Showing your book
A photograph of a closed book tells somebody almost nothing. Here is how to show what is actually inside — and how the page turner works, with a sample you can leaf through yourself.
Try it
A made-up eight-page zine, A5. Use the arrows, or the arrow keys on a keyboard. On a phone, pinch to zoom and tap Bigger to fill the screen — then turn the phone sideways and the spread grows.
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Front cover
Pinch to zoom
01
Photograph single pages, not open spreads
This is the one that trips people up. Upload one page per photograph, in reading order. We pair them into spreads ourselves.
If you upload photographs of the book lying open, every “page” is already two pages, and pairing them again gives you four pages across the screen with the gutter in the wrong place.
The cover counts as page one and is shown on its own, the way a book opens. So the first spread is pages two and three — which is exactly what it is in the real thing.
02
Between two and twenty pages
4 is the minimum and 20 the most. It is meant to be a taste, not a copy: enough that somebody can see the paper, the printing and the rhythm, and still want the book.
A cover, a contents page, two or three spreads and a colophon is usually plenty.
03
Fill in the size in millimetres
The page turner needs it. Two pages can only be laid beside each other if we know what shape they are, and guessing would squash a square zine into an A4 hole.
Height first, then width. A5 is 210 × 148. If your cover is trimmed larger than the pages inside — a card cover, or a jacket — there is a second pair of boxes for the inside. Leave them blank if everything is the same size, which is usually the case.
04
Name each page
“Front cover”, “Contents”, “Colophon”. There is a box under every photograph, and what you type there is printed under the spread.
Optional, and worth doing anyway: an unnamed book still turns, it just says “Page 4–5” where it could have said what the reader is looking at.
05
Choose how it is shown
On the work’s page in your dashboard, under How it is shown, pick the page turner or leave it as a gallery.
Not everything should be a flipbook. A folded broadsheet, a concertina, a boxed set of loose cards — none of those have pages to turn, and forcing them through a page turner tells a lie about the object. A gallery is the better answer for those, and it is the default.
A note on photographing pages
Flat, square on, in daylight near a window rather than under a ceiling light. A phone is completely fine — this is a record of the book, not a reproduction of it.
Keep the crop tight to the page edge and consistent from page to page. Spreads sit two across, so a page cropped looser than its neighbour is obvious the moment they meet.