Programs:

Always check with your printers first, but chances are they'll ask for a PDF file for your zine. You'll also most likely need a program to put this together, since you'll need to make sure your end product is printable in high quality.

• Adobe InDesign - the industry standard, but it's very expensive and not advisable if you're not using it for one-off projects.

• Affinity Publisher - it's very comparable to InDesign and requires only a one-time purchase.

• Free Alternatives - I'm less familiar with any of these, but worth checking out.

Document Setup:

Check with your printers what their minimum requirements are, but something like the setup to the left would work.

• Inner and outer margins - Margins are the spacing around every page. For printed books, think about thumb space at the outside edges, and the "creep" on the inside edges -- for example, if the end product is quite thick, then the book won't open up all the way, and so the middle of a spread would get swallowed up. Top and bottom margins will also need to be adjusted depending on where your page numbers are, and if you're adding running heads for each page.

• Bleed - Most printers will have an area they'd mark for bleed, which means covers a sliver of the page edge that printers might be able to cut off without taking away from the content of the page.

• Your artists may not be used to working with pieces meant for print, so make sure they're working in CMYK instead of RGB -- most programs used for digital art should have this setting handy

• Composition matters! Important pieces of an art's composition may be eaten up if they are placed in the margins.

  • Spreads - artists will have to work around the assumption the middle part of their art will disappear in the binding.

  • Single-page art - Left and right margins should be avoided -- for zine planning you don't know right away if a page will be on the left or right page, we'll have to assume that both sides might get eaten up by the binding.

To the left is a single-page template for a 5.5 x 8.5 book that we've shared with artists in past zine projects with the bleed and margin areas blocked out, along with explanations as to what to avoid. Here's the double-page spread version of it. The total document size is 5.75 x 8.75 because of the bleed area.

Fic is laid out differently than art -- I've worked in zines where we've given writers word counts, but also in zines that have provided templates with page restrictions so as to account for cases when 1000-word fic with more dialogue could take up more space than 1000-word fic with more descriptions. Whichever one you go with, make sure you keep your overall page count in mind.

Besides that, keep the following in mind:

• Title & Credits - Your template for the first page of a fic should be able to handle both long and short titles for uniformity

• Line spacing - Readability for fic is very important, so the amount of white space in a page full of words is very important! Aside from margins, you can ensure readability by increasing the space between lines. As a rule of thumb, the tallest letter in a bottom line should not touch the tail of the letter in the top line.

• Indents vs Paragraph spacing - Using one or the other should help in readability too -- indents could help save on page counts too, if that is a consideration.

• Font - Serif fonts are considered more legible on print, while sans serif fonts are easier for digital.