If you have to use a copy shop’s stack cutter to trim your book, this is a very economical solution. You can get several books out of each cut - which comes in handy when they charge by the cut.

I did come across a few helpful websites like NoMediaKings and Brian Sawyer’s Blog. But, they still required tools I didn’t have. I also found images and videos of bookbinding machines which were inspiring, but more complex and expensive than I could ever hope to afford.

The very first set of practical instructions I found for making a book was from Brad Issac’s blog. He was doing exactly the same thing that I wanted to do, printing out PDF ebooks and turning them into paperbacks. He turned that original blog post into a really simple tutorial that he now sells in a low cost report called Store Quality Paperbacks in 5 Minutes or Less.

From those instructions, I worked out the simple method that I used to make my first book. That book is the focus of my first bookbinding tutorial on this website.

I was happy with my results, but wanted to learn more and improve my bookbinding skills so that I could create books that would be indistinguishable from a store-bought trade paperback. Using Gorilla Glue and plain covers was not going to cut it. So I kept searching until a found a really excellent and thorough guide called (ironically enough) “Easy Bookbinding“.

There is a complete review of the “Easy Bookbinding” course on this site, so I won’t repeat myself here. But, my knowledge lept forward after reading these bookbinding instructions. This was also the course that helped me to design the bookbinding jig that I wrote about in this article. The quality and speed of my bookbinding projects were so radically improved that I made a short video demonstration to show off my new ‘bookbinding machine’.

My skills binding books has now advanced to the level where I feel I can produce a finished book that is every bit as good as any book you can find on Amazon.com.

The search for quality instructions for binding a paperback or hardcover book use a glue binding is ongoing. There is always a new technique to use, a new glue to try, or a new jig to build. But you have found the right place to begin your journey.

Make sure to check out each of these resources on the DIY Bookbinding website:

• Paperback Bookbinding Tutorial
• Bookbinding Demonstration Video
• Converting PDF Files for Book Printing Video
• Making Color Covers for Your Paperback Book
• The Simple Bookbinding Jig
• DIY Bookbinding Review of “Easy Bookbinding”, by Nathan DeStephano

Happy Bookbinding and Self-Publishing!

The bookbinding jig worked extremely well (I’ve made 7 books so far) and I have been having great success using it to make books with glue bindings. So, I decided to put together this quick video to demonstrate the process I use.

The video is edited slightly, but the whole process shown only took about 15 minutes from start to finish and much of the time cut out was waiting for the glue to setup enough to remove it from the jig.If you enjoy this demonstration, please bookmark the page and share it with others.

My first experiments in bookbinding involved some extremely low-tech bookbinding tools - paint stirrers and binding clamps. It was tricky to get the pages lined up, position the stirrers, and get the clamps on and they got in the way when applying glue. Finally, there was no good way to add the covers. I needed a better solution.

An important resource in my bookbinding journey is Nathan DeStephano’s Easy Bookbinding course. In addition to all of the information about designing, formatting, and printing books, he includes detailed instructions for a bookbinding jig that is cheap and easy to make. In my research I had seen a few similar products, such as the $135.95 version sold by GigaBooks, and decided to come up with a version of my own.

The main difference between my bookbinding jig and others available is that I made mine entirely out of scrap lumber (I’m a cheap guy!!!) The whole thing cost just a few dollars for the metal hardware. The first day I tried it I made 2 books - with covers - that were much better than any others I had made previously. The pages were all properly aligned, the spines were properly compressed for gluing, and the covers fit perfectly.

A bookbinding jig doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It’s main purpose is to provide 2 surfaces that are aligned at a 90 degree angle to make it easy to square up the pages you are gluing together (a process known as jogging), and clamping down the spine edge during gluing to keep the pages compressed together and stable as the glue is applied and dries.

I made all of my critical measurements by laying a sheet of paper from a project onto the main board and tracing the edges. From there I was able to work out the placement of the page guides and the press bar.

Here is a look at the jig in action as I bound my first book. The book block and cover are in the jig and the press bar is clamped down. I applied glue, folded over the cover, and let everything dry.

