This sounds a little odd, but how do you make a book into a book?

Question

What I mean is, how do you take what you have on Word (for example) from your computer and actually make it into a book, with the cover and such?

Thanks. :)

Answer 1

A publisher and a printing press do this for you if they decide to buy your story. There are also way's of self publishing - meaning pay a printing press to print your book.

Answer 2

The general idea is to print your book in signatures (5-7 pages folded in half to form a booklet) and stitch the signatures together to form the book block. Then you would sew or glue the book block to the covers. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this.

If you're wanting to bind your own book here is a link for tutorial on various methods of book binding. My personal suggestion is the coptic binding. It's a bit tricky but sturdy when you get the hang of it.

http://www.tjbookarts.com/otherlinks.htm

The hardest part is finding a way to print the book so that when you fold the papers in half they are still in the correct order. I haven't found a satisfactory way of doing this my self yet, but if you take your document a printer/copy store they could print it out correctly for you.