Bookmarks are an excellent way to promote a product that will appeal to readers and book lovers, and as giveaway items are fairly inexpensive to produce and easy to distribute by mail. While bookmarks are ideally suited to authors or others in the publishing industry, anyone canuse this form of promotion.

For personal use, bookmarks are a fun way to make a simple craft project by using family photographs or children's artwork for the illustrations. Such bookmarks make good token gifts to tuck easily into a holiday card or to include with a book.

Things You Will Need

  • Page layout software

  • Printer (optional)

Determine how many bookmarks you want to print. While you can pring individualized bookmarks or smaller quantities of bookmarks at home on your computer's printer, if you want to print 100 or more bookmarks it will probably be both easier and less expensive to pay to have your bookmarks professionally printed.

Select a size for your bookmarks. If you are having your bookmarks printed by a printer, they will likely have one or more sizes for you to choose. Common bookmark sizes include 2 x 6 inches, 2 x 7 inches and 2 x 8 inches. However, if you are printing the bookmarks yourself, you can be a little bit more creative in choosing a size. You may wish to make your bookmark wider or taller, depending on the artwork you will be using and the purpose of your bookmark.

Create a new document in your page layout software program. Examples of suitable programs include Quark, InDesign, Scribus and Microsoft Publisher. Select the custom size option and set the dimensions of your bookmark. If you will be printing the bookmarks on your own printer, specify the exact dimensions of your bookmark as you will be printing this on a full-size piece of cardstock, then trimming it down. If you are sending your file to a professional printer, first get their required dimensions. Professional printers will specify a "bleed" area that will be just outside the printed area of the bookmark, but which will need to be part of your template file. Some printers offer a bookmark template you can download.

Make a second template of the same dimensions, if you would like your bookmark to be two-sided. Most professional printed bookmarks are two-sided, and there is not extra charge. If you will be printing your bookmarks yourself, confirm that the front and back of the bookmark are perfectly lined up so that they may be printed on a single sheet of paper.

Tip

Bookmark templates are also available for use with Microsoft Word software, but keep in mind this is designed as word processing software, and it is not as easy to work with image files in this program.

Scribus is a free page layout software for those who do not have access to more expensive programs such as Quark or InDesign.