WANTED:How To Make a Zine

By: Alicia de los Reyes

One late night last winter break after a hard day of hanging out and doing the dishes, I decided the time had come. All of my random crazy “artwork” and rants about James Bond needed to find a home, a place where they could be content in photocopied glory. I needed something to break up the mundane days of junior year of school. And so it happened—my zine, WANTED, was born. Zine: a vehicle for whatever needs to be shown to the world. It’s cheap, easy, and fun because you can make your zine into whatever you want. Making a zine is also great for the power thrill you get thinking, Ha, I don’t want to write an introduction…I’m not going to.

Now, how to make one
1. The best advice I ever read was to assemble your content before you make your zine. If you want to give the world a zine full of recipes and top ten movie lists, get them together over a period of time. Just start collecting them. You don’t want to get bogged down in the feeling that you MUST come up with something if you can’t. If you’re not inspired or your recipes aren’t working, let it go and come back to it later.

2. Once you get what you want to put in the zine together, think about how you want the finished product to look. There are about 8 billion ways to do it. Mine, for instance, is three pieces of paper folded in half and stapled in the middle (a half-size zine) , but I’ve seen zines that are quarter-size (folded twice and cut to make twice as many pages) and even 8th-size (folded three times). The most important thing to think about is what you have…zines are an unadulterated expression of you, so if you have a pile of shiny empty newsprint in the basement, use that and fold it sixteen times and make a new zine genre—16th size. Keep in mind that if you want a million copies, it’s probably easiest to make your zine on standard sized paper, but there are buckets of options at the copy shop, and most copy guys and gals are more than happy to accommodate freakish paper.

3. Put it together! One fabulous thing about zines is that you don’t have to worry about your audience. It’s a break from the usual routine. Because zines are free (or close to it) no one is going to demand their money back if your writing disappoints or your cartoons aren’t funny. Assemble a dummy copy of your zine. I like to put my three pages together, glue the “articles” onto each page, toss in some pictures or collage-ish work, and take the pages apart again to copy. It’s easy to do it this way because then you don’t have to worry about lining the pages up or making sure things match. Remember to number the pages, especially if you do front and back or complicated folding. It makes stapling easy.

4. Head to the copy shop and make friends with the machine. When in doubt, ask, and pay the 2 cents extra to get them to do it. How many copies to make? This is when you have to think about your audience. My first zine I made 50 copies because I was psyched and handed nearly all of them out at school. My second and third I only made about ten copies because it was summer and I only felt like giving it to my friends.

If you are looking to "distro your zine" (have a kind soul distribute it to strangers over the internet or via a catalogue; this person is called a distro), most distros will ask for a minimum of about four or five copies. Be sure to keep a copy on hand or at least your original because you never know when you’re going to need some underground media.

5. Money and price are rather simple; zines are generally not profit-making. I charge 50 cents for my zine online to make up for the ones I give out for free at home. I keep track of my costs well enough to know that I haven’t broke even yet. No matter. When I get low on cash, I make less copies, when I’m doing well, I make more.

6. Distroing my zine has been all around an excellent experience for me. Here’s the gist of how it works—you send zines to someone working out of their house, apartment, or dorm, and they send you either money or trades (in the form of other zines, patches, mix tapes, or whatever their distro supports).

If you distro on consignment, the compensation comes as your zine gets sold; wholesale means the pay comes upfront. Most zines operate on concealed cash but some use Paypal. I like to trade for other zines because it’s easy to make an equal trade for a zine of the same size and because otherwise, I wouldn’t get to read any. Look around on the internet for a distro close to you and make sure it distros your kind of zine (or at least doesn’t NOT support it).

“Perzines” are personal zines and some distros only like to have a couple of these because they cater to a somewhat limited audience (alright, this is sort of the pot calling the kettle black…all zines cater to a somewhat limited audience—that’s why they are zines and not shiny, commercialized publications). Other types of zines include art and punk zines.

If your zine doesn’t fit into a genre, more power to you because most don’t, or if they do, they fit loosely. Look at the submissions page on the distro’s site to see if they want you to email and/or send a sample zine for possible distro-ification (I realize the real word is distribution…oh, well) and make sure to be really nice to whoever runs it. These people are just like you, in that they like creativity and most definitely are making no money off this operation. Most are happy to offer advice and answer any questions you’ve got.

7. Bask in your coolness. You can now say “I am a self-published and starving artist” with pride..

Alicia de los Reyes is the writer & stapler of Wanted, a 10 page zine that has included a pop out shrine to Frida Kahlo. She aspires to be a writer and to own a Scotty dog.

See Also

Review: Alabama Studio Style
Review: Kids in the Garden
Seeds of Inspiration