People think making a chapbook is complicated. It isn’t. A chapbook is just a small booklet of poems or short prose, usually somewhere between eight and forty pages, folded and held together with staples or a little thread. I’ve made them at a kitchen table with a stack of copy paper and a long-arm stapler, and I’ve had them printed to look like something you’d find in a bookshop. Both count. Here is how I go about it, from a pile of poems to a finished booklet you can hand to someone.
Start with the writing, not the booklet
Gather more poems than you need, then cut back to the ones that belong together. A chapbook works best when the pieces share a thread, a season, a place, a single voice running underneath. Twelve to twenty-four poems is a comfortable range for a first booklet. Once you have your keepers, spend real time on the order they sit in. The sequence carries the reader through, and it matters more than most people expect. I wrote a whole page on arranging the poems in a chapbook manuscript if you want to go deeper on that part.
Count your pages before you design anything
A saddle-stapled chapbook, the kind folded down the middle, has to have a page count that divides by four. That’s because one sheet of paper folded in half gives you four pages. So your options are 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 pages, and so on. Sketch out where each poem lands, leave a title page and maybe a contents page at the front, and keep a blank page or two if you need them to make the math work. The chapbook format and page-count guide walks through the sizes and margins so nothing gets swallowed in the fold.
Lay it out with tools you already own
You don’t need expensive software. I’ve built perfectly good chapbooks in Microsoft Word using its booklet setting, and in PowerPoint when I wanted more control over where things sat on the page. If you have Adobe InDesign, it handles the page imposition for you, which saves a headache on longer booklets. Photoshop works too if your booklet leans visual. Pick whatever you’re already comfortable in. I keep step-by-step video walk-throughs for each of these:
- Making a chapbook in Microsoft Word
- Laying one out in Adobe InDesign
- Building one in Adobe Photoshop
- Using PowerPoint for the layout
- The no-software version: one sheet, eight pages
Print it
For a handful of copies, a home printer and decent paper will do. Print on both sides, fold, and you’re most of the way there. Text paper around 24 lb feels better in the hand than thin copy paper, and a slightly heavier sheet for the cover gives it some backbone. If you want more than a few copies, or you want them to look properly finished for a reading or a launch, it’s usually cheaper and cleaner to have them printed. Prolific Press prints chapbooks for about five dollars a copy, which is often less than the ink and paper cost me at home once I’m running fifty of them.
Bind it
Binding is where a booklet stops looking like loose paper. Staples are the classic choice and the easiest. A long-arm stapler reaches the center fold; if you don’t have one, there’s a trick with a regular stapler that I’ll show you. If you want something that looks handmade and a little special, sew the spine. A few running stitches down the fold hold beautifully and take about a minute once you’ve done a couple.
- Binding with staples
- Sewing the spine by hand
- Sewing it on a machine
- Coptic binding for a flat-opening booklet
Or let a press make it for you
Making one yourself is the whole joy of it for me, but it isn’t the only path. If you’d rather see your collection published under a press’s name, you can submit your manuscript to a chapbook publisher and let them handle the printing and the cover. I keep a list of chapbook publishers that take submissions, and a fuller guide on how to publish a chapbook whichever route you choose. Either way, you end up with the same good thing: a small book with your name on it that you can put in someone’s hands.