Laying Out Your Booklets

As with any information product, the key to the whole thing is consumption. Getting them to actually read your booklet is the first step in getting them to take action on something bigger or better, whether it’s a consultation with you, a higher priced product or service, joining your membership site or anything else.

The booklets produced by BookletsDelivered.com and BuyBooklets.com are sized at 4-3/4 inches wide by 7 inches high with 1/2” margins on all four sides of the inside pages. We recommend the half inch margins because it gives your booklet a nice clean appearance and prevents text from being too tight to the stapled edge. We are using 11 pt. Calibri body text on the inside pages.

The cover is also 4-3/4 inches by 7 inches but you can see it is what is called full bleed, meaning the cover graphics extend all the way to the edge of the cover. It’s important when you lay out your cover that you add ¼” on all four sides in your artwork. This added quarter inch will be trimmed off to arrive at the final trimmed size of 4-3/4” x 7”.

Word Document Template for Booklet Interior Pages

Photoshop Template for Booklet Cover (Contact your Rep for this template)

You have the option of printing your booklet in black and white (with a full-color cover) or printing both the interior and cover full-color. Black & white booklets are printed on cream colored stock and color booklets are printed on white gloss text. Both black & white and color versions are printed with a gloss text cover.

As we mentioned, consumption is the key. Even though by its nature a booklet is far more consumable than a regular book or other printed document, you still need to aware of your interior design. We discussed the ½” margin we require for your layouts. You cannot have any text or graphics in the margin area. Your cover can be full bleed, but your interior pages cannot have any bleed – the ½” margin must be maintained.

You will also need to give consideration to factors such as the length of your paragraphs. Long, bulky blocks of text discourage readership. We think paragraphs should contain no more than 5-7 lines.

If you can incorporate graphical elements such as the cover layout illustration on the previous page into your booklets it will add to the readability of your booklet by giving the eye a break between blocks of text. Graphs, charts and illustrations are also excellent examples of elements that could be included.

It’s important to note that any picture or illustration you choose to include in your booklet, whether it’s in the interior pages or on the cover itself, must be a minimum of 300 dpi to look good in print. You cannot simply grab an image from your website and turn that into, for example, your book cover. Website images are typically low resolution (72 dpi) and if you print them they will look pixelated and fuzzy. This is not the kind of image you want to present.

Remember, your booklets will become a part of your brand. So, they need to have a look and feel you would be proud to represent you and your brand.

Your booklet can be a giveaway item or a product you sell on sites such as Amazon. The more booklets you have out in the marketplace the more likely people are to find you and enter into your world.

You’re far more likely to be noticed if your booklet has a quality cover on it. You’ll have to decide what your budget will bear in terms of cover design costs. You can get covers designed on a site like Fiverr.com for just a few dollars or you can go to the professional cover designers and spend a few hundred or more.

Here are just a few of the professional cover designers whose work we have been impressed by:

Nick Zellinger – NZGraphics.com

Kathy Dunn – Dunn-Design.com

Michele DeFilippo – 1106Design.com

You can also design your booklet covers yourself if you have that capability.

There is a site called Canva.com that you can use to help with cover design. There are also free photo and illustration sites such as Pixabay.com where you can download images that can be used in cover design. Just be sure that anything you are using is a royalty free image and that you adhering to the terms and conditions associated with use of a particular image.

Once you’ve completed the layout of your booklet you should submit your booklet’s cover and interior pages as two separate files. Save your Word Document file (or whatever program you lay it out in) as a .PDF document.

For your cover you can also save it as a .PDF. Again, be aware of the resolution of your cover. Minimum resolution is 300 dpi. It doesn’t matter whether you design your cover in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign or any other design program – your end output should be a .PDF file. If you are outsourcing your cover design please pass along these specifications to your booklet cover designer.

Once you have your booklet cover designed and interior laid out please email your .PDF files to info@BookletsDelivered.com.