For this test book I used 5 minute epoxy for the glue and it produced a very sturdy binding - it’s just a little difficult to work with given the fast set time.

I hope these pictures provide inspiration for you as you design your own bookbinding jigs. If you are interested in a more detailed plan for how to create a jig, please leave a comment below.

If there is enough interest, I’ll draft a detailed set of plans along with assembly instructions and a materials list, and maybe even put together a demonstration video to show how to assemble everything and create a book.

PVA is easy to work with and strong. This is just a common white glue that is very flexible and can be easily brushed onto the spine of the book. PVA glues are acid free and used in libraries to repair books. The biggest problem is slow drying time. You will need to keep the pages clamped together for a while as it dries. Adding another layer of glue to the book block later and attaching the cover works fine.

Another very common glue choice is contact cement. PowerPoxy is a brand name that comes up a lot in my research. This is a neoprene-based contact cement and is somewhat thicker than working with PVA glue, but you can still brush it on the spine. You apply it to both the spine and cover and then let the glue ’set-up’ for a minute before pressing the spine and cover together for drying (which only takes a few minutes.)

My initial projects used Gorilla Glue to glue the pages together. This glue tends to soak into the paper a bit and gives a very strong (and somewhat stiff) spine, but it also expands as it dries which often results in lumpy spines. Plus, every cover I have used it on becomes discolored as the glue soaks in.

The drying time for Gorilla Glue is more like PVA glue, so you will have to keep the pages clamped together for a while as it sets-up. Be very careful not to leave ANY excess glue on the surface of the paper as it will expand as it dries and ‘puff up’ creating the lumpy spine I mentioned before.

You could use Gorilla Glue to bind the pages and then come back with contact cement to apply the covers. I’m not certain how well these to glues would bond to each other over the long term, but my guess is it would be strong enough.

I have experimented with hot glues, but don’t recommend them. They are hard to work with and don’t offer any benefits over the cold glues I have mentioned. The drying time is faster, but I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get smooth even coverage (often resorting to using an iron to re-heat the glued book spines making the glue workable again.)

It may be possible to create some sort of heated glue pot that keeps the glue warm enough for you to brush it on before it hardens and then quickly fold the cover over (or later run a hot iron over the cover to re-melt the glue underneath and bond it to the cover.)

It took a lot of time to get my results (I never had this much trouble with a cold glue) and I wasn’t happy with the results. I recommend contact cement or PVA glues. The dry times are longer, but the results are nicer and more consistent.

Another glue that I have recently discovered is PUR glue. It is very strong and flexible and dries quickly. I’ve come across several commercial binderies that are using it as their primary glue and claim it to be the best on the market.

There are many variations of PUR glue on the market. You can usually find it at your local Home Depot. I have not had an opportunity to use it yet for a project, so I can’t vouch for this glue, but it looks very promising.

If you have a better glue option than those listed (or advice for applying the glues I did mention), leave a comment and share your experience.

Our homeschool group shells out $4,000 a YEAR to a local printing company for expensive hardback color yearbooks (125 pgs). They look okay but the pages fall out every time. So I invested $49 to download Nathan DeStephano’s materials, which I discovered here on your site. We may start a printing / bookmaking shop along with scrapbooking, woodburning, digital & textile arts, etc. And, of course, printing & binding our own yearbooks!

Love all the info you have here!

J.B.

The edges of the paper opposite the spine will not line up perfectly (a problem that becomes more pronounced as the number of pages increases.) You can trim the edges with a paper trimmer to even them up. Many large hardcover books are made by gluing together several small stacks of pages bound in this way.

Another very common method of binding is the ‘perfect binding.’ This is the binding method used for the paperback and trade paperback books that make up the majority of what is sold at your local bookstore.

To create a perfect-bound book you stack together your pages and then glue them along the spine edge with a very strong and flexible glue. After the pages have dried, a heavier stock paper is glued to the spine as a cover. Look on your bookshelf, you will find that all of your paperbacks are bound this way. Since there is no folding - except the cover - the pages are easy to line up and the edges of the finished book are very clean.

