We study the phenomenology of fixed-target elastic J/psi photoproduction in the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism. Our goal is to test an essential feature of this formalism-the color-octet mechanism. We obtain an order-of-magnitude estimate for a certain linear combination of NRQCD color-octet matrix elements. Our estimate is consistent with other empirical determinations and with the upsilon-scaling rules of NRQCD.