Take one sheet of paper and fold it in half. You now have four sides you can print on: front, inside-left, inside-right, back. That is the entire explanation.
A saddle stitched booklet is a stack of folded sheets nested together and stapled through the fold, so the total always arrives in fours. A 14-page booklet is not a thing you can make this way — you have 12 pages or 16, and nothing in between.
Counting your pages correctly
The most common mistake is counting sheets instead of sides, or forgetting the cover. Every side is a page, including the ones you leave blank:
- Front cover — page 1.
- Inside front cover — page 2.
- Inside back cover — second-to-last page.
- Back cover — the last page.
On our booklets the page count runs from 8 to 32 pages in multiples of four, including the cover. So a 16-page booklet gives you 12 interior pages plus four cover sides — not 16 interior pages.
What to do when your content does not fit
You will almost always land between two valid counts. Three real options:
- Expand. Give something more room — a full-bleed photo, a larger pull quote, a contents page.
- Cut. If two pages are thin, merging them often improves the piece rather than compromising it.
- Leave a page blank. The inside back cover is the conventional place, and a deliberate blank page reads as intentional in a way a crammed one does not.
What does not work is squeezing 18 pages of content into 16. Reducing the type size to fit is the most visible way to make a booklet look cheap.
Setting up the file
Supply the booklet as single pages in reading order — page 1, page 2, page 3 — not as printer spreads. Imposition is our job, and doing it yourself is a reliable way to end up with pages in the wrong order.
- Single pages, sequential, in one PDF.
- Trim size plus 3mm bleed on every edge.
- Text and page numbers at least 4mm inside the trim.
- CMYK, 300dpi effective at final size, fonts embedded or outlined.
Full detail in our file requirements.