I would not have thought I could make a perfect-bound book myself until I read a tutorial over at Brad Isaac’s blog showing how it could be done with a simple jig and some Gorilla Glue (He’s since turned this tutorial into an excellent inexpensive report called The Fun and Easy Guide to Binding Your Own Paperback Books at Home… Fast!)

Because of its simplicity, I have chosen a perfect binding for my book. So, now it’s time to move on to the next part of this tutorial and make the book!

This past Christmas I got my hands on one of the coolest new tools for my information publishing business - the DigiMemo L2 by ACECAD.

In spite of the fact that I have a Palm Pilot, a laptop, a voice recorder, several desktop computers, and lots of other little technological gizmos, I still tend to do a lot of my work with good old-fashioned pen and paper. Some of my best ideas come this way and I can often rough out an idea faster than with any other method. The struggle I have is that I rarely type up my notes on the computer and, instead, I end up with notepads full of ideas and product outlines that get lost in the shuffle and forgotten. So, I’ve been on the lookout for some technology that gives me the experience and convenience of writing on paper with a pen, but digitizes the results quickly and easily so that my notes can be converted into the raw material for new books or articles for the web.

One early attempt to solve this dilemma involved scanning my notes into the computer and using OCR software (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the images into text that could be edited in a word processor. The process was cumbersome (which significantly reduces the chances that I’ll actually do it), the OCR software was expensive, and the resulting texts required so much editing to clean up the conversion mistakes (my handwriting is not very neat and OCR software seems to struggle deciphering it) that it just wasn’t worth the effort. I had no intention of trying to change the way I write to please the OCR software and it was faster and easier to just type the notes directly rather than edit the converted files. Not a good solution!

On a business trip last year I was reading the Skymall catalog that the airlines put in the seat-backs of the planes when I came across an ad for the DigiMemo L2. The ad promised that I would be able to write on normal paper using an ink pen and then this device would capture everything I wrote as a graphic. Once captured, the pages could then be quickly downloaded to my computer using an ordinary USB cable and converted to text using their OCR software. Essentially, the DigiMemo L2 digitizes as you write - no scanning required.

From that moment on, I wanted to get my hands on the DigiMemo to see if it would live up to the hype. I tore the ad from the catalog and stuck it to the refrigerator door as a Christmas gift ‘hint’ for my wife. We tend to spend our Christmas money traveling to visit family and keep our gifts to each other more modest, so this one was a combo Christmas/birthday gift - but, I got it! (The combo gift is one of the few benefits to having a birthday right after Christmas!)

So, after months of anticipation, did the DigiMemo L2 live up to the hype? In a word: Yes!

The DigiMemo device is basically a Wacom Tablet with a pad of paper between the pen and the tablet. The pen itself has a ball point cartridge which triggers a pressure sensing mechanism inside when you push down to write. The tablet records the strokes of the pen as you write and builds an image of the page in an internal memory bank. When you flip to a new sheet of paper, there is a button on the side of the tablet to flip to a ‘new digital page’ which starts a new recording.

One great feature of the device is that it does not need to be connected to a computer for you to use it. There is enough memory to store dozens of pages (and you can use an SD memory card to increase the storage space.) So, you can take the pad with you anywhere you would normally use a pen and paper. Then, you can quickly download the pages into your computer using the included software.

Having digital copies of my notes is great, but the real benefit to me is the ability to convert the pages into text. This was the real test of the value of this solution.

I purchased the optional OCR software (a trial version of the software is included, but it’s a ‘must have’ option for me, so I bought it with the DigiMemo.) Once you download the pages to your computer, you can send them to the OCR software for conversion. The conversion software can work with text only and also text with images (which will clean up your drawings.) Straight out of the box, the OCR software converted my chicken-scratch handwriting with about 90% accuracy. This is better than any other OCR software I have used. But, there were still corrections to be made and this was where I was most impressed with the whole system. The OCR software displays the image of your hand written page along side of the OCR results. This enables me to quickly read through the OCR texts and, when I come across something that doesn’t look right, glance over to the original to see the hand written text. A few quick strokes on the keyboard and I have a corrected page ready to save.

