Tips and Tricks for Making Your First Zine
Zines play an important role in helping creative and passionate people spread their ideas. Here’s how you can get started making your first zine.
The history of the zine isn’t long, but it is powerful. Artists, thinkers, and other creatives often use zines to get the word out about important issues and help people find their communities. Though corporations have tried to appropriate the zine for their own purposes, it remains a powerful tool for subverting mainstream ideologies. Here’s how you can get started making your first zine.
Choose a Topic
The most successful zines have a clear target audience and a specific type of content. Are you giving voice to a marginalized community or offering space to up-and-coming creatives to show off their art? Whatever the case, take plenty of time to decide on the scope of your zine so that your message isn’t lost.
Assign Roles
Your first zine might very well be a solo project, or you might be working with others. Maybe you’re supplying art, and someone else is writing. However you decide to split up the roles, we recommend putting it on paper so that everyone knows who owns what part of the publication.
Community Contact
Some zine makers prefer anonymity, while others want to foster communities centered on specific interests. If you want people to be able to reach out, respond to your work, or connect with other readers, consider setting up a website or social media account and include the contact info somewhere in the zine.
Distribution Methods
Once you’ve made the zine, you need to get it in the hands of readers. You can walk up to strangers on the street, leave copies in bathroom stalls, or try to sell them at local boutiques. Knowing how you plan to distribute your publication and whether you hope to make any money from it will help you decide the number of copies to make.
Production Tips
How do you make a zine? Back in the day, you’d haunt the Xerox machine at a local print shop to copy original art and get it aligned for booklet making. You can still do this, but technology has made things a lot easier. Many programs offer booklet design modes that make page collation a breeze.Printing has also gotten easier, thankfully. You can make copies at print shops and even order them online. If you’re a student, you may even get a discount if your institution has its own print shop. If you plan on making a lot of copies, it may be worth investing in a saddle stapler for booklet binding since most staplers aren’t long enough for the task.Making your first zine is a fantastic way to practice finding your creative voice and working with other collaborators. It’s also a great way to network with local businesses and art fairs, preparing you for future artistic opportunities.