Now it’s time to make an eye-catching cover for your chapbook. Choose a heavier card and try to pick one that is attractive. You can choose a nice picture for the cover and use a descriptive title as well as your name and the year the book has been ‘published’. If you are planning on giving your chapbooks away as gifts why not personalize each cover and make a special effort for the intended recipients that they won’t soon forget?
Use an interesting font for your cover page or print in color rather than basic black. You could even try some calligraphy or ask somebody to do it for you.
Be as inventive as you can with your cover. You can add bits of paper, pictures or dried leaves and flowers and have the cover laminated afterwards. The basic idea is to print a chapbook that is both special and personal.
Phase 7 of Printing a Chapbook
Once you have all your pages printed out and have your cover's ready to go you can start putting your chapbook together. A chapbook is basically a pile of sheets folded over in the middle which you bind along the fold but you can be inventive in your choices of binding - staple the pages together or sew the spine with some pretty thread, yarn, twine or ribbon anything goes but try to tone the binding in with the color and theme of your chapbook cover.
How simple was that!?
Now you are ready to share your work with others by giving them to friends and family as gifts, sending your chapbooks out to publishers or periodicals or even selling them! You can print a chapbook quickly and easily so make as many as you like and spread your literary talents around. You can even teach your friends how to print a chapbook and make gift sets of three or four books which you can give away or sell. Have fun with the process and be creative with your writing gift! Good luck and happy publishing!
