Sorry for kind of dropping off the face of the earth in 2023. It was a rough year -- tl;dr a lot of festering RL work stuff exploded in spectacular fashion toward the end of 2022, and the fallout caused a lot of stress-induced health problems that killed my ability to do, uh, pretty much anything creative. But! At the beginning of December, I started a new job that's already lowered my stress levels considerably, and my brain is slooooowly inching back online as I explore wild concepts like "a full night's sleep" and "no more crippling migraines every other week." MADNESS.
I have high hopes I'll be able to get back into fanbinding in 2024. That said, it's going to take me a while longer before I feel comfortable taking on commissions again; I'm also rethinking my whole commission structure after seeing how other fanbinders have abused the process, how fic authors have reacted in turn, and pondering my lifelong stance on Fandom As Gift Economy. Generally, I think it's fair to pay for the material cost of physical works -- but I also hate how fandom has become yet another side hustle, and I despise binders who inflate their material costs while churning out subpar work. I might only allow commissions for author copies in the future. I might do an occasional lottery for a free book. I might ditch commissions entirely and just fling free books at everybody! I'm still deciding.
Either way, if you're still here, thanks for sticking around. May 2024 bring us all more great fic to enjoy. ❤️
(OH ALSO I finally registered the excineribusbooks.com domain, it just directs to my old carrd right now but y'all will be the first to know if it turns into, like. an actual ~website~)
My finished contribution to the @fandomtrumpshate craft bazaar! Honestly, this may be my favorite typeset I've done to date, combined with one of the more elaborate cutout designs I've made in a while. (I learned the hard way that it's time for me to change the blade on my Silhouette cutter, lol. Protip: if it's chewing up the paper/cloth on skinny elements like the pixellated raindrops + puddle here, get a new, sharper blade!) It included all the 80s cyberspace nonsense/vaporwave aesthetic I could cram into one book, some intensely sparkly decorative paper that popped against the black bookcloth exactly how I hoped it would, and yet another excellent last-minute endpaper find courtesy of the Renegade Retreat.
As I've gotten more proficient at typesetting, I've found I really love creating visual markers for POV swaps -- in this case, changing the drop caps and scene dividers depending on whether the chapter was from Sollux or Terezi's POV:
And of course, I have to give a huge shout-out to @isozyme and @roach-works for letting me include their art! (Alas, I forgot to snap a picture of roachpatrol's art before sending off the book, but it's this A+++ piece right here.)
As always, thank you so much to beanutbutter for their incredible generosity during FTH, and to the whole FTH team for running the auction! If you haven't had the chance to read "The Vienna Game" yet, you can at the link above.
we waste the same day like nobody dies by @magpieandwhale, illustrated by @cloudy-recesses
I've lovingly referred to this project as "We Waste the Same Day Like Nobody Dies: The Illustrated Edition" ever since its inception [mumblemumble] months ago (since, if you haven't seen it yet, @teleportbooks also made a beautiful binding of the same series!). magpieandwhale is another friend I've known for TWENTY FREAKIN YEARS somehow; I knew I was going to make her a copy of this as soon as she finished it, and I had the great joy of giving it to her in person last week while in her city for a family wedding ❤️
This was another design that got slammed sideways at the last minute by finding the perfect cover paper. Last month, Renegade Publishing had its first-ever retreat, which included plenty of paper for swap and sale -- and what should I find on the swap table but that incredible gold-and-black Art Deco-ish stuff? It fit so well with the titling I'd already done that I immediately switched it up from a full cloth binding to a quarter-binding, with an inset carved out of the board for the title to sit in. For contrast (and a little intentional clashing), I went with silver-and-black on the endpapers, to play with the idea of Xue Yang and Wang Haoxuan as two not-quite-separate entities with much more in common than either wanted to believe.
The spheres in the cover design reference a scene partway through the third story, "shatter what you will not carry":
Xiao Zhan twirls his pen and digs up a fresh piece of scratch paper. “Okay. Think of a ball of some sort.”
