A Short Guide to Printing a Zine

AKA How to Lose Money But Maybe Make Friends...

Skipping running an interview this week - I wanted to talk a little bit about the fanzine which is the reason for this thing you are reading now existing…

When I first started doing Razorblades & Aspirin, my stated goal was to do a fancy art mag focused on punk bands that play to 50 people in a basement. Obviously, the last few years has seen an explosion in growth of people at shows so maybe its more like 100 people now but, the basic idea of doing a slick art mag focused on the punk scene has remained. More than anything, I wanted to get away from the notion of zines having to be one thing - cut and paste, photocopied, black and white, etc. I view hardcore punk as being this vibrant, brilliant thing and while you can do really cool things in black & white, from a design perspective, I never really feel like it is reflective of the shows I am shooting, the people I am meeting - that vibrancy isn’t there and so I chose to do the zine in a certain manner to try to be a mirror to what I encounter everyday.

I get emailed and messaged a lot about how I do the zine - mostly where do you print it, how do you distribute it, why do you charge what you charge, etc. So I figured, why not type it up as best I can. It’s not easy, it’s not cheap, but I feel it is worth it. So here’s my basic process, vomited up for you in around 1800 words….

Layout

To put the zines together, I lay everything out in Adobe InDesign and edit the photos and do some other graphic work in Photoshop which I drop into InDesign. Adobe works as a subscription service these days and you can turn it on/off as needed. I then export as a PDF X1A. Even if you are doing everything all cut and paste, you still are going to need to scan the pages and export them as PDFs so you can send to a printer…

Printing

Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with photocopying and stapling your zine yourself but I tend to shy away from it based on the fact that, unless you are able to scam your copies, the cost to do it that way is more than using a printer - trust me, I miss the days of scammed Kinko’s cards from the 90s but so it goes.

I use a few different printers depending on what I’m doing. For the magazine, I use Mixam and Short Run Printing depending on their availability and current pricing. They both have an online calculator allowing you to select paper, size, number of pages, etc. I tend to think that Short Run Printing does a better job representing colors but sometimes they are much more expensive than Mixam but, sometimes they’re not. Pricing tends to shift a lot based on paper costs - it used to cost around $2500 to do an issue of my zine, the last one cost $3600. If I were to do one today, I’d be looking at nearly $5000. Same number of pages, same paper, number of copies, etc.

This is why I’ve not done an issue this year - I mean I’ve made some zines but you know not the zine.

When I do newsprint stuff I use either Make My Newspaper or  Newspaper Club - the former is typically much cheaper but the print quality isn’t as good as the latter. Again they both have online calculators so you can create your own estimate. 

Distribution

I printed 700 copies of the last issue. A lot of them were sold direct via mailorder. I use BigCartel for that but I think If I started today I might use something else - I like it but I feel like others integrate with other online commerce tools a bit better. That might just be me thinking the grass is greener or some sorta nonsense shit like that. 

Beyond direct mail-order, the vast bulk of the zines go to my friends at Sorry State, Revelation, Ebullition, Microcosm,and Deathwish Records. I’ve never really been able to figure out how to get more zines into Europe or Asia - the shipping these days is really expensive. Like stupid expensive, that said I’m always on the outlook for a partner but they would need to be able to take at least 50 copies to make it a more reasonable cost.

I also sell direct to a number of shops - Quimby’s in Chicago and NYC have been great partners, totally easy and awesome to work with. Same with Atomic Books in Baltimore. Mom & pop shops tend to be cool with working direct, especially if you are willing to do things on consignment. You just have to stay on top of them and follow up. I tend to do do things on 90 day terms - basically I will just send the zines and follow up every three months to see what has sold. 

I find that a lot of times people don’t pay, or don’t want to pay until you are about to send a new issue - also don’t expect to get copies back from distributors or shops. Its too much of a pain for them to mail them back which is annoying but so it goes. On the flip it's important that you are sort of a jerk about getting paid - a polite jerk but a jerk.

