Chap Books, Medium + other forms of publication

If you take poetry or short story writing seriously, then chapbooks could possibly be in your future. If you write material that could be published elsewhere, gathering it together in a thirty-two-page-or-less booklet is something to consider. Chapbooks provide many benefits to a literary career. But you have to plan for it to do it right.

What are your goals?

Some people prefer the instant gratification of posting their creative pieces on social media like Facebook and Instagram. For creative writers especially, Medium can be considered social media. Many people read other members’ work as a warm exchange of personal interest, listening to each other open-heartedly and speaking in turn about dreams and traumas, love and pain. And very likely, most of them are reading within the community with hopes of making money when the stats shake out.

And within Medium, most publications that put out creative works perpetuate that wonderful near-instant gratification by accepting a high percentage of submissions. It’s poet-positivity, non-judgemental, accepting, encouraging, allowing the joys of expression. It’s great. But some creative writers are now finding Medium’s new reward method to be lacking and are looking elsewhere for places to be published and make money.

Are you writing chapbook-type content?

External magazines and anthologies have extremely high standards and expect writers to have extensively studied their craft, usually formally, have gotten feedback and polished the pieces extensively to resemble the kind of work these publications carry. The publications are limited as to the number of pieces they can include, and being published in them is key for obtaining degrees and for professorships and grants, so competition is fierce. The style you write in should stand out as your own and innovate beyond anything done before, but it needs to have certain characteristics that fit within the current literary scene if your work is to be considered by the editors.

There’s a certain direct, confessional style of poetry that’s common on Medium, and it usually does well here, finding many fans. In many cases, it’s dissimilar to the contents of external magazines, chapbooks, anthologies and collections. Submitting poems with the particularly on-the-nose style, especially to top tier, second or third tier magazines, might take up your time and create disappointment. But many poems here have qualities that could be pushed further in the direction that would make them viable there and the writers could enjoy many benefits beyond what Medium can provide. And quite a few poets writing on Medium are already writing material that could do very well in the external literary world.

External-mag poetry more often includes characters, nuanced intimations of philosophy, one-of-a-kind structures that inherently imply something profound about society and consciousness, line breaks with double meanings, sophisticated metaphors, startling juxtapositions of powerful words, attention to cadence, subtle symbolic motifs, vivid descriptions involving the senses, and so on. The subject matter is uniquely specific and fresh, rarely abstract statements about love or depression.

If you write only the more common straightforward style poetry and anecdotal short stories and love the experience and are rewarded well for it financially, you may have no interest in turning to publications elsewhere. You can potentially earn more money and a larger readership for creative writing on Medium than you would receive from external magazines. Most external magazines don’t pay anything, because since the gate-keeper effect is profound, it’s an honour to be included within them, as long as the acceptance rate is low. The reason the honour matters most is because of how it helps a writer’s career and finances in the long run.

And each publication of a poem is valuable as it adds to the resume while writers work their way up the ladder toward lower and lower acceptance-rate magazines with the highest reputations. The lowest acceptance-rate magazines will be mentioned in the five-line third-person bios that writers send out with their submissions, and the bios will then be published at the back of the magazine or anthology to establish credibility and show interested readers where to find more of your work.

The author bios will also include awards, MFAs, grants, fellowships and editorial positions, all of which become increasingly possible to obtain the more poems you have in reputable magazines and anthologies. Most Medium publications would usually not be appropriate to include in the bio unless you’re submitting to obscure high-acceptance rate magazines, though if you have an enthusiastic following of 20K for your poems, including that fact in your query could get you somewhere. Many magazines and anthologies do pay, however, and many pay quite well, some extraordinarily so. I’ve personally made a good deal of money from short stories.

And while most chapbook publishers don’t pay other than perhaps in a few copies, and in exposure, some do. And once you have the copies they give you or that you purchase from them at a discount, you can sell them.

