Religious Book Printing

Are you writing a religious or spiritual book?

If you’re a self-publisher who’s ready to publish a book, choosing the right printer, format, and cover design can help make your book a success. 48 Hour Books has some tips to help you through the religious book printing and self-publishing process.

Let’s discuss religious book printing. Different categories of books fall in the religion and spiritual genre – including texts for Christianity, Judaism, Islam and more. Some popular religious book printing categories include:

Academic: Your book may explore one or many religions, supported by research.
Memoir: Writing a memoir is another popular format, detailing how religion has personally impacted your life.
Guide: You may be printing a guide, such as a devotional or journal, used for everyday life and the readers' personal religious advancement.
Spiritual: Spiritual books focus on broader themes, such as family values, living a better life and other inspirational angles. They also tend to steer clear of organized religion, and focus on the individual's interpretation of the soul or the spirit.
Children’s: Religious children’s books are popular and have a wide range of uses from devotionals, Bible or other religious storytelling, or church Sunday school workbooks.

Common Religious Book Structures

The structure of your religious book will vary based on your content. If you’re writing a memoir or informational text, a standard format works. You can divide your book into chapters or sections, with a table of contents for reference.

Often, Christian books or religious books are formatted in a devotional or journal style. For those purposes, your book will be structured differently, using days of the week as headers and containing your desired text for each day and space for notes.

We recommend researching your favorite devotionals and journals to see what style you like best. There are many opportunities to be creative before you begin the religious book printing process!

Choosing a Template Size for your Religious Book

48 Hour Books offers free book templates you can use to format your book. Our book templates come in four standard sizes that open in Microsoft Word or nearly any other word processing program.

Type your book directly into the template, and set it up any way you choose. Be sure to choose the right page size. When you're done formatting, simply convert the file to PDF format, and the resulting PDF file will be ready to upload to us.

You'll upload your files directly to your order, so you'll need to place an order first on our website. If you get stuck or have any questions, our customer service is just a phone call away at 800-231-0521.

Types of Religious Book Binding

When you’re ready to print and bind your book, there are a variety of decisions to make. The intended use can determine the type of binding you choose for your religious book. For devotionals and journals, coil binding is a great option since the pages open out flat for writing purposes. For religious books that contain worksheets or activity pages, this type of binding also works well. We recommend our 70# or 80# offset paper for coil binding.

Perfect bound books are another popular choice. Softcover book covers keep the cost down, but still hold up very well over time. And, at 48 Hour Books our standard turnaround for perfect bound books (softcover books) is only two business days. Nobody else in the world offers this as their standard turnaround time. And if that's still not quite fast enough for you, we have rush and super rush options available.

We also offer hardcover (case binding). Both coil and hardcover books take five business days to produce.

Religious Book Cover Design Options

Your book cover is the first thing people see, so make it eye-catching! Whether you have a fully illustrated cover or just text, there are multiple ways to make your book stand out.

learn more about cover options

For something more attention grabbing, we offer foil stamping, dust jackets, and Diamond 3D covers. Choose an interesting graphic or font - just make sure it’s easy to read. At 48 Hour Books, all of our covers are printed in full-color at no extra charge, so liven your cover up with some color! We recommend that your images be at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). This ensures your graphics look crisp and clear.

If you need help constructing and designing your cover, 48 Hour Books has a Create-a-Cover option for $100. With Create-a-Cover, you can choose a general layout, a background color and texture, and any additional design options and photos. Upload all the photos to your order on our website, and our prepress technicians take your options and assemble your cover using these elements. The $100 is a one-time fee, so if you receive your cover proof and decide you want to change an element (for example: the background color), it’s no problem.

Of course, if you have InDesign, you can use one of our free cover templates to design your own cover.

Faith-Based Self-Publishing Help

You willl find there are many options for religious book self-publishing and Christian book self-publishing. It can seem overwhelming! But if you’re considering religious book printing, 48 Hour Books offers guidance, templates, cover design assistance and more. We print bookstore quality books, so your religious book or spiritual book will be professional, attractive and practical for whatever use you select.