Tutorial: making a ficlet booklet a quarter the size of 8.5x11 paper
My first fannish foray into renegade book-binding today! It’s so ugly (no fancy paper, no pictures or imprint, the margins are off, two blank sides have to be glued together & I still gotta bind it) but it’s mine 😎
So here’s how I got it done.
First, get your story together in a word processor. I was using Microsoft Word 2007 for this but I bet you could do this in LibreOffice too. Second, make sure your printer is set to duplex (print on both sides).
When you put your story into your word processor, order it this way: page 1 is the cover of your booklet, page 2 is the inside cover, page 3 is across from page 2 on the same spread, page 4 is on the other side of page 3 when ya turn the page & so on & so forth.
You must make sure the total page count is divisible by 4 (add blank pages if you must). Don’t forget that. Mine was 28 pages for a 2.6k word story (you have to blow up the font size because when you squeeze 4 of these pages onto a 8x11.5 sheet, the text naturally reduces; font sizes given below. Because it’s indecipherable, just want to share the title+author was 72 pt font)
When you fiddle with customized margins, don’t make the same mistakes I did. Here’re my mistakes so you know how these numbers correspond to the bad margins you see in my gif 😅👍:
Next go to this amazing website: http://workingonperfection.000webhostapp.com/booklet_printing.php.
Plug in your total page count to get the page number sequence you need for all the magic to happen. Ctrl+C that number sequence (under the “Four pages on each side” not “Two pages on each side”)
Go back to your doc, click ‘Print’ and paste the sequence into “Pages” under “Page range.”
And don’t do anything with “Zoom.” Keep it to 1 page, No Scaling.
It should look like this when you’re done:
Next click “Properties” next to the name of your printer at the top. You should get ‘Document Properties.’ Here, you keep things in Portrait orientation, Flip on Long Edge, page order doesn’t matter I don’t think, and then under Page Format, click ‘Pages per Sheet’ as 4.
It should look like this:
Moreover, make certain that in these previews you see above, Side 1 has that exact 1-2-3-4 order (it has to match up with the workingonperfection website’s 1-2-3-4 order). This order is also called “Right then Down” if you wanna click “Advanced” & make sure everything’s lookin good there:
Done? Great! Now print!
Big thank you to Tank0923 for his Youtube video on this x
and all my love to @renegadepublishing & its discord for getting me motivated to do this all day (both the attempt to create a booklet & write this tutorial 😅📚💛
