Chapbooks

from

Picaro Press

     Poetry chapbooks have a long and distinguished history. Ours are modelled on the influential Black Sparrow Press series in the USA, Makar Press’ famous Gargoyle Poets, and Angus & Robertson’s Poet of the Month pamphlets. These small publications did a great deal to develop careers and readership in 1970s.
      Nearly 40 years on, technology has changed to make publication of quality chapbooks very much easier. The first decade of the 21st century is full of time-poor readers, for whom a 16-to-28 page collection is a welcome relief. We hope and expect that those who find a poet’s chapbook attractive will thereafter be more inclined to consider investing $20-$25 in her or his books. All Picaro Press chapbooks sell for just $5, domestic postage included — once again, it’s possible to buy good poetry on impulse, to take a risk, without doing painful damage to the wallet.

Titles and Publication Schedule
All chapbooks cost $5, postage included

Dael Allison’s Shock Aftershock
Yahia Al-Samawy, Two Banks with No Bridge
Magdelena Ball’s Quark Soup
Peter Boyle’s Reading Borges
Cathy Bray, The Owl
The Broadway Prize Anthologies (Poets Union)
                                for 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, & 2008
David Brooks’ Set
Joanne Burns’ penelope’s knees
Ashley Capes’ Orion Tips the Saucepan
Graham Catt’s The Hieronymus Bosch Shopping Mall
Nandi Chinna’s How To Measure Land
Maxine Clarke’s Original Skin
Chris Clifton’s Incompletion
Michael Crane’s Poems from the 29th Floor
Bruce Dawe’s Towards a War
Joel Deane’s £10 Poems
Adam Ford’s The Third Fruit Is a Bird
Will Fraser’s Llamaesque
Will Fraser’s The Legend of Eno ‘Che’ Llama
Will Fraser’s The Leema Conspiracy
Will Fraser’s Leema’s Llamas
Danny Gardner’s The Lips Inside
Juan Garrido-Salgado’s Eleven Poems, September 1973
Juan Garrido-Salgado’s Unmoving Navigator
Beverley George’s Drawing God
Kevin Gillam’s Closer to Now
Barry Hill’s The War Sonnets
Richard Hillman’s Timber Country
Venie Holmgren’s Day of the Pardalote
Karen Knight’s Doctor Says
Karen Knight’s My Mother Has Become
Peter Lach-Newinsky’s The Knee Monologues
Andrew Lansdown’s Warrior Monk
Andrew Lansdown’s Consolations
Andrew Lansdown’s Little Matters
Anthony Lawrence’s Magnetic Field
Anthony Lawrence’s Words & Music
Robin Loftus’ A Certain Radiance
Peter Macrow’s Thuck
Peter Macrow’s Waiting for the Mountain
Peter Macrow’s Spring Rain
Garth Madsen’s Thirteen Jesuses
Garth Madsen’s The Nude Mirror Exercise
Peter Mitchell’s The Scarlet Moment
Meg Mooney’s The Gap
Liz Murphy’s Walk the Wildly
Jenni Nixon’s Agenda!
Nathanael O’Reilly’s Symptoms of Homesickness
Geoff Page’s Long White Cloud & Indian Pixels
Geoff Page’s Bahn Dance
Geoff Page’s Europe 101
Geoff Page’s Cartes postales
Dorothy Porter’s The Night Parrot
Craig Powell’s Poems for a Marriage
Ron Pretty’s Where the Heart Is
Lyn Reeves’ Beads
David Rowbotham’s Rogue Moons
David Rowbotham’s The Star of Engelmeer
David Rowbotham’s The Cave in the Sky
Max Ryan’s Before the Sky
Andrew Sant, The Bicycle Thief
Thomas Shapcott’s Beginnings and Endings
Thomas Shapcott’s The Book of Hanging Gardens
Richard Tipping’s Notes Towards Employment
Ray Tyndale’s Sappho at Sixty
Rob Walker’s phobiaphobia
John West’s Couchworld
John West’s Walking Amongst Women
Dennis Wild’s Just North of Bewilderment
Steve Woodbury’s Dying from Birth
Steve Woodbury’s Northern Lights

Chapbook Contributor Guidelines

Picaro Press has developed a strong line of chapbooks, and we're always looking to add to it.  We are open to poetry in all its many forms — quality is the only criterion.  Many of our poets have been quite successful with this form.  Our chapbook design can be posted in Australia under a $0.55 stamp, and the recommended retail price is just $5; they sell quite well at readings, festivals, and other events.  Contributors may buy unlimited copies at a 40% discount.