Genre short stories, like Horror, Romance, Thrillers, and Suspense are rarely collected into chapbooks, as chapbooks are particularly for Literary fiction.

Getting published

Duotrope is very useful for learning about each publications including the acceptance rate, subgenres and lengths of pieces they consider, how much they pay, how long you must wait to hear from them and so on. If you are on track to get into an MFA program and/or make a career out of creative writing, teaching, magazine editing, manuscript editing, coaching and so on, once you have enough material to submit, paid membership to Duotrope is worth the money to unlock their

There are other useful sites to find what magazines, anthologies, chapbook and collection publishers are looking for, including NewPages, The Submission Grinder, Poets and Writers and the Creative Writing Opportunities Group on Yahoo. Go ahead and create your Submittable profile, polishing a professional bio to include with submissions even if you have no publications, yet; this is your chance to show your personality and writing style, so make it sing. Confidently write your bio like someone special that editors want to throw money at. Yet self-deprecating humor is welcomed.

Just be prepared to submit poems and short stories many times to magazines and anthologies before they are accepted; even the most well-known writers go through that process. Since the reputable magazines typically have somewhere around a one percent acceptance rate (although of course it varies), you just have to find the pieces that resonate with their editors, and that may never happen. The more closely you analyze the content they publish, the better chances you’ll have. If you keep good records and constantly submit lots of pieces all the time, eventually you may have enough publications to gather into a chapbook.

And expect to wait a few months to hear a response. The longest most publications advertise taking is fine months. I put my own cut-off at submitting to places that take no longer than six months. And some publications say they never respond if they aren’t interested, and yet they expect exclusive submission. If you can submit elsewhere at the same time, they’ll say simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Don’t try to break their rules; treat them respectfully as fellow humans.

If you do write material that fits the style of external publications, then I’d suggest thinking ahead in terms of chapbooks. They’re historically legit books with a respectable tradition that it feels good to participate in. Since they are usually conceptually themed, that means you should begin now writing some poems and short stories that fit together. For example, Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby chapbook is organized alphabetically. Each letter begins a baby name.

You don’t need to have the chapbook’s full thirty-two pages-worth of material that already inhabits magazines. Chapbook publishers like from around one third to two thirds of the stories or poems in the manuscript to be in magazines. So you can submit to calls for chapbooks and include some unpublished work. And many chapbooks are shorter, anyway, some being only twelve pages.

Chapbooks serve a variety of purposes

Stimulation

They are usually themed. Rarely do publishers put out chapbooks that are random collections of a poet or fiction writer’s pieces. Each chapbook has a specific topic, style or concept that holds it together and makes it into a unique work of art as a whole, such as with the Matt Bell example above. So writing toward a chapbook gives you an opportunity to explore a subject from a variety of perspectives. Once you come up with the concept, your creative juices can flow to produce many individual poems or short stories. The two genres can even be combined in some chapbooks. Thinking in terms of chapbooks can be a real boon for triggering your imagination. Each chapbook is a beautifully designed world.

Cred

Having one or more chapbooks adds to your resume. This can be useful for showing publishers when you submit a full collection later. They can lead to acceptance if you apply to an MFA program. Chapbooks can get you grants, fellowships, scholarships, internships and teaching jobs.

Connections

High quality publishers putting them out are usually good people to network with. They take particular note of their chapbook authors and develop personal relationships throughout the editing and marketing process. If you go to conferences like MLA, AWP or &Now, you’ll likely see the publishers there, and if they’re local to your city, they’ll probably have booths at Book Fairs and Festivals and you can hang out with them and meet other people involved with the scene. Publication editors are some of the most intimate friends you can make, as they delve deeply into your work. A chapbook gives them more to connect with than the three to five poems or flashes and single short story that is allowed within a submission to a magazine. They provide the art and binding and promote it on their websites and social media.