“Make it a football,” Yibo says, bone-dry. Involuntarily, Haoxuan laughs. His real legacy, right there.
Xiao Zhan scoffs. “Too complicated, I’m not drawing that.” He sketches out a sphere. “A ping-pong ball. One half is black, one half is white.” He draws a vertical line down the middle, giving it dimension, shading it into a half-moon. “Do you get it? Two colors, one ball. If you rotate it so one color is facing you, the other is still there. Sound familiar?”
Haoxuan glances at Yibo; his gaze is fixed on Haoxuan, stolid. It bores into him. Haoxuan swallows. He dabs his face with a napkin.
Xiao Zhan keeps narrating. His pen dashes across the image. “Okay, now spin the ball on its axis. It’s still the same ball, it’s still got both colors on each side. But now that it’s in motion, the colors blend. The ball is.” He wrinkles his nose. “Gray. Should have chosen better colors. But now it’s a whole new thing, still with its component parts. Are you following?”
And the art! THE ART. cloudy-recesses, thank you so so much for letting me include so many of your incredible pieces -- whether they were made especially for the fic or just so fitting that magpieandwhale yelled "THAT ONE! I LOVE THAT ONE!" as we were hashing out what to include.
You can read the whole series at the link above, and see a whole lot more of cloudy-recesses's art on their Tumblr!
So I've had some people ask about the supplies and equipment I use to make my books! This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it an official tutorial on how to make a book (for that, I recommend starting with Renegade Publishing's resource documents, DAS Bookbinding, or SeaLemon's YouTube tutorials -- all free, no patreon required!), but if you're floundering because you don't know what you need to get, hopefully this will help a little bit ❤️ If I discover more good resources or change up my style, I'll add to this post.
Of note: I'm based in the US, so this list is unfortunately pretty US-centric. Apologies!
SUPPLIES
Disclaimer #1: I have a background in book conservation, so I'm picky to a fault about the supplies I use. To make a long-lasting book, you want to look for "acid-free" or "archival" materials -- BUT, a lot of consumer craft stores have realized those are good buzzwords to slap on products even if they aren't really archival. Your best bet is to buy from stores that supply materials to libraries and archives; those tend to be higher quality and stick to actual archival standards. Talas, Hollander's, University Products, and Colophon Book Arts Supply are good places to start.
That said! If price matters more than longevity, hitting up Michaels or Joann Fabrics is totally fine. This is a hobby. The bookbinding police are not gonna come smash down your door because you didn't use archival-quality craft paper. My big recommendation, though: at least get your glue and paste from Talas. High-quality adhesive makes a huge difference in how well, and how long, a book holds together. Bad adhesives can turn brittle with time, stain your paper/cloth, and make all your hard work fall apart.
So, all that said, here's what I use:
BOARD - Davey Binder's Board, 0.098"
GLUE - Jade 403 PVA
PASTE - Zen Shofu wheat paste (you shouldn't have to buy more than half a pound -- a little goes a long way)
CLOTH - Either Arrestox or Dover bookcloth, which comes in a wide variety of colors and holds up extremely well to whatever you want to do to it
THREAD - 25/3 linen thread, which I run over a small block of beeswax to make it easier to handle and give it better "locking" properties as I sew. For bigger books of ten signatures or more, I sew onto 3/8" linen tapes for extra support.
DECORATIVE PAPER - Hollander's is a treasure trove of decorative papers for endsheets and covers; Talas has some really nice ones, too, but they tend to be pricier (since unfortunately everything at Talas has gotten a lot pricier lately)
PRINTING PAPER - Hammermill Colors paper, 20lb, in cream; 24lb is also a good weight that feels a little more substantial than regular printer paper. (I'll probably switch to 24lb once my 20lb paper runs out.) To get the right grain direction, I buy a ream of 11x17 paper and cut it in half to make standard letter-sized sheets (8.5x11). Here's a quick primer on grain direction and why it's important when making a book!
