Setting Up A Spine (Perfect Bound Books)

When creating a Letter or Digest sized Perfect Bound Book, you will need to create a spine image for the outside edge of your book.

The easiest way to set up the spine is to use a solid color or pattern that matches the bleed of your covers. This will help avoid the appearance of drift. 

Setting up an Image or Title

The width of the spine of the book will change depending on how many pages are in the book. The middle of the spine, regardless of how many pages you have, will fall on the green fold line. 

When designing your spine image, no matter how many pages your book contains, your background color or pattern should extend to cover the grey bleed zone. Any text or important images should never extend past the red cut line. 

Spine Sizes

Here is a table that tells you how wide the spine of your book will be according to the number of pages you use. 

This table is in increments of 10 pages, however, perfect bound books come in sheets of 4 pages. When using a page count in-between the page numbers above, use the smaller measurement as a guide. 

Using the above table, create a box in the template like the example in blue below and center it on the fold line. This is the spine that will be visible on the book. 

Your text or important images should be within that box. 

Please keep in mind that there can be up to 1/8th inch of drift. We recommend avoiding titles on the spines of thin books. 

Examples

Here is an example of a spine in a 200-page digest-sized perfect bound book.

.