Before you design a single page, it helps to settle the shape of the thing. How big is the booklet, how many pages, how wide are the margins. Get these right at the start and the layout falls into place. Get them wrong and you end up with poems that vanish into the fold or a page count that won’t staple. Here’s how I set up a chapbook so it prints cleanly the first time.
How big is a chapbook?
The most common chapbook is half of a letter-size sheet. You take an 8.5 by 11 inch page, turn it sideways, fold it down the middle, and each panel is 5.5 by 8.5 inches. That folded size, 5.5 x 8.5, is the workhorse of the chapbook world. It fits poems comfortably, it’s cheap to print, and readers recognize it.
You’ll also see smaller booklets at 4.25 by 5.5 inches, which is a letter sheet folded twice. Those are charming for very short poems and gifts, though a long line of verse can get cramped. A5, roughly 5.8 by 8.3 inches, is common outside the United States. Pick the size that suits your longest line of poetry. If your lines run long, go bigger so you’re not breaking them awkwardly to fit.
How many pages should a chapbook have?
Most chapbooks fall between 16 and 40 pages. Under that and it reads as a pamphlet; well over it and you’re drifting toward a full poetry collection. For a first booklet, somewhere around 20 to 28 pages of poems is a good target, which usually means 16 to 24 poems depending on their length.
Here’s the rule that trips people up. If you’re folding and stapling, your total page count has to divide by four. One folded sheet makes four pages, so you can have 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 pages and so on, but never 18 or 22. Count every page, including the title page, a contents page if you use one, and any blanks. When the total isn’t landing on a multiple of four, add a blank page or a short colophon at the back to make the math work.
What goes on the pages
A simple, sturdy structure looks like this:
- Front cover: title and your name.
- Inside front: a title page, sometimes with the press or the year.
- Optional contents page, handy once you pass a dozen poems.
- The poems, one per page as a rule, longer ones spilling across two.
- An acknowledgments or notes page at the back, if any poems appeared elsewhere first.
- Back cover: a short bio, a price if you’re selling it, or just left plain.
Give every poem room to breathe. One poem per page, starting fresh, reads far better than cramming two onto a spread to save paper.
Margins, fonts, and the fold
Keep a margin of at least half an inch on the outer edges, and a touch more on the inside edge near the fold, around 0.6 to 0.75 inch. That inner margin, the gutter, keeps your text from disappearing into the crease when the booklet is folded. Nothing looks more amateur than a first word bent into the spine.
For type, a readable serif at 11 or 12 point suits poetry. Give the lines a little extra leading so the verse doesn’t feel packed. Set your titles a few points larger and keep them consistent from poem to poem. Resist the urge to use three different fonts; one for the poems and one for the titles is plenty.
A note on page imposition
Because the pages get folded, they don’t print in reading order. On a 16-page booklet, page 16 sits next to page 1 on the same sheet. Working that out by hand is tedious, which is why I let the software do it. Word’s booklet setting and InDesign’s print-booklet feature both handle this imposition for you, so you lay the pages out in plain order and the program arranges them for printing. I cover the setup for each in the step-by-step guide to making a chapbook.
Once your format is settled, the rest is the fun part. If you’d rather hand the printing and folding to someone else, Prolific Press prints chapbooks at about five dollars a copy and takes care of the imposition on their end. And if you’re weighing a chapbook against a longer book, the chapbook, pamphlet, and zine comparison lays out where the lines fall.