Y'all had a few recurring questions on my fanfiction typesetting videos, so here's a little FAQ post!

Why does the page count need to be a multiple of 32?

When you're hand-binding a book, the pages are divided into 'signatures,' which are packets of folded paper that you'll stitch together to form the book's 'textblock.'

Your standard signature length is how many sheets of paper there are in each of these packets. Each of these sheets of paper has 4 pages on them. in traditional bookbinding, depending on the thickness of your paper, these will have 2, 4, or 8 sheets of paper, which corresponds to 8, 16, or 32 pages. Say you have a project that is 128 pages long–you could either have 4 signatures containing 8 sheets of paper or 32 pages each, 8 signatures containing 4 sheets of paper or 16 pages each, or 16 signatures containing 2 sheets of paper or 8 pages each.

This means your page count technically only needs to be a multiple of 4–you just might need to do some math to figure out the signature length / how many sheets of paper will be in each signature.

Luckily, I've done (most of) the math for you!

If your page count is a multiple of 16 → signature length is 4

If your page count is a multiple of 32 → signature length is 8

If your page count is a multiple of 40 → signature length is 10

If your page count is a multiple of 4 and some other number → signature length is the other number

• If your page count is a multiple of 44 → signature length is 11, because 44 is a multiple of 4 and 11 (44 ÷ 4 = 11)

• If your page count is a multiple of 28 → signature length is 7 (28 ÷ 4 = 7)

I prefer 8-sheet long signatures and figured it would be easier for people completely new to bookbinding, hence why I recommended the page count be a 32, but it's not a hard rule! Any signature length works <3

Why do you copy the fanfic chapter by chapter, instead of viewing the entire work and copying all of it at once?

The reason I go chapter by chapter is because if you click 'entire work' and command-A to copy the entire thing, you will copy everything. You'll copy ao3's header and footer, all the fic's tags, any author's notes left at the start and end of each chapter, and sometimes even comments left on the fic. When I used Google Docs, it was really cumbersome to go through and delete all of that, so I preferred to copy chapter by chapter. On Ellipsus, however, everything is really nicely sectioned out in the 'Outline' tab. So as long as you're okay parsing through that to clean up the text, you can absolutely 'entire work + command-A' to speed up the copy-pasting process!

(And in case it needs to be repeated, I prefer copy-pasting in general over exporting the fic to a pdf/epub and converting it to a .docx file. The formatting is way easier to manage when copy pasting, imo.)

Lastly: is binding fanfiction legal?

Yes, provided you are creating for personal use only, as in you do not sell the final bound fanfiction. You should never sell or buy fanfiction, in any capacity, as profiting off of another person's IP is grounds for a lawsuit from the original owner. This is not only bad for you, but could jeopardize fandom websites (like Ao3).