is gsm × bulk ÷ 1000, where bulk is about 1.25 for uncoated paper and 0.94 for coated.

A 300-page A5 book on 75 gsm: 150 sheets × 0.094 mm = 14.1 mm of text block, plus 0.6 mm for a soft cover, so 14.7 mm. Hard bound it is 18.1 mm, because the boards and case add about 4 mm.

Two rules worth holding onto. Do not letter a spine under 3 mm — there is not enough width for the text to sit straight. And build the cover to the calculated spine rather than a rounded number: a spine set 3 mm too narrow puts the title round the corner onto the front board.

Spine calculator → — it also gives the flat cover size, which is what you actually need next.

10. The cover spread

One flat page, laid out left to right as back cover, spine, front cover. Its width is the two covers plus the spine; its height is the trim height.

For a 300-page A5 paperback: (148 × 2) + 14.7 = 310.7 mm wide by 210 mm high.

• Keep text and logos well inside the trim — remember there is no bleed, so a background colour will show a white margin.
• Spine text runs top to bottom on the spine as the book stands on a shelf.
• Cover stocks are 170, 225, 270 and 300 gsm in matte or glossy. 300 gsm is what a shop-bought paperback feels like.
• We do not have a cover designer. Supply the artwork as a PDF.

11. Preparing the file for export

• Export to PDF. Never send DOCX as the final file — Word re-flows the layout on whatever machine opens it, which is how page breaks move and fonts get substituted between your screen and the press.
• Embed all fonts. This is a checkbox in every export dialogue and the single most common cause of a book printing in the wrong typeface.
• One consistent page size from first page to last. A PDF that mixes A4 and A5 is the most common reason a book comes back wrong.
• Flatten transparency and remove comment layers before exporting.
• Check the last page is the last page — stray blank pages at the end are common and they are printed and charged.
• Over 100 MB? Send a WeTransfer link to print@printster.in rather than fighting the upload.
• Use styles, not manual formatting. Repeated hard returns and manual spacing shift when the file is exported; proper paragraph styles and page breaks do not.

Large file printing → · Printing from scans →

12. Proof one copy

On anything above a handful of copies, order a single copy from the final PDF before committing to the run. One copy is priced from the same rate card as a hundred, so a proof costs a few hundred rupees and is the only reliable check there is.

What to look at, in the book rather than on the screen: the gutter and whether text disappears into the spine; running heads and page numbers after the front matter; where blank versos fall; image pages; the spine text; and the last page.

Terms you will meet

Trim size

The finished page size of the book. A5, B5, A4 or A3 here.

Gutter

The inside margin, next to the spine, where a bound book swallows part of the page.

Recto and verso

Right-hand and left-hand pages. Recto is always odd-numbered.

Bleed

Artwork extended past the trim so it can run to the edge after cutting. Not used here — we hold a margin instead.

Safety margin

The clear space between the trimmed edge and anything that matters, so nothing important sits near the cut.

Text block

All the interior pages stacked together, before the cover is added.

Bulk

How thick a paper is for its weight, in cm³/g. Higher bulk means a thicker sheet at the same gsm.

Perfect binding

Pages glued at the spine and wrapped in a cover. What a paperback is.

Saddle stitch

Folded sheets stapled through the spine. A booklet. Page count must be a multiple of four.

Case binding

Hard binding — the text block sewn or glued and attached to rigid boards.

Checklist before you upload

• Interior and cover are two separate PDFs
• One page size throughout, matching the trim you ordered
• Page count is even — and a multiple of four for saddle stitch
• Mirrored gutter of at least 15 mm for perfect or hard binding
• All fonts embedded
• Images at 300 DPI at printed size
• One colour space; black text is pure black; grayscale images set to grayscale
• Colour pages separated out if only some of the book needs colour
• Cover built to the calculated spine width, with no bleed
• No spine text if the spine is under 3 mm
• Last page is really the last page

Price your book and upload

Make a book → · Spine calculator → · All guides →