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How to Layout Books and Zines – Guide to Document Set-Up (Revised)

InDesign logo with an angry domo face.

Welcome aboard!

If you’re here, you probably got bit by the self-publishing bug and want to learn how to layout your own books of some kind. While I specialize in tabletop game books, this guide can be used to make any kind of publication. Should you find you have helpful or constructive feedback, please reach out.

Before you get started with this article, you’re going to need the right software for the job; I’ll be using InDesign in this article, and if you don’t already pay for the Adobe Creative Cloud, InDesign alone is $22.99 a month, as of writing. Affinity Publisher is a solid and more affordable long-term software, coming in with a $69.99 one-time purchase. Affinity Publisher’s software is similar enough to InDesign’s for this article to be relevant, though some adaptation may be required.

As beginners, the primary features we want from purpose-built software are master pages, paragraph styles, grids and guides. These are the magical things that make your life easier, save time, and make all of your text still line up neatly after you’ve sprinkled ten different headers of various fonts and sizes across the pages.

This article is a combination of things I’ve learned across a spectrum of books, blog posts, videos, and old fashioned trial and error. Since I’ve gotten a lot of questions about this, we’re going to cover all of the basics and get a firm foundation under us. We’ll cover setting up a document, adding our grids, learning a few essential controls, and chat a bit about the technical side of laying out pages.

The only things you’ll need to follow this guide are your manuscript and either a copy of InDesign or Affinity Publisher.


  1. A starting note.
  2. Plan ahead.
  3. Setting up the document.
  4. Setting up your grids.
  5. A worthy aside: Professional standards.
  6. Add your text.
  7. Rough format your text.
  8. Snap your text to the grid.
  9. Outro.

A starting note.

Publishing software is not for word processing. Ideally, you’ll have the text for your project complete and generally spellchecked and proofread before you open a program to format. Making big edits in your neatly formatted pages can become a heartbreaking and headache inducing complication. If you are formatting for an early PDF release of something you’re still working on, you’ll do yourself a favor by keeping the layout simple and flexible. If you do an intricate layout on a draft, it’s best to know upfront you’re likely going to have to do it all over again later.


Plan ahead.

Know what size book you want to make before you begin. It’s helpful to look at your own bookshelf and measure books similar to yours. In game design, the most common book sizes are Half-Letter (5.5×8.5”), A5 (148x210mm), 6×9, and Letter (8.5×11″). For fiction books, the most common sizes are Half-Letter and 6×9, while children’s books seem to come in any size you can dream up.

Changing the size of your pages later is just as tough a task as making any other large edits. If you can avoid it, do so. That said, as long as you follow along, you can make whatever size of book you want, and the process remains the same. 

Once you know what size you need for your project, we can get started.

A note about staple-spine zines and booklets in particular.

The classic zine dimension is Half-Letter size in the US, and A5 pretty much everywhere else. Because zines are traditionally a shoestring-budget indie production, they are made to be printed on a standard piece of paper that is folded in half, with the spine stapled to create a booklet. Each piece of letter-sized paper, front and back, becomes four booklet pages.

These look tricky to set up, but with InDesign’s “Print as Booklet” feature, you set them up just like any other book and the program will do the rest. For this article I’ll be setting up one document that works for digital viewing (PDF), professional printing (PUR bound, hardbound, or printed as a booklet), or printing from home as a booklet.

Warning, we’re about to get technical: 64 booklet pages (16 full pages folded in half) with a paper weight of 80#, plus 4 cover pages (1 full page folded in half) with a 100# cardstock weight, is about the maximum size for a zine with a stapled spine. Check with your preferred printer in advance, as some have a lower, 44 page (11 full pages folded in half), maximum. Any larger and you’ll need something like PUR binding (softcover) or hardcover binding, and you may be better served by a different book size, because folks on the whole like their collections to match. 

Read more about paper weight on this page: at JamPaper.com.


Setting up the document.

Open up your InDesign and click the shiny ‘New File’ button. Under Preset Details we’re going to set a few parameters before we hit the Create button. 

