A couple of posts ago, I “debuted”, “Lucy’s Pocket” © 2020, a black and white picture book I created last year for my granddaughter for her Christmas present.  In my last post, I unveiled another picture book, “Adventures with phearnik!™” © 2021, that I wrote and illustrated, again, for the same granddaughter, this time for her birthday. (Hopefully, it will be a less chaotic time than Christmas to present her with a special book!)  So, I needed a copy of the book for the gift (soon!) and another for myself to have on hand to show and shop around.  Since I’m looking for an  agent to help me shop the book to publishers,  I’m not travelling the “conventional” self-publishing route. If I were, having just finished all the illustrations this past month, there would not be enough time to get the books printed by mid-November.   I also costed  “photo books” made by online photo book printers but the cost was a bit beyond my budget – around $50 per book for a 32 page 8” x 9” picture book.    So, I decided to travel a different “self-publishing” route and made built the books by hand.

I have been through the process of putting my own picture books together before with “Lucy’s Pocket” and another book I made for a nutrition unit for a family daycare provider training I developed. For both of those books, I took the original pages of text and illustrations I had laid out, one on card stock and the other on paper printed from my home printer and laminated, to Staples for copying and binding. With “Lucy’s Pocket,” Staples Print Services made a copy of the original  8” x 8” pages and spiral bound both the original and the copy into two books for less than $20 each. (More like two-for-one compared to a 32-page photo book from an online printer!)  Because many of the illustrations in “Adventures …” are full page spreads (occupying the whole of two facing pages), I did not want the book to be spiral bound (the full page spread illustrations would have a gap between the two facing pages) and  I wanted to try my hand at making my own hardcover book.

I started by using my personal home scanner and scanning my illustrations to the computer, saving them as jpeg photos. Then, I used Microsoft Publisher to layout the pages of the book. Publisher does not have book or booklet templates for custom sizes, so I had to create my own.  I made an 8” x 9” “Custom” “Blank” page and used this to lay out all 32 pages of the book.  I then imported my scanned illustrations onto the pages and copied and pasted my text from Word into text boxes in Publisher.

At first, my pages were presenting with a white border around each page.  Although it looked nice, I couldn’t have a border where the two pages came together in the center to make the full-page spread.  I finally figured out how to remove the borders and was able to layout the spreads.  Once the layout was complete, I used Staples again to print out the pages, but this time, I did it myself on one of their “self-copiers” using a pdf of the Publisher file saved on a thumb/jump drive. 

Because the “Adventures…” book pages are 8” x 9” and they were printed on 8 ½” x 11” paper, I had to cut each page down to size.  I unfortunately made the mistake of printing each page one sided instead of two-sided!  I can’t believe I did that!  (Even my husband said, “All book pages are two-sided”.  Like, “Duh”!)  I had to glue all the pages together to make them two sided, making sure each “front” page was glued to its corresponding “back” page.  Next time, I will be sure to print the pages two-sided!    After that, I laid out the pages, taped them together with Magic Tape, added the “end pages” (the ones that get glued to the inside of the cover) and stitched them together with my trusty, old metal Kenmore sewing machine and pressed them folded overnight. 

I then made the hard cover for the book.  I used an old, stained piece of 4 ply (1/16”) mat board (it was getting covered so the stains wouldn’t matter) cutting two pieces to the size of the finished book – 8” x 9” and a thin, ¼” x 8” piece for the spine.  I  covered the board with the front and back cover pictures.  This was tricky because the pictures only measured 8.5” x 11” so there was not enough “cover” to fold around to the inside of the board.  Because of this, I glued more paper onto the cover pictures so they could fold into the inside nicely.  Once the front and back covers were glued down, I glued down the end pages covering up the folded parts of the covers.  And after another overnight pressing, the book was complete!  I’m really pleased with how it came out. 

Now that I have “built” a hard cover picture book from start to finish, I am no longer intimidated by the process.  I recommend it as a good experience for any picture book illustrator.   (You may gain a new appreciation for publishers and printers! I certainly did.)   Plus, I may have started an annual tradition – giving a very special granddaughter a Nana book for her birthday (or maybe even Christmas)!

Have you ever put a hardcover book together from scratch?  Did you run into any issues?  Were you pleased with the results?  I’d love to hear about it in Comments!