ENDBANDS - I've never had the patience to sew my own endbands (though I hope to gain that patience someday!), so I just use premade ones like these.
EQUIPMENT
Disclaimer #2: a lot of the stuff on this list is professional-grade (or close to it) with prices to match. You definitely don't have to buy everything right off the bat. It took me fifteen years to accumulate it all, and you can DIY a lot of bookbinding equipment -- a good googling will lead you to all sorts of innovative ways hobby bookbinders set up their shops. The Renegade Publishing resource documents also have a lot of A+ recommendations.
PRINTER - For text, I use a Brother B&W laser printer with auto-duplex (auto-duplex is key when printing a book); for images, both B&W and color, I use a Canon color inkjet printer set to at least 300 DPI. I fully admit having two printers is an absurd setup, but what laser printers can do well, inkjets absolutely suck at, and vice-versa -- and like I said, I'm hella picky. You can get by fine with a single laser printer! Just make sure it's got auto-duplex to save yourself a lot of pain.
GUILLOTINE - I have this model, which goes in and out of stock with some regularity. The trick with this guy is to (a) sandwich your text block between some scrap board so the clamp doesn't leave a dent, and (b) REALLY CRANK DOWN on the clamp as tight as you possibly can to keep the paper from shifting as you cut. This fixes 99% of the skewing problems mentioned in the reviews.
PRESS - I have a little cast-iron press I bought off a coworker for fifty bucks; similarly, you might have luck searching eBay, looking at Affordable Bookbinding Equipment (Jim does incredible work!), searching craft stores for a flower press, or even just using two pieces of wood and a few C-clamps. SeaLemon on YouTube also has a good video on how to DIY a book press.
PRESS BOARDS - For setting the hinges in the press, I use a pair of brass-edged boards like these. It's a good investment if you want to get really nice, crisp hinges, but it's also 100% possible to DIY brass-edged boards if you want. At my very first job, we even set our hinges by taping sewing needles to the book before putting it in the press!
FINISHING PRESS - I have this one, which I use to back my books in combination with these backing irons
BACKING HAMMER - To my chagrin, I've discovered that having an actual backing hammer makes backing a book way, way easier. Some folks have had good luck with a cobbler's hammer or just a regular old hammer from a hardware store, but I splurged on a student hammer from Hollander's, and it works fantastically. (I wouldn't recommend buying the "professional" hammers, though, because seriously, $90 for a hammer?! No.)
BONE FOLDER - I'm actually not a fan of bone folders made from real bone; I like Teflon folders a lot better for scoring and flattening. (Real bone folders tend to burnish the material, an effect I'm rarely going for.)
CUTTING MACHINE - A Silhouette Curio. This is 100% optional, but it's how I do the bulk of my cover designs, including cut-outs, embossing, foiling (with a foil quill attachment), and spine titling. The software and overall quality are way better than Cricut, and its 5mm clearance means you can fit more than just vinyl in there. Sadly, Silhouette has discontinued the Curio, but it's still possible to buy from third-party sellers -- and if you don't care about the 5mm clearance, I've heard good things about the Silhouette Cameo line.
A side note on vinyl, from the obnoxiously picky book conservator: if you're aiming for longevity with your books, using HTV in your book designs may not be the best idea. Not only can the adhesives be questionable, but the plasticizers in vinyl break down in really weird, gross ways once several decades have passed. That's why I tend to stick with cut-outs and foiling instead of HTV. But, again: if you just want to make something pretty, don't worry about it!
SOFTWARE
TYPESETTING - I use Affinity Publisher -- it's similar to Adobe InDesign, but with a flat cost instead of a bullshit subscription model. I am by no means an expert in this, since I've only been designing books for a couple years; pretty much everything I learned, I learned from Aliya Regatti's tutorial, plus or minus a lot of googling and noodling around. I've discovered that it does get cranky if your book is over 250 pages or so, meaning you may have to split longer fics into multiple files. That said, I've been really happy with it, and it goes on sale every now and then if the $70 price tag is too much.
