What Is a Chapbook?
There was a fantastic panel discussion regarding poetry during the Wisconsin Book Festival. Several small-press publishers answered questions posed by Verse Wisconsin co-editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman. The publishers had a variety of takes on many questions, ranging from how long it should take to get a response on submissions to money and keeping a small press afloat.
But the topic I thought I’d put out here first is this: what is a chapbook? What constitutes a full-length book of poetry? And how does a poet approach assembling a collection?
The fast answer to the first question came from B.J. Best, editor of Desperado Press, who said a chapbook typically consists of 20 to 30 pages, though they can be longer or shorter, depending on the collection. A full-length collection is 48 pages or more.
Lester Smith, president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, noted that the work assembled in a chapbook is even more deeply thematically linked than the typical full-length collection.
Once poems have been published in chapbook form editors of small-press magazines or literary journals will no longer publish them, noted Linda Aschbrenner, who publishes Marsh River Editions and was the editor and publisher of Verse Wisconsin’s predecessor Free Verse for 11 years. She suggests, especially for a poet publishing a first chapbook, that at least half of the manuscript consist of poems that have previously been published in journals.
More chapbook facts shared by the panelists: chapbooks are typically staple-bound and have color only on the cover, and sometimes not even there. Chapbooks are faster and cheaper to produce than full-length collections, which are perfect bound and use color more liberally.
Other publishers on the panel included Charles Nevsimal of Centennial Press (which published the fantastic chapbook by Karla Huston pictured above), F.J. Bergman of Mobius-Journal of Social Change, Ralph Murray of Little Eagle Press (of Wisconsin, website coming soon) and Richard Roe of Fireweed Press (no website). I will share more about this informative discussion in coming posts.