*Designing without calculating the number of pages you need for your booklet is a recipe for a design disaster. Knowing the number of pages and creating a proper layout makes sure your booklet printing will run smoothly and that your company saves time, money, effort, and other resources. So, how many pages should a booklet be? ** *
Truthfully, there are very few rules to how many pages does a booklet have to contain. The pages can be as few as 8 or as many as 200. However, there are things you need to remember when calculating the number of pages for your booklet design.
The Minimum
Booklets have a minimum number of pages to be considered as booklets. They need at least 8 pages. Otherwise, the print product can be considered a folded leaflet.
Remember: The minimum amount of pages differs, depending on the booklet binding method:
Saddle Stitched - minimum of 8 pages
Perfect Bound - minimum of 28 pages
Wire-O - minimum of 8 pages
The Booklet Binding Method
Standard booklets, such as saddle stitched booklets, wire-o booklets and perfect bound booklets, are created by binding folded sheets of paper at the spine. Due to this particular booklet binding method, booklet pages must always come in multiples of 4. Each folded sheet of paper fastened adds 4 pages to the booklet. This results in booklet pages amounting to even numbers only.
While it is possible to create a booklet design file with pages not divisible by 4, it will result in your printed booklet having white blank pages at the end.
The Limit
Consider the maximum number of pages each booklet binding method can hold. Each method has a limit to how many pages it can bind. Here’s a quick run-through:
Saddle Stitched - up to 92 pages
Perfect Bound - up to 200 pages
Wire-O - up to 88 pages
The purpose
Think about what you want to achieve with your booklets. What is the goal of your marketing campaign or why do you need booklets?
Direct mailing
For instance, if you are looking to send out booklets to your customers to tell them about your new products, you might not need a lot of pages. You can use a booklet of 8-16 pages so that you can easily send it in a direct mailing to your clients.
Brand book
If you are in need of a brand book, maybe you should consider the size of your company and your operations. Say you are a huge corporation, which operates in the field of design, you might need a lot of space to explain every detail of your branding, a 52-64 page booklet would do. On the flip side, if you are a smaller company, just getting started into building a brand, you might need less space and a booklet of 20-32 pages would suffice.
Trade show
Have you decided to include a booklet in your goodie bag at your next exhibition? If you plan to give an overview of your business, maybe a bigger booklet of 12-24 pages is perfect or you thought it’s best to just do a promotion on a couple of products, then, 8 pages are enough.
Training manual
If you thought of the clever idea to use a booklet as a training manual for your employees, you might need a lot more space to explain all the peculiarities of a job, so consider the 100-150 page booklets.
When you calculate the number of pages you’ll need, before you start designing, you can ensure that you’ll have the right template depending on the binding type that suits your page quantity best!