  • Size. Change Units to Inches, then Width: 5.5 in, Height 8.5 in (or the size you chose), portrait orientation (the tall one), and make sure the little ‘Facing Pages’ box is ticked, it makes planning two-page spreads much easier. 
  • Pages. Make a ballpark estimate of how many pages you’ll need. I prefer to have more than I need and delete the extra later, but adding more is just as easy. In this example I’ll just pop in the max for zines: 64. Start # 1 is fine.
  • Columns. Unless you plan to format the lion’s share of your pages in Columns, set the Columns to 1, and any old Column Gutter (the space between columns we’re not using right now) is fine. For a zine or 6×9” book, a single column is usually preferred. In an 8.5×11” book you see two column layouts become more common.
  • Margins. For 5.5×8.5” zines, I like a 0.5” Outer Margin (white space) around all sides of my pages. If I am formatting something I plan to print, I make the Inside Margin 0.6” to make up for the dip where the spine is folded. When in doubt, set it up as though you intend to print it at some point.  

For books (6×9” or larger), I find that an Outer Margin of 0.625” looks pleasing.  If it is intended to go to print, I make the Inside Margin 0.79” to account for the binding. This looks great all the way up about 300 pages at 80# weight, after that you’ll need to increase the gutter by 0.06” for every 100 pages.

Aside: Another term for the Inside Margin is the Gutter Margin and there are other ways to set up your Gutter, this is how I prefer to do it. 

  • Set your Bleed to 0.125” for Top, Bottom, and Outside. Set the Inside Bleed to 0. When you go to print later, books set up as two-page spreads with an Inner Bleed can get funky, and we’re just covering the basics here. Bleeds allow you to print all the way to the edge of any given page. Without bleed, you need a 0.125” interior margin of whitespace around the edge of every page to print.
  • Check the ‘Primary Text Frame’ box; this will do pretty much what it sounds like, and automatically make the area of the page left after you set your Margins into ready to go text boxes. As a beginner, it will also save you potential headaches with text overflow errors later.
  • Leave Slugs at 0, we don’t use them for our purposes, and hit ‘Create’. 
  • If you do not have your InDesign workspace set up specifically for your workflow already, or if you are otherwise completely new to InDesign, after your new document opens: Go to the top of the screen, click Window, then in the dropdown menu, click Workspace, and finally click Book (Window > Workspace > Book).  This Workspace preset is great for our purposes, and now your page should look something like the below.

Setting up your grids.

At the top left of the screen head over to (Edit>Preferences>Grids). We’ll use the following parameters in the box that pops up.

  • Color: The default is usually Light Blue, but I typically like to set it to something just barely visible. You can tinker with the color until it feels right. To change it, use the dropdown menu and choose a preset color, or, at the bottom of the menu you’ll see ‘Custom…’ where you can create your own color. I like to make a custom light grey here. 
  • Start: I like to set the baseline grid that we’ll be using to evenly space all of our text to start after my top Margin ends, in this case that’s 0.5” Relative to: Top of Page. 
  • Increment Every: 14 pt is really friendly for beginners and great for old hats, so that’s what I’ll use. Later, after you understand the basics, if you want more control over exact positioning of headers, you might try 7 pt. 
  • View Threshold: I prefer 50% – this just means that as long as your zoom is 50% or higher, you’ll see the grids, provided you’re not in Preview mode.

Click ‘OK’.

You may notice that nothing changed on the page. If this is the case for you, head back to the top left of your screen and click (View > Grids & Guides > Show Baseline Grid). – If you still don’t see your grid, make sure you’re not zoomed out further than the View Threshold you set. If the grid is still hiding from you at this point, make sure you’re not in Preview Mode. Hit your Escape key first, to ensure you have the Selection Tool active, and then hit “W” to toggle Preview view on and off. 

On that note, either way, go ahead and hit your Escape Key to ensure that you have the Selection Tool Active and then hit your W key a couple of times to toggle back and forth between Preview mode and Work mode because it’s a handy shortcut you’ll use a lot. 

Now your screen should look something like the below. 


Let’s get professional… or at least learn to fake it. A worthy aside.

Before we really dive into it, there are some details worth covering. When you make a zine you’re allowed to throw any and all rules out the window, but it’s still worth knowing what those rules are. If you’re setting up a book rather than a zine right now, you’ll want to stick around for this.

