How to Create Your Own Bookplates

A bookplate is a label stuck in a book originally with the purpose of identifying the owner of the book. More recently bookplates have become an item for authors to autograph and send to fans who cannot attend a book signing in person.

Designing and printing your own bookplates is fairly easy, but depends on your personal tastes and design skills and how elaborate you want your design to be.

Bookplates for Autographing

If you are an author you might want to design a bookplate that you can autograph and have available to hand out or post to fans who request one. Another option is to scan and convert your autograph to a digital image and offer a bookplate template on your website that your fans can download and print out themselves.

Commonly such bookplates include an image of the book cover and might include either a scanned autograph or white space for your autograph and possibly space for a message or the recipient’s name.

Designing Your Bookplate

You can use a program such as Paint, or other graphics software, to edit your book cover image and/or your scan of your autograph so that it is a suitable size for your labels. (In Paint, use Image, Stretch, input a number less than 100%).

Alternatively you can insert a full size image in Word and use the image handles to drag it smaller, and the relevant options on the Image Toolbar to position or crop it and to wrap any text around your image or float it over the image.

You can print your bookplates onto plain paper and paste them into your books with acid free glue, or print them onto large sized adhesive labels. In the next post I talk you through setting up and printing on labels.

Is Word driving you crazy? Then Word 4 Writers is for you. Learn to tame the monster and save your time in front of the screen for writing not fighting. Elsa Neal has been strong-arming Word for 14 years and teaching others to do the same. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.