The DigiMemo L2 fits right in with my normal work flow and makes it easy to convert my writing into editable texts. Using the device requires very little change to my normal work methods which means that I will actually use this device. The only thing I can imagine being more convenient would be to have a personal scribe who follows me around taking notes and typing up everything I think and say (a man can have a dream, can’t he?)

One add-on that I did not get (but plan to add soon) is a portfolio case to hold the pad and pen. The pen is designed to clip onto the tablet when not in use, but is very easy to knock loose. Without the pen, the tablet is useless except as a very expensive clipboard. I also want a little extra protection for the whole thing. So, another $40 will get you a fancy portfolio style holder that zips shut and will keep everything in place and protected.

There are a few other cool little features on the DigiMemo L2. The most significant one is that it will serve as a drawing tablet for your computer when it is plugged in with the USB cable. If you don’t already have a graphics tablet, this is a nice little bonus feature.

The DigiMemo L2 has already proved its worth to me. I’ve been using it to capture notes for new reports, e-books, and web content. I take it with me everywhere I go and know that everything I write is captured and ready to use. It is an ideal solution for any writer who likes to work longhand and wants to avoid the time and expense of typing up notes.

This problem never gets in the way when someone comes up and asks me for help! When that happens, I can zero in on my audience and give the information that is necessary to answer their questions.

A visitor to this website recently asked me a few simple questions and I ended up writing a 780 word mini-article in response (rendered in 12 point Arial type on a 5.5″ x 8.5″ page - that’s 4 solid pages of text!) This lead me to my ‘ah ha!’ moment. (I’m sure I didn’t invent this, it just finally sunk into my brain.)

The 20 Questions Book Writing System

This idea couldn’t be any simpler. Recruit one or more people who would benefit from the book you want to write. Ask them to provide you with 20 questions on your topic that they have always wanted answered. Steer them to ask big picture questions rather than detailed ones.

When you get the questions back, sort them into a sequence that makes sense to you. If a question is too narrow, try to make it more general and group together related topics into sections. This list is the chapter structure of your book. Now it is time to get to work.

Answer each question with a 5 or 6 page response that is directed toward your audience. You are on your way to a first draft of your book. I recommend creating your document in the same physical format as you envision for the final format. I have a 5×8_book_template in Microsoft Word format that you can download and use as a basis for your project.

Give your answers back to the people who provided the questions and have them review your responses. Ask them to give notes about anything that is unclear or extraneous.

Revise your first draft using the notes you get back from your question team and then start looking for experts in your field to submit chapters to for professional feedback. (Do not send them the whole text, just the chapters that are focussed on their specific expertise.) These are also the people you will want to approach for promotional blurbs for your book cover, front matter, and promotional materials. (Thanks go to Dan Poynter for this strategy.)

Revise your book using the notes provided by your subject matter experts. This draft should be a fairly well developed manuscript. At this stage it is a good idea to hire a professional editor to edit your book for spelling, grammer, consistency, and style. You may chose to go it alone, but a good editor will give your work a level of polish that is hard to do by yourself. If you don’t know any editors, a service like The Proofreaders can help you locate one.

Next Stop, The Printing Press

Once you have your manuscript is done, it is time to decide how to publish your book. You can create an e-book, submit it to publishing houses and agents, or go the self-publishing route. (If you want to pursue a traditional publisher, you should consider submitting your chapter outline - the list of 20 questions - and a sample chapter earlier in the process. If they want the book, this may be enough to get a contract.)

There are lots of layout and design issues to consider before your work is complete, but you have a book now!

I have been wanting to write a book on video lighting for independent movies for a while now. I asked a good friend, who is planning his own movie project right now, to help me with my 20 questions. I’m also soliciting questions on my indie film blog too! I expect this to be a useful strategy in my writing endeavors.

