How To Make A Chapbook

Category: Publish Your Poetry

By: Don J. Carlson

If You Are Interested, You Are Ready

If you have been writing and publishing in a number of magazines and ezines, or otherwise had positive responses to your writing, you may decide it is time to produce a small, bound volume of your poems. This is called a Chapbook.

If you think you are ready, go ahead and assemble your book. It will be a valuable learning process, and will cost you very little. you may even be able to find a chapbook publisher who will pay for the project.

Don’t Worry, Enjoy the Act of Creating Your Chapbook

Don’t worry about the cost of the chapbook. The first step is to do the work of selecting poems and working with your computer to produce what is called Camera-Ready_Copy. I started with Microsoft Works 3.0. You may have a more advanced word processing program or even a desktop publishing program. Whatever your system, you can do it!

If you already have a body of work from which to pick, go through the poems and select some for your chapbook.

Give a Little Thought to Your Format

You will need to decide on the size and number of pages and size of type font. A good size for the chapbook is a standard eight-and-a-half by eleven page folded once across the middle and once down the center. This gives you eight pages of 4.25 by 5.5 inches. Chapbooks are usually most economically produced in multiples of these eight pages. You should therefore plan a chapbook of eight, sixteen, twenty-four or thirty-two pages.

If you choose twenty-four pages as I did, you will have twenty-eight blank surfaces on which you could print something. This of course, includes the inside and outside of the front and back cover. It is good to leave the inside front cover blank in case someone wants you to autograph their copy. You could conceivably print poems on the inside and outside of the back cover. I left the back cover blank inside and out except for the printer’s mark on the outside lower back cover.

A Sample Format

you will need to format your computer document to stay within the dimensions of the page size you have chosen. Set your margin for 1″ at top, and 3″ at both sides. The bottom margin should be 6.5″.

A good font size for your book is ten point. I used an Ariel font. Put some of your poems into such a formatted page and see how they fit. You can adjust the margins if you need more or less space.

With these margins I got 21 lines per page. You could take it a few lines closer to the page numbers at the bottom of the page, but I like a little more white space.

Will You Have Illustrations?

Next you will need to decide whether to use illustrations or spot designs and how much space to allow for them. They can illustrate the poems or exist as separate works of art on their own merit. I chose to use drawings I had done that were not related to the content of the poems.

Put your poems all into the chosen font and size, and make sure they fit within the margins. Count the number of lines on a full page and determine the order of the poems and which poems and illustrations will appear on facing pages. Odd numbered pages are always on the right and even numbered pages on the left.

Look at Some Books to See Their Format

Start your first poem on Page 1. Pages 2 and 3 will be facing pages as will 4 and 5, etc. If you need to adjust a page by one or two lines you can look for a poem with the right number of lines or rewrite a poem to fit. Rewriting for this purpose can sometimes improve a poem. If the poem is a line or two too short, you can just allow the extra white space. If it is eight or ten lines too short you can center it in the page or use a half page illustration with it. If it is too long you may want to carry it over to the next page. If you have only two or three lines to carry over to the next page you may prefer to divide the poem in halves and put half on each of the two pages rather than having a short bit carried over. You also have the option of rewriting it or combining two short lines as one line. Look at some sample chapbooks for ideas for your book.

You Can Start With an Unnumbered Page

OR TWO Although your poems start on Page 1, you may choose to insert a few unnumbered pages before Page 1. A title page, acknowledgments, introduction, and contents page are sometimes used in one or more combinations. I chose to have the first right page be a combination title page and contents page. The back of this page was an illustration, and the following right page was the first numbered page: Page 1. This left me a total of 22 numbered pages to work with. Page 1 should be a right page.

Enlarge or Reduce Drawings

If you have drawings that are too big or too small for the space where you need them, enlarge or reduce them with a copy machine or scanner. On a copy machine, experiment with the manual darkness setting. You will want all of your lines to print clearly without any of the white areas darkening in spotty patches. You can be more exact than the default or automatic setting. You may waste a little paper but be very careful with your best printouts. Remember, you can reduce a picture by 50% and then reduce that copy another 50% if you need a 25% copy. If you check for quality at every reduction (or enlargement) you can go through several reductions and still get clear prints. If you have a scanner or desktop publishing program, learn to use them. They can produce very good results.

You will need to think through what you will have on the front cover, inside front cover, and right and left pages all the way through. Check these details and think about how unexpected juxtapositions of poems or illustrations may enhance or defeat your purposes. See next month’s installment for the conclusion of this article!