Publishing your Poetry Chapbook - part 1
You don’t have to have a vault filled with your poetry in order to be able to print a chapbook. You can create one with as little as thirty poems. In this series of blog posts, we will show you how. We will take you from having a pile of poems on a dusty folder on your computer, to actually having a fully-fledged poetry book in your hands. You will be surprised by what you can do with a ton of free or almost free tools on the World Wide Web. So, let’s get started.
You want me to make a Chapwhat?
A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch, but often times just folded. In early modern Europe, a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. A Chapbook was widely accessible, even to people who couldn’t afford to buy books. You could say in a way it democratized reading.
Modern chapbooks usually contain poetry. Although the exact page ranges vary from publisher to publisher, the generally accepted length for chapbook manuscripts is between 15 and 30 pages of poems. There could be a poem on every page or a handful of longer-form pieces spanning several pages each. If you wanted to go all-out art tart, you could publish a chapbook with a really long, single poem, but you could also use a chapbook as a writing portfolio.
The trim size will vary, but nowadays, the most used format is 6 by 9 inches.
A short history of the Chapbook
Smarter people than us claim chapbooks started taking to the stage as far back as the 16th century. Chapbooks were inexpensive to produce and used to be small, paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16, and 24 pages. They were usually illustrated with rough woodcut illustrations, sometimes irrelevant to the text (much like today's stock photos), and are often read aloud to the audience.
The American Beat poets in the 1950s and ‘60s breathed new life into the chapbook format. It was a great way to spread countercultural ideas without the use of the traditional printing presses. Just because these booklets were tiny in trim size, they were shockingly effective in spreading the words of these poets. Just think about the impact Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ is still having today.
Why we think you should write a chapbook
The internet has helped with the evolution of the chapbook. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a paper medium any more. People produce chapbooks as PDF downloads or e-books. The paper chapbooks are not dead, however. Because chapbooks are historically tied to self-publishing, it is still taken very seriously in the literary world. It is a way for publishers to find the next big poetry talent. This is exactly the reason why we think you should create one. You can use it to enter chapbook contests, use it as a portfolio to break into the literary industry, or to simply just give yourself a material reward for all the hard work you have done.
It is difficult to get a book deal for your first collection of poetry, so many poets start their careers by sharing their work online, participating in open mics, submitting poems to literary magazines, or publishing a chapbook. Chapbooks are an important first step in poetry publishing and help build your name.
If your chapbook takes off, it makes your work more interesting for bigger publishers. With the success of the chapbook, you showed that there is a market for your work after all. It can also increase your chances of publishing a complete collection, because poetry editors at both large and small publishers will keep up to date with the new edition and focus on adding new voices to their list. At the same time, if your brochure is commercially successful, then when you reach the stage of submitting your first collection of poems to the publisher, this will give you an advantage because it clearly shows that your work has an urgent market.
Chapbooks by Famous Authors
If you are still not convinced, a chapbook can take you places; have a look at the list that follows. It contains chapbooks famous poets created at the start of their careers.
Langston Hughes' "A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia" (1934)
T.S. Eliot published each poem of “The Four Quartets” in individual pamphlet form before they appeared in book form in 1943.
Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956)
Ted Hughes' "Animal Poems" (1967)
Margaret Walker’s “Prophets for a New Day” (1970)
Carol Ann Duffy’s “William and the Ex-Prime Minister” (1992)
Still with us? Great, we will be back soon with a guide on how to actually create your first chapbook. Stay tuned.