As always, Renegade Publishing has a whole lot of tutorials for other software options, including Microsoft Word, InDesign, LaTeX, and Scribus if you already have access to one of those instead.
IMPOSITION - "Imposition" is when you lay out a book so all the pages are in order once you fold + gather the signatures. Since Affinity Publisher doesn't do this automatically on export, I use Bookbinder 3.0, which is an old but nice little Java program that breaks a single PDF into a series of properly imposed signatures. I usually set it to 6 sheets per signature.
MISCELLANEOUS
IMAGES
The Noun Project is a gigantic repository of basic SVGs and PNGs that are not only great for cutting machines, but for adding flourishes to your title page, chapter headings, and scene dividers. Every single book I've made has used at least one image from here; I pay for the yearly Noun Pro subscription, but it's not necessary to use the site.
Unsplash is perfect for photo elements
Pixabay not only has a great archive of photos, but illustrations and vector images as well
Surprisingly, Wikipedia also has a lot of good Creative Commons photos attached to their articles!
FONTS
1001Fonts is a good starting point for finding free fonts, as is FontSpace and DaFont
If you're willing to pay for fonts (and sometimes it's worth it for a well-designed font that's perfect for your project), Creative Fabrica and Pixel Surplus have some good stuff, including discounted bundles of multiple fonts
Hey everyone! For Fandom Trumps Hate 2023, I'll be joining the crafts bazaar and offering up a fanbinding work.
Fandom Trumps Hate is a yearly auction to raise money for progressive charitable causes -- you can find out more about it here, including the list of charities they're supporting this year. If you bid on my auction and win, you'll be sending the money directly to one of the charities on that list. It's a great way to support vulnerable communities AND get something cool and fannish out of it 😄
If you're coming from the official FTH site, you can take a look at my past work at the #ex cineribus books hashtag here on Tumblr. If you decide you'd like to bid, please look over my Carrd first for more information about what kind of fanfic I will and won't bind. (LEGAL NOTE: this isn't officially a commission, despite what the title of the Carrd says! Like I said further up, I won't be receiving any money for this work, not even for supplies.) The tl;dr: I'm open to all fandoms except Harry Potter, for works between 30k-150k words, but do have some DNWs/triggers that I ask you check beforehand. You'll also need to get permission from the author first unless (a) you wrote the fic, (b) it's a surprise gift for the author, or (c) the author's made a public statement okaying not-for-profit fanbindings of their work.
When bids open on March 1st, you can fill out this form! Bidding starts at $25; you can view the current high bid at this spreadsheet.
Good luck, and if you have any questions, DM me here or shoot me an email at excineribusbooks @ gmail.com!
is there a way to hide email addresses on your bidding form?
Oh, crap, thank you for letting me know -- I was hurriedly setting everything up on mobile yesterday morning and forgot to hide the column. It's hidden now!
Hey everyone! For Fandom Trumps Hate 2023, I'll be joining the crafts bazaar and offering up a fanbinding work.
Fandom Trumps Hate is a yearly auction to raise money for progressive charitable causes -- you can find out more about it here, including the list of charities they're supporting this year. If you bid on my auction and win, you'll be sending the money directly to one of the charities on that list. It's a great way to support vulnerable communities AND get something cool and fannish out of it 😄
If you're coming from the official FTH site, you can take a look at my past work at the #ex cineribus books hashtag here on Tumblr. If you decide you'd like to bid, please look over my Carrd first for more information about what kind of fanfic I will and won't bind. (LEGAL NOTE: this isn't officially a commission, despite what the title of the Carrd says! Like I said further up, I won't be receiving any money for this work, not even for supplies.) The tl;dr: I'm open to all fandoms except Harry Potter, for works between 30k-150k words, but do have some DNWs/triggers that I ask you check beforehand. You'll also need to get permission from the author first unless (a) you wrote the fic, (b) it's a surprise gift for the author, or (c) the author's made a public statement okaying not-for-profit fanbindings of their work.
