Time To JUMPSTART Your Poetry Career With A Chapbook

“Why did we make a chapbook together?

Well, we had a show together, and we were like, we wanted people to be able to take things home with them.

We basically just collabed, put poems together that were fitting of a theme. So it had poems from both of us.

We put them together into like a word doc or PDF, we went to FedEx/Kinkos and just printed out copies.

One of the first reasons why chapbooks can be really powerful for getting your work out there is that they don’t necessarily have to take much.

So for instance, you can compile your poems, go to a print shop, you can make a chapbook for about three bucks; I’ve seen some for like $2.75 for a good quality book. You get a little bit of a deal the more that you have printed.

The nice thing about doing it on your own is that you get a lot more control over quantity. I think it can also make it less daunting; if you get like 500 chapbooks, but you only sell 10, you’re thinking “I’ve got 490 chatbooks in my basement!”

That said, you probably shouldn’t be thinking, ‘Oh, we’re only going to be using these at one event,’ right?

You go to an open mic, or any poetry event, you can mention, ‘Hey, I have a chatbook,’ and then people can always approach you.

I remember I had released a chapbook for a show one night, and I went to the barber shop before, striking conversations with people there. Like, ‘Yeah, I’m like, you know, I’m getting cleaned up, you know, I got a show later on.’

And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, like, yo, you got a book?’ I sold four books right there at the barber shop. This is just to say keep them on you because you never know!

See the full discussion: https://youtu.be/VHyD7Fs2mPU

Make Your Poetry Reading Impossible To Forget

Someone really loving your poems, that’s the best, right?

But someone loving your poems and having your chapbook, and even thinking, ‘Man, that one guy that came through the show a couple of months ago, he was really good…’

I actually got four gigs out of one of the chapbooks I had, a vending machine chapbook that was supposed to be a silly little project. This is just to say that you never know what is going to strike with who.

And having chapbooks, having a product that you can actually give to somebody, that’s a product of your work. Chapbooks are really special because they let people who hear you or experience you in one space actually take a piece of you home with them. Maybe they will even reference it later on down the line.

That networking aspect is really key. Chapbooks don’t necessarily get the same level of prestige as a full-length, but it’s nothing to write off. There’s no reason if you have a feature, you don’t have a chapbook. You could make one for all the poems that you plan on reading, and then sell it afterwards.

It’s valuable just in giving something where people can remember the event by.

And then, on top of that, it’s just another opportunity for people to connect with your work, potentially on a deeper level. A lot of times with readings, I personally do better having the visual and being able to read off the page.

I actually once had this feature in Dayton where I set up my reading as a play. So, the chapbook I made for it acted as this playbill that I could offer, a tool that created a really natural connection between what I was doing on stage and the product that I was selling. It becomes part of the experience. When I leave a play, I have listened and watched, but when I also have the playbill, suddenly it becomes ‘Oh, that’s how I’m going to remember that’s how I’m going to remember the experience of being here.’ I have this as a keepsake.

So I think there’s chapbooks turn your reading into not just a show, but an experience.

How To Make Your Poems LIVE Longer

Chapbooks are super, super, super valuable for poets in publishing.

They’re kind of a cheat code because in traditional publishing, it works like this:

you submit a poem, the poem gets published, and in general, no other journal wants to publish that. No one wants to touch that poem again because it’s…it’s tainted; it’s already published. Like, “we don’t want it; we want something pure. Stay away from me.”

Chapbooks, however, want those published poems

(NOTE: I’m thinking less of the homemade chapbooks and more of the published ones, from competitions and things like that).

So chapbooks will typically allow poems you’ve already published. You can include a little acknowledgments page to indicate where the poems originally appeared, some in earlier versions, etc.

And then you can publish that chapbook full of poems you’ve already published.

That really helps with developing those connections because now you have a connection, not only with your chapbook publisher, but also with all the different editors of the journals where your poems were published.

This develops your professional network in the poetry world.

When that chapbook comes out, you can reach out to those editors where those poems originally appeared and be like, ‘Hey, guys, thank you so much again for publishing my work. I’m excited to tell you that it’s now appearing in this chapbook.’

Now you’re helping drive attention not back to the original journals where pieces appeared, but also to the press publishing your chapbook!

The other reason that this can build further is that once the chapbook appears, and you get ready to do a full-length, well…

you can take those same poems that were published in journals, were published in the chapbook, and get them published a third time in a full-length collection. So you’re able to triple-dip!

See the full video here: https://youtu.be/jmF_V9ioj60