In the “real” magazine world the expectation is that you only sell 30% of your issues and if you sell 30% that is considered really great! A lot of magazines you see on stands are running a sell through of like 20-25% I sell out of everything and fairly quickly at that but, part of that is that I just print the amount I know will sell and only go up in print run when I’m sure I can sell them. Also, since this is a one person operation run out of our home, I don’t like to annoy my partner with a bunch of zines sitting around the house if I can avoid it. Beyond that, it’s a good practice to keep the margins as tight as possible when you are working on, basically, a shoestring. Or a razor. Or a banana peel. (inset additional dumb cliché here).

Pricing

Warning, this will probably give you a headache.

I spend a lot of time agonizing over this - in my mind, a zine should cost about $5 max. I recognize that isn’t realistic but my perception on this is shaped by how long I’ve been at the game and years of punk having this perspective of everything should be done as cheaply as possible. It’s a noble idea but it is sorta self destructive, so here’s how I really do it these days.

For the sake of discussion, let’s say the next costs $5000 to print 700 copies of an 80 page, 8.5x11, full color zine. On a base level this means my cost $7.15 per copy to print. My goal is for 30% of those pages to be advertisements - so ideally I would sell 24 pages worth of ads. In an ideal world, those 24 pages would cover the cost of printing the zine - meaning each full page ad should cost $200, a half page ad $100, quarter page $50.

The last issue I charged $150 for a full, $75 for a half and $30 for a quarter pager - but again the print cost of the zine was $3600. I sold 19.5 pages for that issue, not bad.

Following me so far? Ok, again for the sake of argument let’s say I sell 19.5 pages again - so that means $3900 in ad sales - this means an out of pocket cost for me of $1100. So, how do I figure out how much to charge!?

Typical magazine world would say, take that $7.15 per issue cost, multiply that by 1.4 (40% mark up) and you get $10 (well technically $10.01 but…) - this should be the wholesale cost. Double it and you get what you should charge to via mailorder before postage - $20.02, though I would just charge $20 because its nice and even.

Being an old punk, I have a hard time charging $10 wholesale - ideally that is what it costs in a shop when you buy it off the shelf. So here’s my (possibly) dumb math - print cost is $5000 minus $3900 in ad sales means $1100 out of my pocket, so let’s say $1.60 (rounded up) cost to me, so $2.25 wholesale cost and then $4.5 cost to you on the shelf. That feels low - so I split the difference and charge $5.50 wholesale, $10 on the shelf in a shop. This allows me to cover miscellaneous extra expenses like shipping boxes, Adobe Creative Suite subscription, envelopes, packing tape, transcription charges, postage meter charges, the cost of my PO Box, etc.

So if everything works out like I would like, the zine (minus those misc charges) costs $5000 and ideally I bring in around $7750 in revenue for a profit of $2750. Between buying records, paying for interviews to be transcribed (because, fuuuuuuck transcribing interviews), and all the rest you can shave about $1000 so… like $1750 is what’s left. Ideally, this then goes into printing the next zine and the next zine and the cycle continues. But as anyone who has done any sort of DIY venture, that ‘profit’ comes back to you over a longer than ideal stretch of time and in small chunks here and there. I’ve never really never had that block of cash from the zine sitting in my bank account, but technically, that’s what it is.

So that’s my quick primer on how I do a zine. I tend to think about this sorta nonstop. Yes, I could do it all in black and white and it’d be cheaper. I could do it all newsprint and it’d be cheaper. The thing is, that’s not what I want this to be. To be honest, the high cost is sorta and the stress involved is sorta why I started doing this shitstack - the fun part for me is the writing, listening to records, making photographs, interviewing interesting people, etc. The business of putting out zines is mind melting. Certainly the end product of all that stress and worry about the dollars and cents of the thing is worth it but it is also all a bit exhausting. Hopefully, I can use this to help with the creation of that physical thing again soon. Until then, I welcome your thoughts, feedback - even if it is just to let me know that this put you to sleep.

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