How to make a booklet zine
Step by step guide, using my zine "How to Keep Your Hobby from Becoming a Job"
Before we dive into today’s post, I want to give a big thank you for supporting my collaborative zine, Rules to Live By! A portion of last week’s post where I share the zine was accidentally paywalled for free subscribers in the email version. So sorry about that! If you'd like to read more about the process of making Rules, feel free to click through again.
The first edition of the physical zine is officially sold out (ahh thank you so much!) I’m exploring a possible reprint and dreaming up ideas for how to share a few remaining copies down the line—stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can grab the digital version or enjoy sneak peeks from contributors like Kelcey Ervick, Kristen Drozdowski, Seth Werkheiser, and Nishant Jain, who’ve been sharing their pages on their newsletters.
The booklet zine
After covering how to make one page zines last month for our spring zine challenge, today we’re going to tackle the booklet zine! This is the most common zine format—paper that is folded and bound with staples, clips, or thread.
I recently wrapped up teaching the first iteration of Zine Lab, a multi-week workshop to plan, create, and distribute your zine. Most of the students made 12 to 20 page booklet zines in just three weeks!1 This zine format is beloved for its flexibility in size and length, and it’s also easy and accessible to print en masse, though it requires a bit more assembly and materials than the one page zine.
To walk you through printing a booklet zine, I’m going to show you step by step how I put together “How to Keep Your Hobby from Becoming a Job”, a quarter page zine I completed last year.
The planning
To make a booklet zine, you’ll first have to decide on a paper size. Zine makers in US/Canada most commonly work with folded letter sized paper (8.5”x11”), either folding it once to make a 5.5”x8.5” half letter zine or trimming once horizontally and folding to make a 4.25”x5.5” quarter letter zine.
You can work in any smaller dimension (e.g. 5x8” or 4x6”) by trimming your paper, but you can’t work bigger unless you get bigger paper—like a legal or tabloid sheet.
Then comes the zine length. For booklet zines, your total page count when the zine is in its folded, finished form should be in multiples of 4 (e.g. 4, 8, 12, 16, 20…) Don’t understand why? Try grabbing any sheet of blank paper and folding it once—now you’ve got four pages of a booklet! Any additional number of pages requires another sheet of paper, which automatically adds another 4 potential pages. You can leave pages blank if you’d like, but the pages will still need to be there for your zine to be assembled properly.
If you have an idea of how many pages you’d like to work toward, you can grab the required amount of paper and fold it to create a dummy zine for planning your content. Here are some of my dummy spreads for “How to Keep Your Hobby”:
As you work through your zine content on scrap paper, feel free to add or remove pages as you need. If the dummy zine feels too intimidating, you can also ideate using smaller thumbnails.
However, I highly recommend the dummy so you can play with the layout of your writing and imagery true to size! It’s also a great reference to have when you print your final zine and get confused about page order (trust me, this will definitely happen).
The creating
Once you have an idea of your page layouts and zine length, you can start making your individual pages to work towards a PDF! In the case of “How to Keep Your Hobby”, I worked towards a 12 page PDF that measures 4.25”x5.5”.
If you’re making imagery, you can create them in analog, Procreate, Photoshop, or whatever tools you’d like. Then you’ll want to layout your text and imagery into the final zine size. Here are several suggestions of free and paid software to use for layout: