HOW TO MAKE A CHAPBOOK OR AN EBOOK BY Lou Steer
Poets keep asking me how to make a chapbook or an ebook. It’s easier
than you think. Poets everywhere have
resorted to printing and publishing their own work. Island Press in Australia,
which has survived for 45 years as a publisher of poetry, started out this way
with a platen press that could only do one page at a time. The digital age is our
blessing as it makes printing available to everyone.
Chapbooks are not money makers, they are calling cards! If you price
them modestly, you will recover your printing costs – and make your fans happy
to take home a little piece of your work J
Using a simple template, I have produced a chapbook, Wild Red Heart, and
an ebook of stories and poems, The Forests of the Night, using the methods I am
describing here. You can find them soon on http://www.lousteerbooks.com
1.
WRITE your poetry. Content is the most important thing!
2.
TEMPLATE. Find a template online.
I used a free template that converts to PDF, which is easy to upload.
There are quite a few on the net. If you want to publish, Smashwords or
Pressbooks are both good. Smashwords is free and Pressbooks is only free if you
don’t mind their watermark. Pressbooks also has a print on demand service if
you would like to see your book in print the old fashioned way.
3.
DESIGN a cover. A simple font for the title
and your name is best. Use an image which you would like to see on a book cover – a more graphic
style is easier to reproduce in colour or black and white.
Des
Pensable, who has published his novel Visions
of Chaos on Smashwords, recommends
getting a professional book designer for the cover. I design my own using my
own artworks or photographs. Or get an arty friend to help! I don’t even use Photoshop,
I just produce mine using Word, which works if you have a good image that does
not need tweaking.
If
you are happy with a white cover, Officeworks is the cheapest printer,
Officeworks Broadway has the best equipment and specialises in printing.
4.
FORMATTING.. Use
an easy to read font eg Arial or Times New Roman (preferred by publishers).
Limit fancy fonts to the cover page if you must have one – but simple fonts are
best for the cover too. Don’t use more than 2 styles of font eg one for the
heading, one for the body text. You want the font to be invisible to the
reader.
5.
INSERT LINKS to
your performances, either after each poem or at the end of the book. This is
not compulsory, but it’s a nice touch that makes the book interactive with the
reader.
6.
PROOFREAD!!! Run
it through spell and grammar checks, then read it line by line with a ruler
under each line, or get a friend to read it.
7.
PRINT the
book on your home printer. Print the chapbook in Adobe Acrobat booklet option, Word sucks for
booklets. Do a test print first to make sure the pages fold in the
proper order, this can be tricky.
If
printing at home, keep it to 40 folded pages (ie 10 x A4 pages) including cover
so you can print more easily. I print Wild Red Heart on my home printer (HP
Office inkjet) because Officeworks won't do coloured covers (because to do that
they have to count the pages). It's labour intensive but not hard.
All
you need is paper, a metal ruler for folding and a long arm stapler. Then you:
- print the book,
- collate the pages,
- use the metal ruler to get a neat fold in the
middle by folding the pages in half over the ruler,
- then use the long arm stapler to bind the
book by stapling on the outside of the fold so the staple prongs are inside the
book. You don’t want to stab your customers!
8.
EDITION. If printing at home, print an
edition of 50, then number them like art prints ie 1/50, 2/50 etc. This makes
them a little more special.
9.
ISBN: This is the international library catalogue number. You need this
to get your books into libraries or bookshops. It is not needed for ebooks. I
didn’t use one because I am selling my chapbook at poetry readings. You can buy
them yourself for around $22 each if you are doing the distribution or get them
free at Smashwords or Pressbooks or similar print on demand sites.
10.
DISTRIBUTION. You can sell or give away your chapbook at poetry
readings, on commercial online publishing sites, or on your own website. Keep
track of how many you have printed and how many you have distributed, this may
even impress a publisher. Always keep a few ready for your fans!
PRO TIPS:
You can download Scrivener (it’s often on special), which will format
books for you in PDF, epub or MOBI. You can convert to epub or MOBI (Kindle
format) in Calibre, which is free.
Professional printers are really expensive, so go with print on demand
if you want hard copies of longer books. They aren’t cheap but you only buy
what you need.
If you are really popular, eventually a publisher will pick you up and
pay your costs (and recover them from your royalties, so you won’t get rich
that way either!)
