Poetry is the category where careless production does the most visible damage, because in poetry the visual arrangement is not presentation. It is content.
A line that wraps because the measure is too narrow has been silently rewritten. A stanza break lost across a page turn changes the poem's breathing. Indentation flattened by a template destroys a structure the poet built deliberately. Concrete and shaped poems can be rendered meaningless by a typesetter who does not realise what they are looking at.
So poetry typesetting is a specialism, not a setting. We set collections with the measure chosen from the longest line in the book, so nothing wraps unintentionally. Stanza breaks are protected across pages, and where a poem must break, a continuation marker tells the reader. Indentation, caesura spacing and vertical placement are preserved exactly as written. Each poem starts on a fresh page unless you want otherwise, and blank versos are used deliberately rather than falling where they land.
The order of the poems is the book
A collection is not an anthology of your best work. It is a sequence, and the sequence is a compositional act.
Editing poetry means working on arrangement more than on individual lines: which poem opens and what expectation it sets, how the collection moves between registers, whether it should be sectioned and where, which poems are doing the same job twice, and which strong poem is nonetheless breaking the book and should be held for the next one.
Our poetry editors work at that level. They will also raise line-level questions, but always as queries rather than corrections, because a poet's deviations are usually intentional and an editor who "fixes" them has misunderstood the job.
Chapbook or full collection
A chapbook — typically twenty to forty pages, often saddle-stitched — is a genuine form, not a lesser one. It suits a tightly focused sequence, it is affordable to produce and to buy, and it is well suited to selling at readings.
A full collection usually runs sixty to a hundred pages and can support sections and a more varied arc. We will help you work out which shape your material actually wants, which is not always the one the poet had in mind.
Digital poetry needs care
Reflowable eBooks are hostile to poetry by default: they rewrap lines according to the reader's font size, which is precisely the thing that must not happen.
We handle this by building poetry EPUBs with proper line protection and continuation indentation, so a long line that must wrap does so visibly and consistently rather than pretending to be a new line. For collections with concrete or heavily shaped work, a fixed-layout edition is usually the honest answer, and sometimes the right answer is to publish digitally only in a format that can hold the shape.
Poetry's economics, honestly
Poetry sells in smaller numbers than any other category, and print runs, pricing and expectations should all be set accordingly. That is not a reason not to publish — poetry finds its readers through readings, magazines, prizes and word of mouth over years rather than through a launch week.
What it does mean is that we will steer you towards production choices that suit the reality: print-on-demand rather than a garage of unsold copies, a price that works for the form, and a beautiful object rather than an expensive marketing campaign.
