The bleed and gutter are press dependent. You should talk to prospective printers to see what the requirements are on their equipment.

second McCahill’s opinion. Printers deal with secretaries and ma & pa owners all the time. They have no problem letting you know their requirements.

If you are starting out or not too comfortable around print. I recommend picking up a book or two on this subject. Personally I got “getting it printed” by Eric Kenly. And “getting it right in print, digital prepress for graphic designers” by Mark Gatter.

I agree with what was posted above. Every printer has different requirements, and sometimes different requirements for different equipment within the same shop. I am currently working for a printer, we require 1/8” bleeds and 1/4” gutters. How many pages is your book? You should also find out if you need to accommodate for creep at all.

Ok thanks guys.

Actually they want an accordian fold brochure now. Is there anything to keep in mind when designing in this fashion? For instance—I’ve yet to hear of “creep.”

In a saddle stitched book with a large number of pages, the thickness of the paper can make the pages near the center of the book shift away from the gutter (“creep”), so you may want to make a small compensating shift in your margins.
If you are accordion folding, it sounds like you had a fairly low page count anyway.
An accordion fold puts all your pages on one long strip of paper. Depending on how many pages there are, and how wide they are, you could bump your job up to a more expensive press. For instance, if you have 8 panels across, and each panel is 4 inches wide, you can’t run on a 29-inch press, so you’ll have to run on a more expensive 40-inch press. And you won’t fit most digital presses either (they typically max out around 20 inches).
Another note about accordion folds: If this is a self mailer, you’ll have to put 4 wafer seals on it.

There used to be a great reference book called Production for the Graphic Designer by James Craig, but a quick Google search tells me the most recent edition was published in 1990, so it will be comically out of date.
One up-to-date reference I can recommend is International Paper’s Pocket Pal.

An accordion fold should be pretty straight-forward, the only other thing I can think of is to make sure you give yourself enough of a margin and don’t have any body text too close to the edge where it might get cut off.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Print-Production-Claudia-McCue/dp/0321410181

Again, with the accordion fold, talk to the printers. These are folded by machines, and they will have specific idiosyncrosies. The minimum panel to fold, maximum open length, etc. There may also be recommendations about layout for you to think about. Keep in mind that different printers will have different folding machines, so the maximum length at one place will be different from another.

You want to design something that can be printed (folded) at at least one place. (Don’t laugh. Graphic arts students continually design beautiful projects that cannot be printed).

Thanks people. I got the specs from the printer (1/8 bleeds was correct).

As I’m working on this, I’m curious if any issues arise from creating a spread that’s two of the pages of the accordian fold rather than just one. Will letting text flow from one page to the next cause any issues?

Running type across 2 panels won’t cause any problems at all for the printer. If you’re concerned about the reader, though, keep a couple of things in mind:

Re: compensating for creep. That’s another thing to ask your printer about, as a lot of the software we use to prep stuff for plating automatically compensates for creep.