  • The first page of a book always begins on the left-hand side, and it is always a title page. It should have your title, subtitle, author’s name, and/or name of your publishing company. Not having a title page is a red flag to professionals, it tells them they are looking at an unprofessionally self-published book.
  • Your next page(s) are going to be copyright first–It’s worth looking at other professionally published books in your industry to see how they set up their copyright pages–followed by any credits, acknowledgments, thank yous, forewords, and/or dedications, wanted or needed.
  • The next page(s) of your book contain your Table of Contents. 
  • The first chapter of a book should always start on the right-hand side. Sometimes that leaves a blank left-hand page. You can add art, or a small detail, or just leave it blank, but do not have your chapter 1 text start on the left, that’s another red flag. (Subsequent chapters can begin on either the left or right side, or always on the right side, as you prefer.)
  • When formatting your page numbers, Page 1 should appear on the first page of Chapter 1. Odd numbered pages are always on the right, even numbered pages are always on the left.
  • When formatting text you want to remove any “widows” or “orphans”. That is, the first line of a new paragraph should never appear alone at the very bottom of a page (widow), and the last line of a paragraph should never appear alone at the top of a new page (orphan). When this occurs, it can be remedied by subtly changing the word spacing, or by changing the contents of the problem paragraph when necessary.
  • “Word widows” also look messy. This is when the last word of a paragraph appears on its own line. You can usually get rid of word widows by changing word spacing in the paragraph. If I can’t get rid of it easily, I like to make sure there are at least two words on the last line instead. Some publishers say a word widow is fine as long as it’s at a five letter (or longer) word. Your preference may also vary. 

Suggested Reading! If you’re not snoring yet, check out this article for additional terminology and general detail regarding typesetting books: at 1106design.com.


Add your text. 

You can copy and paste any text into your InDesign document, but ideally, you’re dropping in a Word document. I say this because, with a little know-how, InDesign will preserve your Word document’s styles: things you’ve bolded or italicized, for example. If you’ve already invested time in early formatting, it’s worthwhile to just bring it along. We’ll cover both options.

Place a Word document:

  • To place your file, use the upper left-hand menu and navigate [File>Place…] or use the keyboard command Crtl+D instead.
  • Click the “Show Import Options” box on the popup menu before you choose your file by either highlighting it and clicking the Open button, or just double clicking it.
  • A Microsoft Word Import Options box will open. Ensure that “Import Styles Automatically” is toggled on and then click OK.
  • You can see that there is now a box of text that is following your mouse pointer around inside InDesign. You now have a “loaded” cursor. Be careful not to accidentally click anywhere inside InDesign during this step.
    • Without clicking, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard. The icon closest to your mouse cursor will change to a curvy arrow. Release the Shift key and it will turn back to the dotted line icon. The difference between these two modes is an important one. If you try to drop your text into the document while the dotted text icon is visible, meaning you are not holding the Shift key, you will only fill in a single page depending on how you set up your document at the start. If you drop your text while the curvy arrow icon is showing, meaning you are holding the Shift key, InDesign will automatically flow the text onto all pages. So, let’s hold down our Shift keys and drop our text.
    • To place the document that has now been loaded onto your cursor, make sure you’re on page 1 of your InDesign document. Press the Shift key to activate flowing text, and then click in the interior of the upper left-hand corner of your designated text box.

*If you missed the ideal spot to click and drop your document, like say, you clicked on the upper left-hand corner of the page in the margin space rather than inside the text box, and your text is appearing outside of your designated text area, this isn’t a big deal. Only the first page’s text box will be the wrong size. Hit the Escape key on your Keyboard, or manually select the Selection Tool in the right-hand menu, to ensure you have your Selection Tool activated and then click once on the text in question. You should now see a resize box appear around your text. You can click and drag any side or corner to school the wayward text block back into bounds.

Copy and paste plain text:

  • Select all of the body of text you would like to copy over by highlighting it or using the keyboard command Ctrl+A, then right-click the highlighted text and select Copy.
  • Inside InDesign, manually select the Type Tool in the right-hand menu or press the T on your keyboard to ensure your Type Tool is active.
  • Double-click in the upper left-hand corner of your first text box and then either use the keyboard command Ctrl+V, or right-click and select Paste.

Trouble shooting:

If your text is cut off, it has failed to flow onto the next page and you have overset text. You’ll see the Error Status bar at the bottom of your workspace go from green and displaying “No errors”, to red and displaying “# errors”. InDesign knows something is up and is alerting you so you can fix it. This most likely occurred because you did not select the “Primary Text Frame” box during document set-up. Good news is there are a ton of ways to handle this issue after your document has been set-up, so for the moment I’ll just drop a link to an in-depth article that outlines them all, and you can pick your poison based on how advanced you want to get: at Redokun.com.


