#kryterius

It's printed on standard copy paper that I trimmed by hand with a hand trimmer at work, each signature separately. I'm sure there's a better way to do this without an industrial guillotine, but for now that's the best I could do. I needed to trim this because at less than 10K words, this one was barely big enough for me to be able to sew it together - I had to increase the page count somehow and I decided to do it by just making the pages very small. The end result is 11cm wide, smaller than most of my paperbacks 😅

The cover is also made from regular printer paper — I was afraid of splurging on professional bookcloth with my first project, in case I didn't like this hobby... Now I wish I had gone for something more durable! The black and white does fit the vision I had, though, so I'm mostly happy with it. The spine is lined with this cool space-pattern fabric I picked up at my favourite local crafts store. They already know me (💀) and know I like space themed things (💀) so I was immediately pointed to these when I went in asdkfjhdgkj....... But yeah I finally found a project I can use them on. It was a whole bundle, so I expect future mass effect fics to have these space fabric spines as well.

Now for my mistakes: paper was not the best choice for the cover. I fucked up. I followed a tutorial on YouTube where the woman showed how to do a hardcover using paper, and it looks clean, but I just know this is gonna fall apart soon. Especially at the back, you can already see spots where it scraped off a little bit when I was applying it onto the glue. Maybe I'll eventually rebind it when I get better at this 🤔 I also cut the endpapers a bit too short, but you can't really tell when it's closed. It opens surprisingly nice, almost 180 degrees! I'm happy with that, even though the glue really warped the endpapers. I know to use a thinner layer now!