Blog - This one is pretty obvious. She already bought her name as a domain and I set her up with a WordPress blog. The focus of her blog will be on the world of a fiction writer, with news about her projects and signings, etc. I recommend she actively write about the book and drop hints and teasers about the story to build interest.

Book Website - She also bought the name of her main character as a domain. These types of books tend to result in a series of novels, with fans of the character becoming built-in audiences for each new book. For starters I recommended she make this a sales site and offer free advance chapters to people who sign-up for her mailing list. Later she can make it more of a fan site with a discussion forum and ancillary products and content.

Forum and Group Recruiting - I recommended that she start looking for forums and discussion groups with fans of this genre as well as fans of similar books. I told her to offer a sample chapter for people who join her mailing list and to mine that list for possible advance readers who would help generate buzz for the official release.

Blog Recruiting - My suggestion here is to find a number of bloggers who write about the genre (or even specific book series that have a similar tone) and recruit them to become advance readers. Feeding them advance copies of chapters and checking out how often (and what) they write about the book. Following up with those who are vocal fans will help with generating buzz for the release.

Those were some strategies that came up in our conversation. If you have done this type of marketing before, leave a comment and tell us what’s wrong or missing from this list.

These hurdles are not as high as they first appear and with the two strategies you are about to learn, they will shrink even further.

Staring down the blank page is like deciding to go on a cross country trip. Say you are in New York and decide to go to California. If you you just hop in the car and start driving west, every turn will be difficult because you really don’t know enough about where you are going to make a good choice. The wise traveler pulls out a map first and picks a few major stopping points on the trip. Then the specific roads to take to each point are selected. Once the trip is planned out, the driving begins.

The Road Map to a First Draft of Your Book

Most first time non-fiction authors don’t start out by looking at the map. There is a map for creating non-fiction books. The book map includes major way stops and the roads in between. When the writer consults the map, it becomes much easier to plan the journey. So, what is this map?

The map is other successful books. Spend a little time at the bookstore looking at similar books to the one you want to create and it becomes easy to see that there is a basic structure to all of them. Author and product creation consultant Fred Gleeck calls it the 25/4/2 system.

Books in the non-fiction world can be roughly broken down to 25 main topics (the chapters), 4 sub-topics inside each topic, and 2 paragraphs of actual content for each sub-topic. Organize your information around this road map and write the content and you will have a text that will work out to be approximately 120-150 pages in paperback format. This is a respectable length for a non-fiction book.

Creating the outline of these points is the “planning your trip” portion of the writing journey. The topics and sub-topics outline where you want to go. Writing the paragraphs for those sub-topics is the actual trip to your first draft.

So, step one is to create your 25/4/2 outline for your book.

Choosing the Fastest Way To Write

Once you know where you are going, it is time to choose the fastest vehicle to get you there. For me, dictation is the key to speed.

Rather than sitting down with a pen and paper, or at your computer keyboard, have a friend sit down with you and interview you based on your 25/4/2 outline. Your friend will ask you to explain each sub-topic and your responses will be the paragraphs in the first draft. Momentum is vital, so don’t stop to look up information or verify facts. Leave what I call a breadcrumb note for yourself and move on. A breadcrumb can be as simple as saying, “find statistics to back this up.”

After everything is recorded, hire a typist to transcribe your recording. That transcript is your very rough - but completed - first draft.

Now it is time to go through the text, cleaning up your breadcrumbs and smoothing out the language. After this first pass, you will be ready to share the first draft with some reviewers and get feedback for your second draft.

Finishing Your Book

There is still a lot of work to be done to move from the first draft to a completed book. But completing this draft is a major milestone and creates a momentum for the project that greatly increases the likelihood that your book will get finished.

Many first time writers (I am as guilty of this as anyone) start plowing into the writing without a plan and get lost in the content. Frustration builds until they abandon the project. But, when you have a first draft to show, the project becomes ‘real’ to you and other people can react to what you have created.

Plan your trip by consulting the road map and then get yourself a fast car!