Rough format your text.

Now that your text is set in your InDesign document, you’re probably noticing it doesn’t look great, and it hasn’t aligned to those grids you lovingly set-up a moment ago. Never fear, we just need to make some fun adjustments first and then we can snap our text to our grids!

  • Open your Paragraph Styles. Press F11 to open the window, or use the top menu (Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles) to open the window.
  • If you pasted in plain text without formatting, using Ctrl+A to select all of your text, then click on [Basic Paragraph] in the Paragraph Styles menu to assign it as the base style to all of your text. Otherwise, you’ll see something like Normal+ as an option in your menu, meaning InDesign is already using an imported style from Word. In either case, now we can do some preliminary formatting to make sure there are no double spaces between our lines or any other shenanigans.
  • Right click [Basic Paragraph] or Normal+ (or similar) if it is available, and choose Edit ”[Basic Paragraph]”… to bring up your Paragraph Style Options window.
  • Click Preview in the lower left-hand corner of the window to activate it, first thing, so you can see your changes live on the screen.

There are three key Paragraph Style Options in the left-hand side menu of the box you just opened for beginners to get to know early on. They are: Basic Character Formats, Hyphenation, and Justification. So, let’s dig in!

1. Basic Character Formats

This is where you change your font type.

  • As a beginner, choose a font that matches your theme while being easily legible, and double check that your chosen font is licensed for legal commercial use. A quick Google search of “[font name] license” will usually do the job.
  • Choose a font size. As a general rule, 9-11 pt is good for most fonts, based on your preference. Lower than 9 pt and you start getting accessibility issues, higher than 11 can look good on the screen but ends up looking horsey and cartoonish when you print it.

Optional, nitnoid step: After I have identified the font I want to use, I take a minute to open up a word processor and copy+paste any old paragraph a few times, and change it to the font in question. Then I change the size of each paragraph by .5 pt in the range I am interested in looking at off screen. Finally, I print that page. With the printed page I decide which size best meets my aesthetic need for the project I’m working on.

For my purpose I have chosen the font ‘Karma’ and settled on 10.5 pt.

2. Hyphenation

You know how when you get to the end of a line, sometimes the last word is broken (roughly) in half and continued on the next line to keep the ragged edge of the line attractive? Or to keep justified text from having to crowd or space out more than desirable? InDesign is natively very open-handed with its hyphenations. Left to its own devices, InDesign will hyphenate a lot of text and leave your project hard to read smoothly and amateur-looking.

You can turn hyphenation off entirely, but unless that is your desired style for a specific reason, it is overkill, and will cause a lot more inconsistencies in the appearance of your body of text. Instead, I like to just give it more strict rules, like the following:

Words with at Least: 7 letters.

After First: 4 letters.

Before Last: 3 letters.

Hyphen Limit: 2 hyphens

Everything else as default.

3. Justification:

It’s worth taking a moment to fiddle with this knob now. When you set your text to justify, meaning all lines span the entire width of the designated space, InDesign has to make adjustments to the spaces between the words or sizes of the characters themselves. Natively, it’s settings are not the best.

  • The following settings will help save you time manually fixing problem lines later.
    • Word Spacing: Minimum 85%. Desired 100%. Maximum 125%.
    • Letter Spacing: Minimum -5%. Desired 0%. Maximum 5%.
    • Glyph Scaling: Minimum 98%, Desired 100%, Maximum 102%.
    • Everything else as default.

Once everything above is settled, click OK and we’ll get to the good stuff!


Snap Your Text to the Grid.

Now, the moment of truth, when we make our text line up with the grids as we intended at the outset.

  • Open up the Paragraph panel (Window > Type & Tables > Paragraph).
  • Use the Ctrl+A keyboard command to select all of the text in your document.
  • Click the little Align to Baseline Grid button at the very bottom-right corner of the Paragraph panel.

You’ve done it! You should now be seeing a much cleaner looking page, more like the following:


Outro.

Woof. You didn’t think we were going to make it here, did you? If you followed along you now have a completely set up canvas for your artistic vision to grace, and hopefully a little knowledge about why we made the decisions we did, so you can make educated choices for each of your projects going forward. You can’t hear it, but I’m cheering for you.

Love y’all,

Navi



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