Readings

Chapbooks are handy at open mics or if you become a featured reader at a reading series. You can hold them to read from, which is better logistically and classier than holding a piece of paper. The photos of you with books in your hand establish that you take writing seriously. And you can have them for sale at the events. Many authors, including grad students attending conferences, seminars, festivals and workshops will have them to trade with you, which can lead to lifetime networking with those authors.

Education and career

Some authors never move beyond chapbooks and build up an entire career based on a series of them. Many people get into MFA programs and gain teaching or editing jobs based purely on the chapbooks. When you list your books, chapbooks may carry the same weight as a full length collection if the publisher is well-known for releasing excellently reviewed chapbooks.

Impress and gift

Your family and friends can get the idea that you really mean you want to be a writer when they see you with a beautiful book in your hand. And you can give away the chapbooks as gifts to friends, as they have particular value, being limited editions with high resale value.

This is the order you go in

First, magazines and anthologies.

You might start with publications that have relatively high acceptance rate and work your way up, including in your submission bio the publications that have the lowest rates of acceptance. Your publications in magazines with high rates probably should not be included in your chapbook submission unless it’s a contest. With a contest, judges won’t see the list, so that won’t sway them.

Chapbooks come next.

Anything that has been published in a magazine or anthology can potentially be included in a chapbook. If it’s already been in a different chapbook, that’s not ideal to include in another one. If it’s been in a book longer than thirty-two pages, it can’t, however, be included in a chapbook. That’s why the strict cut-off on length that is part of the definition of a chapbook.

Then come full-length collections.

If it’s been in a magazine or anthology or a chapbook, it can go in a collection. But not vice-versa.

Note that at no point in this list have I included publishing your work on social media like Facebook or on your blog.

Those don’t count as publication in a bio, but they do count as publication to a magazine, anthology or publisher of a chapbook or collection. They don’t usually accept “previously published” work. A few say they will consider reprints, but they don’t generally pay much for them. And they mean it’s previously published even if you put it up and then remove it. Respect their rules; publishers are people too who shouldn’t be lied to. They know about the Wayback Machine and other ways of discovering the archives of internetland.

What do chapbooks look like?

Most are in print and aren’t large enough to have a title showing along the binding. There are certain types of bindings that are traditionally used, none of which would be found with a full-length book. The binding styles tend to inexpensive and sometimes are personalized, with the publisher sewing them by hand with special ribbons or yarn. The look is usually more handmade craftsman style than slick and standardized commercial style. They can be any dimensions, so often vary from the typical proportions of books.

They might include popups, pockets, glitter, one-of-a-kind additions on each individual chapbook created, such as butterflies and flower petals pressed on with heated wax paper. They are artistic productions. They might be origami or two-inch folded paper books hanging from a necklace. They might have DVDs inserted. Or they might look exactly like typical commercial books, just shorter.

They can also be online, though those are rare, living on the website of the publisher, illustrated and contained within a beautifully structured presentation. Those are better for sharing with as many people as you like, compared to print books which get fewer eyes upon them but which are worth money or trade value to you.

Printed chapbooks aren’t usually available on Amazon other than used copies, so have no ISBN. They sometimes are only five dollars, though the fancy productions from high reputation publishers, when the pieces inside have been published in famous print-only magazines or anthologies might cost forty dollars. The limited editions sell out, often going up in price the fewer you have left and then become collector’s items that can have hundreds of dollars resale value. If you have only a few left, you can set the price as high as you like, even for hundreds of dollars.

They don’t look like zines. Zines are self-published and printed on computers on regular paper or are scanned and the copies are printed, making them look even more industrial and grunge or punk. Zines are less expensive and are found at zine fests or zine sections in local book stores, and writers have them for sale at readings such as one might find some evening at an anarchist book store.

Summation

All right, so there are the reasons to avoid publishing specific work on a blog or social media that you think might work later within a chapbook. The choice is yours whether you want to pursue that path, but if you do, you may be thrilled to one day hold a wonderful little work of art in your hands that is thirty-two pages of goodness and worth hundreds of dollars