When bids open on March 1st, you can fill out this form! Bidding starts at $25; you can view the current high bid at this spreadsheet.
Good luck, and if you have any questions, DM me here or shoot me an email at excineribusbooks @ gmail.com!
Hey everyone! For Fandom Trumps Hate 2023, I'll be joining the crafts bazaar and offering up a fanbinding work.
Fandom Trumps Hate is a yearly auction to raise money for progressive charitable causes -- you can find out more about it here, including the list of charities they're supporting this year. If you bid on my auction and win, you'll be sending the money directly to one of the charities on that list. It's a great way to support vulnerable communities AND get something cool and fannish out of it 😄
If you're coming from the official FTH site, you can take a look at my past work at the #ex cineribus books hashtag here on Tumblr. If you decide you'd like to bid, please look over my Carrd first for more information about what kind of fanfic I will and won't bind. (LEGAL NOTE: this isn't officially a commission, despite what the title of the Carrd says! Like I said further up, I won't be receiving any money for this work, not even for supplies.) The tl;dr: I'm open to all fandoms except Harry Potter, for works between 30k-150k words, but do have some DNWs/triggers that I ask you check beforehand. You'll also need to get permission from the author first unless (a) you wrote the fic, (b) it's a surprise gift for the author, or (c) the author's made a public statement okaying not-for-profit fanbindings of their work.
When bids open on March 1st, you can fill out this form! Bidding starts at $25; you can view the current high bid at this spreadsheet.
Good luck, and if you have any questions, DM me here or shoot me an email at excineribusbooks @ gmail.com!
I’m trying to get into book binding but am lost, do you have any tips or where to start supply wise?
Hey! I'm working on a big list of supplies that I hope to post this upcoming week 😊 In the meantime, I always recommend folks check out the resources at @renegadepublishing -- they not only have some great tutorials and resource lists, but a gigantic Discord full of fanbinders eager to help newbies.
Pop quiz! You've got a fic that revolves around a secret identity. Do you create an inlay or a cutout on the cover?
Luckily, I had a ton of photomanips to pick from for the cutout portion -- nearly every chapter included a graphic or two. Which led to another design question: while typesetting the fic, did I want to sprinkle the graphics throughout like I've done with fanart in the past, or collect them all in one place?
The graphics were part of the summaries and/or author's notes, and they weren't always chapter-specific; plus, they occasionally had their own captions that worked great on AO3, but might've interrupted the flow of the story in a typical book. So I decided to go with the latter and create a "bonus materials" section that included the graphics, some info about outtakes/side chapters, and the chapter-by-chapter author's notes.
You can read "The Crimson Lotus" at the link above!
A few people in the tags of my last post were like, "HOLY SHIT, HOW DID YOU GET THE DESIGN SO NEAT AND CRISP WITH A HANDHELD FOIL QUILL??"
and my secret is....... it wasn't a handheld foil quill 😅
We R Memory Keepers also makes a foil quill attachment for cutting machines like Cricut, Silhouette, etc -- you can set it up the same as you would a sketch pen, and it'll foil the design onto your bookcloth. The initial setup is a little finicky, but as you can see, it works beautifully one you get it going! I've only tried it on commercially-available bookcloths that say they "take blind and foil stamping well" (Arrestox is a favorite of mine), because it's pretty functionally similar to a hot stamping machine if you do it right.
I hope to write up a post with more details soon! It's such a good alternative to HTV, for real, and you can do so many pretty things with it.
Much like when I got my first taste of drop caps, I've become a foil quill menace. I've always liked hot foiling more than HTV for preservation reasons -- vinyl plasticizers and adhesives can turn pretty gross after a few decades -- and this book gave me the chance to try a full design in nothing but foil. It fit perfectly with a sci-fi Wangxian AU!
