I wrote 126,572 words and then made it a book with 472 pages! Supernatural modern AU -- bow your head and say yes. In which Castiel is a gay Mormon bishop and Dean Winchester is his new neighbor.
I use a simplified bookbinding method (search #simplified bookbinding) (if you want to find the tutorials) (The links all broke because I changed my username since I made them). I admire and love all the elaborate and artistic books other bookbinders make. My goal is to just get the book on my shelf. So this is what a simplified book looks like. You can see the cover is just plain bookcloth. The spine text is laser printed on bookcloth -- if I change my printer's paper source to 'thick paper' then it prints just fine on bookcloth.
I use formatting templates to cut down on the amount of time that I spend typesetting. All my cover pages are: fandom name; fandom logo; title; author, arranged vertically. Chapter headings are just centered in biggish font.
In the photo below, you can see the headband isn't sewn. I tried sewing a headband. It looked like a drunken spider had a seizure on my book so I cut it off and went back to simplified headbands -- it's fabric glued over a piece of twine. Then it's glued to the spine instead of sewn.
The only fancy typesetting I did is for the text messages. Insert a table with two columns and as many rows as there are text messages. Right justify the responder's responses. Make the table rows invisible. And voila! You have text messages!
The text block is glued, so the text block has smooth edges. Instead of printing in signatures and sewing signatures together, I print on A5 size paper. I have to manually double-side it, meaning that I print 10 pieces of paper at a time, then turn them over and stick them back in the paper tray to print the other side. I use bookbinder glue to perfect bind them, with two layers of mull saturated in glue to stabilize the spine.
Again, the series of tutorials I made come up under the tag '#simplified bookbinding'.
