Contributors need to be aware that poetry is difficult to sell through bookshops at any time, and that chapbooks are doubly difficult to get into the commercial system.  Some stores will accept works by local authors on consignment, but they generally expect a 40% discount on the price they pay.  It can be a good way to get your work into circulation, but you shouldn't expect to make anything significant in the way of profit.  We can supply bookshops directly; your royalty will then be calculated on the discounted price.  Because all our products are produced using print-on-demand, we much prefer to make a firm sale, not sale-or-return (SOR).  That being said, our policy is to supply event stock for festivals and suchlike — meaning that we will ship to an event's designated bookseller on SOR conditions.  We're not likely to break even on such transactions, but it's good for both contributors and Picaro Press to be represented. Please contact us for details before making a commitment.

We generally advertise chapbooks to our subscriber list, and they can be purchased through our online store.  Historically, though, our best chapbook sales come through the poets themselves.  If you do frequent readings, can organise a local launch, attend festivals, or otherwise lift the profile of your work, you can sell hundreds; it's been done many times.  If you have a particular market in mind — schools, for instance — then there could be significant potential for good sales.  If we supply your customers, we pay a royalty on each copy sold, typically 10% of the recommended retail price.  If you are in a position to supply customers yourself, you earn the full 40% discount (less any expenses, of course, such as postage, travel, advertising, etc.). 

Our chapbooks typically run to 28 pps, as anything longer is difficult to trim.  We've done larger ones, but the cost goes up because we need to either hand-trim or contract that operation out.  For longer works, we may be willing to consider publication in book form.  All our publications are produced in black and white; colour covers can be very expensive, especially in short runs.  We can scan in your cover image, or propose something from our own resources. We can generally include illustrations, photographs, etc. Our standard design includes a quality cover stock, 80-90 gsm copier-quality paper, and a tissue sheet.  Other cover stocks or fancier paper are available, though at increased cost.  All chapbooks for which contributors licence their copyright typically carry an ISBN.

The overheads associated with publishing a chapbook are considerable.  Many hours go into typesetting, exchanging drafts, production, advertising, and running the business.  We need to factor in the cost of consumables, wear and tear on our equipment, taxes, software upgrades, phones, internet costs, bank fees, and a host of other recurring expenses.  To cover our costs and overheads, and still make a fair return on the time required to produce a quality product, we generally need to sell on the order of 100 copies.  Naturally, that's much easier to do for established poets than for emerging ones.  Please keep this in mind when formulating a proposal; we can and will accept orders for smaller numbers, but possibly not at the standard discounted price of $3/each.  And we do make exceptions to this rule: a) we're not risk-averse, and b) we're willing to support worthy but not particularly profitable projects such as small anthologies, publications for charity or other good causes, etc. We've done a considerable number of special-purpose publications requiring short print runs for workshops, seminars, publicity, and related purposes; if the numbers are low, we may be able to cut expenses and overheads in other ways.  If in doubt, please ask us for a quote.  A significant advantage of print-on-demand is that, after the initial print run has recovered our costs, we can promptly ship orders for much smaller numbers; if you want just one more copy, or ten, we can generally ship within a week; we've turned around orders overnight to meet an emergency.

Picaro Press receives no grants or subsidies of any kind; one of our key objectives is to demonstrate that poetry, properly formatted and marketed, can thrive without begging. We've managed to stay in the black for almost ten years now, so we must be on the right track.  We're genuinely interested in publishing quality work, full stop.  If in doubt, write or e-mail with your idea.  The one thing we can guarantee is a fair hearing.