leonardo menezes

I believe your exact words were "pics or it didn't happen" (though I admittedly wasn't the anon in that's ask)

So here it is, by printed and bound version of what has quickly become my favorite fanfiction - Salvage, by MuffinLance

Still waiting on the last chapter obviously, (Currently praying to a tiny child god) but once it's done, the book is only a few short steps away from being finished. I am loving the outcome and can't wait to finish this project!

Quote on back is from chapter 12: "When Ozai called him son, it was as different from how Hakoda said it as the crew's laughter was to the Fire Nation royal court's. As 'couldn't go back' was from 'wouldn't'."

End id.]

Disclaimer: I had never bound a book prior to this.

Step 1: Formatting and Printing

Once I had decided that I did indeed want to print and bind Salvage, I started by formatting what I came to call the “Master Text”. 

To make the master text, I made a word document and immediately went to File>Print>Page Setup.

When you do this, a menu will pop up, go to Multiple Pages, and select book fold. At the top of the menu, under Margins, you will also be able to change the margins. in the picture below you can see my preferred settings. Be sure to also change the Gutter (It will automatically be set to 1″ on all sides. IMPORTANT: change Margin settings after selecting bookfold, as when you select bookfold they will be flipped)

(my margins are .8" top and bottom, .5" inside and outside, and .25" gutter)

Once this is all done, go back to your document and start working - it will be a little hard to notice, but your page will be changed, and what you see on each page will be how it should look once it’s printed.

At this point, I basically just copied and pasted the entirety of the fic into the Master Text, formatted the chapter titles to look pretty, numbered the pages, and added a Table of Contents on the first page. I usually make my font size 9 so that the thickness of the book is as thin as possible to save on printing, while still being very readable. (smallest readable font size is 5, by the way. In case anyone was wondering.) I also like my font to be Times New Roman, since it’s universal.

This is when things get tricky, so bear with me. 

I would imagine that someone with their own printer could set their “Sheets per booklet” setting to 4 (shown above as set to 16 but that is [probably] not correct) and just go ahead and print the whole thing. and be done with it.

However, in my case, I wanted to be able to control how much I printed (since the last chapter is not out yet, and I was paying for how many pages I was printing) AND I was using my school printer system, which went through google docs which took all my stuff and change the font and the spacing, and overall was just a disaster.

SO for anyone who would like to control how many pages you print at a time (which I have actually found super useful regardless) the following steps and information are for you.

First thing you need to know is that your pages should be grouped into “Signatures”, which are made up of 4 sheets of paper, printed front and back, which will contain 16 of your book pages. Below is an illustration demonstrating this.

So what I have done is made a folder for each Signature, and in each folder is 4 documents - one for each sheet in the Signature. Each document has two pages - formatted Landscape, with the same margins as the Master Text. In layout, make it so that each page has two columns. Each column will end up being a page in your book.

In the footer, you can manually type each page number and use the space bar to put them in opposite corners of the document. Be sure to mark either “Different odd and even pages” or “Different first page” so that the two sides of the sheet can have the numbers for all the pages. 

IMPORTANT: be sure to format the gutter between the two columns. If you’re following my margin and formatting, the gutter between the columns will be 1.5″. With custom margins, the formula is:

(side margins x 2) + (gutter x2) = column gutter

I label my Signatures A-Z for ease of finding and following along. Here is a chart breaking down how the first 5 signatures should pan out. The different colors dictate that they are on the same sheet, the different tones of those colors dictate that they are on the same side of the sheet. If you have trouble figuring it out past that point please feel free to message me and I can help you.

IMPORTANT: Your smallest and largest number on each sheet should always be on the same side, with the smallest number being on the right side, and the largest being on the left. On the other side of the sheet they should be in numerical order. (As shown in the above chart.) In other words, each sheet will have two sets of consecutive numbers - they should be diagonal from one another.

Once you have all that figured out use your Master Text to copy the page you need and paste it in the correct column. Do this for all of your pages.