Circles play a big role in the story, so I included them in as many places as possible: the cover circuity, the endpapers, the scene dividers (a little mini solar system map!), and the title page. The title design also reflects Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian's traits in the fic, with Lan Wangji always looking to earth and Wei Wuxian always looking to the stars -- a complementary mirror of each other.
The whole of "symmetry" is just lovely, and I hope you'll read it at the link above!
Can I ask what color duo was used here? Is it Mud Bath? Thank you 😊
It is! Good eye 😄 Technically it's the "Nile" colorway that Colophon Book Arts sold, but they used a lot of different names for their Duo offerings, and it's functionally identical to Mud Bath.
Giant moment of YIKES today: listening to a podfic on ao3, and then being smacked at the end with the podficcer's patreon advertisement, where folks pay to get access to podfic. Glancing at their works where this advertisement appears, it's all blanket permission stuff.
Folks getting into podfic: DO NOT DO THIS. First, advertising patreons on ao3 is a huge no go, even when you do it auditorily rather than via text. It is very much against terms of service, and puts the site at risk. Second, though: authors giving you blanket permission to podfic are not giving you permission to make money off their work. I can't believe I need to say this, but if you are going to record fic for money? You need that fic author's SPECIFIC permission. And you should probably be sharing any proceeds with them, though that is something you can negotiate individually. But taking something freely offered for free transformative use and making money from it? That is a huge violation of trust in the community, and could result in authors pulling their blanket permission.
But DG, you may say, I should get to turn my side hobby into a hustle just like fanartists do! Fine. If you are a skilled podficcer who produces high quality audio, you already have an option for that - go pick up work as an audiobook narrator on audible. It's not hard for a skilled reader to find ocassional gig work that way, and it's something I did years ago when I was poor and unemployed.
In summary: Don't put the whole podfic community at risk just to make a buck. Follow the rules of the sites you use, respect authors' rights, and look elsewhere for your side hustle.
I see this happening a lot with fanbinding, too, and it HAS led to authors retracting their blanket permissions because folks have lied and said they were "not for profit" or "only charging for materials" while their commission rates started at, like, $100.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I have a background in book conservation. I know what high-quality materials are. I don't skimp. And the most I've ever spent on materials for a single (non-leather) book?
$60.
So if someone's charging significantly more than that "just for materials," odds are extremely high they're pocketing the extra. And I'm still mad as hell they've ruined it for the rest of us.
Gonna reblog this over here, too, because I'll 100% die mad about it. Pay careful attention to what "not for profit" fanbinders charge, be wary if they lock anything behind a paywall, and never commission anyone whose actions screw over their fellow fans in service of a quick buck.
forgive us the days forgotten to fear by @animatedamerican
So I've known Batya for close to twenty years now. (Holy shit.) Every year, our friend group does a secret holiday craft exchange -- and when she proudly told us she'd just finished writing her first big novel-length fic, I sidled over to the organizer and went, "Hey, so... can I game the system a little this year and make Batya a book?"
My reach felt like it exceeded my grasp a bit at times, because the entire de Rolo crest? That's a bookcloth inlay. I jigsawed together all those tiny (and not-so-tiny) pieces from five or six different colors of bookcloth. There was one horrible moment where I upended all of them on the floor and almost wanted to commit crimes, BUT! It worked! I already know what I want to tweak the next time I do such a complex inlay, so this was a great learning experience AND a great chance to make a gift for a lovely person ❤️
I also finally switched away from Lora as my default body text. I'd never been super-happy with its kerning in a few spots, but it took a bit to find a good replacement: Libre Caslon Text, which has a similar visual feel and far fewer kerning problems.
I used a Silhouette cutting machine! They're similar to a Cricut, but with better software and less paywalling of important features. I cut out the bunnies on the cover cloth, then cut the same design on two different colors of bookcloth and fit it all together like a jigsaw puzzle.
The bunnies themselves I got from The Noun Project, which is a fantastic resource for simple PNG and SVG design elements.
