Printing Your Adventures Of Book at Home: A Quick Guide

Half our customers download the PDF and print it themselves. The other half order a softcover or hardcover at checkout and skip the whole thing. If you're in the first camp, here's the quick guide to making home printing look good.

Paper

Use heavy paper. 32 lb or 60 lb works — standard 20 lb copy paper is too thin and colors bleed. A ream of heavy inkjet or matte photo paper is usually $10-15 at an office supply store and makes a huge difference.

White or cream both work. Matte beats glossy for picture books — kids can flip pages without fingerprints.

Printer

Color laser is best if you have one. Inkjet works but uses more ink than you expect — budget for one ink cartridge replacement per book. A black-and-white printer will not work; you need color.

Make sure "fit to page" is off and "actual size" is on. The PDF is already sized to 8.5×8.5 inches. If you let the printer auto-fit, you'll get weird white borders.

Binding

The laziest option: print single-sided, punch three holes in the left margin, run yarn through. Looks crafty, kids love it.

Slightly less lazy: print double-sided, take the stack to a Staples or FedEx print counter, pay $3 to have it coil-bound. Takes 10 minutes.

Most polished: print the cover on heavier cardstock, print the interior pages on normal matte, and have the whole thing perfect-bound at a local print shop. Looks like a real book.

The not-printing option

If any of the above sounds like too much work, order the softcover ($29.99) or hardcover ($44.99) at checkout. We print it through Lulu and ship it to you. Takes about two weeks total, zero effort on your end, and looks like a real published book because it is one.