(Optionally, this is also where you can do some fun formatting, such as adding Headers or designs to your pages, as these will be the final copy)

IMPORTANT: If you are adding a table of contents - that will be on your page 1. (I also like to make this the title page.)

When you have every sheet for every signature done - you are ready to print. Print each sheet double sided, on the short edge. When I was printing I printed 1 signature at a time, made sure everything looked right, folded each sheet individually, and stacked the four sheets to make each signature.

FUN FACT: My Salvage print is a projected 18 Signatures.

Step 2: The Fun Part

Here is where I step back and let a professional do the talking. Here is how to make what is called a Text Block:

Here is a more in depth video on the stitching style used in the above video:

Feel free to check out more of this lady’s videos. She recommends a lot of products you can use and has a lot of videos on different stitching styles, though I’ve found this on to be my favorite.

For the “two thick sheets” of paper, she mentioned towards the end of the video (the black ones she glued to the front and back), I’m using construction paper. In fact, I just went out and bought a pack of construction paper, of which I will use almost exclusively for everything else in my Salvage printing and binding process.

She also uses a number of tools in these video, such as an awl and bone folder (whatever the heck that is). Instead of an awl, I used a pushpin, and instead of a bone folder I used my fingers, or my ruler.

And finally, for the cover I have this video:

In this video she uses something called bookcloth, which you can buy or make pretty cheaply, but I had construction paper, so I decided to use the contraction paper, which works just as well, and is even cheaper.

The problem with my construction paper, was that the kind I bought wasn’t big enough to cover the entire length of the cover - which is how I came up with the two toned cover idea, with the spine being different from the side flaps. (I also really liked the way it looked

To get this effect I cut out my chip board for the sides (which you could also get fairly inexpensively..... or you can by a cheap binder and cut out the board from within, like I did) measured out as instructed in the video, and wrapped them both in the color of paper that I wanted. I used the purple dries-clear glue stick Elmer’s glue sells, and it worked so good, but you have to work quickly because it dries fast. I also recommend having it dry pressed underneath a Flat Heavy Object TM, like a text book or something, so that it dries flat. 

TIP: Use a glue stick when gluing your material to your covers, but use liquid glue when gluing the signatures together. If you want more information on what kind of glue to use, check out this other video. But also keep in mind she is mostly talking about gluing “perfect bound text blocks” which means they aren’t sewn together at all. (therefore Elmer’s craft bond should work fine for gluing signatures)

When I finally got an idea of how thick the spine was going to be (I recommend having a finished text, so that you can just trace the spine like she did in the video, but I’m impatient) I cut that out, as well as the spine color construction paper. I knew I wanted an inch of overlay onto the sides of the book, so I did the following math:

(side cover overlay (1 in) x 2) + 1/2 in + spine width = width of black spine paper.

After that I decorated the cover as I liked, highly recommend metallic sharpies and pens, and practicing on scrap paper.

Finally, I will (eventually) glue the text block to the cover, as shown in the hard cover video.

I don’t feel particularly great at drawing chain-mail either but there’s a technique I learned from a tutorial a bunch of years ago that I think makes a pretty good texture. It’s fast and the end result is cartoon-y enough to match a less photo-realistic style. I can’t for my life find the tutorial so I’ll recreate it here (using Photoshop):

1. Fill your canvas with black or white. Filter -> Render -> Clouds

2. Filter -> Filter Gallery -> Glass (under the Distort category)Keep smoothness as low as possible, play with the other settings

3. Find a filter in Filter Gallery that you like and apply it. Combine them, if needed.

4. When applying texture to the drawing, use Edit->Transform->Warp to make it fit the shape you’re trying to convey

You can stack more filters on after the texture is placed or draw over it with a textured brush to make it look less uniform if that’s what you want. Add a shine to it with a big soft brush, colorize it, go crazy. I go with whatever looks best to me atm.

This is how I did Geralt’s armor too, though since I knew the final print will be smaller than 1.5″ I didn’t worry about details much.