This is pretty easy after to do it a couple times. You will need to format your text editor to divide a page into segments. Here’s one example:
8.5 X 11 Page of paper
After you experiment a little, you will be able to make the appropriate changes to format your pages properly for your project. This is a fairly tiny book, of course, and uses just one sheet of copy paper to make an 8 page chapbook. This is perfect for haiku, or short poems. You will need to learn to fold the book properly. Here’s a video that shows you how (see below), and after just a couple tries, it really goes very quickly:
This tutorial is for magazines, but the technique is the same for chapbooks. Using Photoshop is an easy way to move elements around and create spectacular artistic effects in your chapbook. And, if you budget is tight, they have a free trial period for the software. You can probably complete your whole project for free if you get busy.
Adobe InDesign is probably the most powerful tool you can use to make chapbooks. This tutorial is a bit longer, but covers many of the key skills you will need to create your own project. There’s good news for people interested in using this tool, Adobe now allows you to lease the InDesign tool by the month, so it is very inexpensive to have access to this resource.
Yes, you can use PowerPoint to make a great chapbook. In fact, some of the tools that come standard in Power point, like the templates, make it easy to produce a chapbook that has a lot of flair!
This video explains how to use Microsoft Word to format chapbook pages. Many people ask about this. In order to print a chapbook from a MS Word file, you must use the book layout, and set the appropriate margins as well as page size. Please be aware that Word files will look somewhat different from computer to computer, so it is advisable that you create the chapbook on the same computer you plan to print from.
