Behind the Scenes: Chapbook, Stage One

We’re so excited about our chapbook competition, we thought we’d talk about the process of selecting and publishing a chapbook as it happens. Or until the semester gets so busy we forget. We are human, after all.
We already have ISBN numbers so that’s taken care. Yesterday we took the first step of starting to get quotes for printing.   While we worked with McNaughton-Gunn for PANK 3 (and will likely work with them again, they are fantastic), it is always good to get a few estimates each time we’re embarking on a print project to get a sense of where the market is at and to get the cheapest estimate possible. To my mind, printing is one of the biggest rackets. I say that with a lot of love to our printing brothers and sisters. I remain flabbergasted at the cost of printing something in nontraditional formats, sizes, with color, etc. There’s a reason why so many magazines are 5.5 x 8.5″ and black and white. It isn’t for a lack of wanting to do something different. If I knew then what I know now, I would have opened a print shop   right out of high school so today I could   walk around with my pinky finger at the corner of my mouth with manservants throwing rose petals before my feet. Alas.

Getting estimates is easy yet tricky. You always start big with your wish list of elements you want to include (huge pages! thick paper! embossed covers! full color inside pages!) and then you start to whittle away at the bells and whistles until you reach your budget and you find yourself where you should have started. It’s a bit disheartening, really but it is also kind of fun. It’s like looking in the glass windows at Tiffany’s in Manhattan. You want the pretty baubles in that there window. You want them bad but sometimes, just looking gives you a bit of a thrill.

Before we called around, we dropped Adam Robinson at Publishing Genius Press an e-mail, asking him where Light Boxes was printed because it was so well done. The matte of that cover, sexy. He was kind and generous enough to respond, and quickly. Turns out, Light Boxes was printed at McNaughton-Gunn. Small world.

I also happened to look inside the Caketrain chapbooks and they were kind enough to list where they publish their chapbooks, Morris Publishing.

These details are mundane and yet they’re not. The thing about working with printers is they’re either very good or they’re not. When they’re not and you’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars, it makes for a bitter combination. Being able to see finished, successful, remarkable books like Light Boxes and the Caketrain chapbooks, publications which are similar (we are not so bold as to consider them our peers just yet) to what we hope to produce is so much more useful than receiving a packet of samples in the mail. Samples (with, I must say, the exception of MCG which provides real, and fabulous samples) are generally hideous and not at all useful. You look at these sad samples of self-published books and bad design and ugly covers and think, “I could do better with my copy machine.” The problem in most of these cases isn’t the printing, it’s the design which most printing companies have nothing to do with. So, known quantities give you a place to start in a world where there are thousands upon thousands of printers waiting to take your money.

Armed with this information, the phone calling began. Web forms for estimates are well and good but six times out of ten you have requests that the form cannot interpret so I just save myself some time and start with actual contact with fellow human beings. Now it is a matter of waiting for the various representatives to e-mail us the estimates. Then we start reading tea leaves and upending sofa cushions and making preliminary decisions.

Exciting times!