Book Cover Experiment

One way I've decided to save space at this convention is to combine each of my comic book series into cute little packs. For example, since I have three Lipstick & Malice's for sale, I'm going to sell them as a cute triple pack instead of individually, hence taking up less room on my table. I can do the same for Bonnie N. Collide (three of those) and Gods & Undergrads (two of those).  But how to bind them together?

Over the years and conventions, I've seen a couple of cute ways to bind several books of a series together. But frankly - I haven't got much time and I'm not very gifted in the crafty. So I decided (as is my custom) to just haphazardly try something out and see if it worked. Here goes ...

First, I got the books together I wanted to combine.

Then I started out by wrapping a plain piece of cardstock around them to see how it would look.

Since that seemed wayyyy too big (since it's 8 1/2" x 11"), I thought I'd try out what half of a sheet of paper would look like when wrapped around my books.

This was better, but I still felt like it was a tad big, so I halved it again, ending up with a 1/4 sheet of paper.

So I wrapped it around, testing out the size, and started to make sketches of the design I wanted to put on it.

I punched a hole where the two ends overlapped, giving me something that would (hopefully) hold the wrapper in place.

Now that I had roughly the dimensions I needed my wrapper to be, I sketched light pencil lines where the creases were ....

And scanned the scrap of paper in, sketches and all. This gave me a template to use for creating a more polished looking design in Photoshop.

I used the pencil lines as guidelines for where to keep my edges. And when it was done, I printed it out - 4 to a page (since I made mine 1/4 the size of a piece of paper), printed on cardstock with the settings to "borderless printing".

Now that I had it printed and cut up, I punched holes in the wrapper.

And wrapped it around my books to make sure it still fit okay.

Then, for flare, since you can never have enough flare ... I cut a piece of ribbon out to thread through the punched holes.

And tied a neat little bow. So - voila! There you have it - a tiny little book sleeve for a 3-pack series of books, all totally possible to recreate yourself.