You don’t need InDesign to make a chapbook, and you don’t need to hunt down a template either. Microsoft Word has a booklet mode built in, and once you know where the settings hide, you can go from a document of poems to a folded, stapled chapbook in an afternoon. Here’s the exact setup I use, step by step. It works in every desktop version of Word from the last decade or so.
Step 1: turn on Book fold
This one setting does most of the work. Go to the Layout tab, click Margins, and choose Custom Margins at the bottom to open the Page Setup dialog. In the Pages section, set Multiple pages to Book fold. Word flips the paper to landscape on its own; leave it. Set Sheets per booklet to All.
What just happened: Word now treats each half of a landscape letter sheet as one page of your booklet, so every page you see on screen is 5.5 x 8.5 inches, the standard chapbook size. Better still, Word will handle the imposition for you at print time. Pages in a folded booklet don’t run in reading order on the sheet (in a 16-page booklet, page 16 prints next to page 1), and Book fold sorts that out invisibly. You just write in normal order.
Step 2: set the margins
Stay in that same Page Setup dialog. With Book fold on, the margin boxes read Inside and Outside instead of Left and Right, because the inside edge alternates as the pages face each other. Set Inside to 0.75 inch and Outside to 0.5 inch, with Top and Bottom at 0.5 or 0.6. The bigger inside margin keeps your poems from bending into the fold, which is the single most common mistake in homemade booklets. Leave the Gutter field at zero; the extra inside margin already does that job. Click OK and the document reshapes itself.
Step 3: pick type that prints well
Poetry wants a quiet serif. Garamond, Georgia, Book Antiqua, or plain Times New Roman all print cleanly at small sizes; set the body at 11 or 12 point. Titles can be the same font two or three points larger, or bold. Two fonts is the ceiling for the whole booklet.
Two Word habits make poems behave. Inside a stanza, end lines with Shift+Enter instead of Enter, so Word treats the stanza as one block and doesn’t wedge paragraph spacing between your lines. And start each poem on its own page with Ctrl+Enter, a proper page break, rather than tapping Enter until the text moves. Page breaks hold their position when you edit; a stack of empty returns doesn’t. One poem per page is the convention, with a long poem running onto a second page.
Step 4: add page numbers
Go to Insert, then Page Number, then Bottom of Page, and pick a centered style. Centered numbers are the safe choice in a booklet, since left and right positions swap sides as the pages face each other.
You probably don’t want a number on the cover. While the footer is open, the Header & Footer ribbon tab shows a Different First Page checkbox; tick it and page 1 goes bare. That’s enough fuss for most chapbooks. Skip headers entirely, they crowd a small page.
Step 5: lay out the pages in reading order
Build the booklet front to back exactly as a reader meets it: cover, title page, contents if you use one, the poems, acknowledgments, back cover. Don’t try to arrange pages for printing; Book fold does that.
One rule you do have to respect: the total page count must divide by four, because each folded sheet carries four pages. Word will quietly pad the booklet with blanks at print time if your count doesn’t divide evenly, but it’s better to control where the blanks fall yourself. Add a blank page before the first poem or after the acknowledgments to reach 20, 24, 28, and so on. The chapbook format guide covers the page-count math and what belongs on each page.
Step 6: print and fold
Go to File, then Print. If your printer does two-sided printing, choose Print on Both Sides, flip pages on short edge. Short edge matters: the sheet is landscape, and flipping on the long edge prints the backs upside down. Print one test copy before you run the batch. Every printer has an opinion.
If your printer only prints one side, check Manually print on both sides in the same print dialog. Word prints the fronts, tells you to reload the stack, then prints the backs. Do a two-sheet test first to learn which way your printer wants the paper turned; scrap paper is cheaper than a ruined print run.
Then stack the sheets in order, fold the pile in half, and crease it with the back of a spoon or a bone folder. Two staples through the fold and it’s a chapbook. A long-arm stapler reaches the center easily; my stapling guide shows a workaround if you only have a regular one.
Step 7: or export a print-ready PDF
Sending the job to a print shop instead? Go to File, then Export, then Create PDF/XPS. A Book fold document exports as single 5.5 x 8.5 pages in reading order, one booklet page per PDF page, which is exactly what a shop wants; their equipment does its own imposition. Before you send it, click through the PDF and check that page breaks, stanza spacing, and fonts survived the trip. They almost always do, but almost isn’t always.
If Book fold fights you
Some printer drivers and Book fold don’t get along, and the symptoms are strange page orders or backs printed upside down no matter what you pick. There’s a reliable detour. In Page Setup, set Multiple pages to Mirror margins instead, then go to Layout, Size, More Paper Sizes, and enter 5.5 x 8.5 as a custom page size. Export the PDF, open it in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, and print from there using its Booklet option, which does the same two-up imposition on letter sheets. Same folded result, different program doing the arranging.
That’s the whole process. If you want the wider picture around it, choosing paper, binding options beyond staples, covers, my guide on how to make a chapbook walks through everything from manuscript to finished booklet, and there’s a short video on printing chapbooks from Word if you’d rather watch the print step than read it. And when you need more copies than a home printer can cheerfully produce, Prolific Press prints chapbooks for about five dollars a copy from the same PDF you just exported.