#zine creation

[tohtarot]

🦉 GUIDING GLYPHS: CONTRIBUTOR LINEUP 🦉

Please put your hands together for the newly-joined mages and magicians that have been welcomed into the Covens!

#the owl house #toh #owlhouse #fanzine #fandom zine #zine promo #zine #fan zine #art zine #toh zine #tarot cards #tarot #toh au #zine announcement #coming soon #new release #creation #zine creation #contributor spotlight #contributor intro #zine contributor #spotlight

[springtimebat]

The Girl in the Back of the Class

She was more shadow than flesh. An outline of a person rather than an actual human being. Just one of those students who is there to take up the empty spaces in a classroom.

The only time anyone noticed her was when a member of the football team decided to torment them; smashing her into a locker, stealing their lunch off of cafeteria trays, administering burns to her sensitive wrists.

She didn’t show up to class in the fall. Her desk, with its creaking planks and runes etched onto its burnt edges, lay lonely in the Autumn-wine shade. 

Her mom is wiry and ancient, living off benefit check after benefit check. She spends the day handing out missing posters to strangers instead of seeking employment. 

The other parents in the neighborhood tut and fuss at this strange limbo of a woman. Now that her daughter is gone she should  just fade away from public life; become a mournful silhouette against colorful wallpaper. 

The girl was strange, alternative, lonely. No one cares to remember her in any significant way. Except maybe with embarrassment. Next year, she will be dug up with the rotting snow. 

Still, no-one new moves into town. Her desk remains empty. Unloved. It takes the rest of the class two months to pry open her old locker. Their heads ache when the idea comes to mind.

The locker is covered in old stickers and permanent marker soliloquies. The lock has to be twisted inside out three times over before the door gives way. Its hinges seem to ooze an unnatural blue ooze. Territorial marks made by a girl who was never noticed.

She went to a lot of shows, they realize, shuffling through tickets from a year ago. Corrupted snapshots and polaroids display flashing stage-lights and mosh-pits. 

One photo, tacked onto the locker door with wrinkled strips of tape, shows a figure with teased hair and ringed eyes. The girl had never smiled before. Death made her grin.

A war-torn notebook is buried inside too, along with several home-made zines in a misshapen drawer. Its cover is decorated with baby lambs and human skulls. They interact within speech bubbles, scribbled hastily on the page. They ask each other what the color of the sky is. 

The zines belong to a collection, written almost obsessively over the girl’s high school years. Beneath the Wire. Her classmates go through them together as a makeshift research group, anticipating some kind of extensive eulogy. They instead discover something else entirely. 

No one ever expected the dead girl to be funny but humor drips quietly across every page. Drawings depict herself as a gorgon, hair twisting and floating above her as its own entity, who turns various people from town into stone. Poems which don’t really rhyme retell times that she skipped school to people-watch. Multiple caricatures of people riding the bus are pasted into the notebook’s margins.

There’s a woman with a pink beehive that reaches the clouds, smoking ten cigarettes at once.

A couple with matching scowls, combat boots and spiked hair, who shoot lasers through the cracked bus windows.

An old man in a defunct army uniform, whose soul spews from his ass and rants about the “good ol’ days of ‘nam”. 

The last page expresses the same attitude. There’s no sadness, no pain. Just a scribble of the chemistry teacher sodomising himself with a rolled up poster depicting the periodic table.

The class gather up all the vanished girl’s belongings and hand them over to her mother the next morning, putting an end to her spell over town. At least, to them anyway.

The mother takes everything home and arranges her daughter’s life on the kitchen table. It is a holy experience, like she’s identifying a skeleton. She gazes at the comics, the lyrics, the grinning photographs…they all seem to sink deep underneath her flesh. Finally, she lets out a small cry.

By the next week, she has stopped handing out missing posters. Now, she gives out copies of Beneath the Wire in the local park, a wistful expression on her face as winter approaches.

#my writing #creative writing #missing people #american horror #suburban horror #small town horror #american gothic #suburban gothic #small town gothic #vanishing #bullying #mentions of moshing #horror #poetry #southern gothic #monsters #cryptids #cryptidcore #weirdcore #zine creation #zines #loneliness #isolation #ambiguous ending

[celestriakle]

Hi! I found your at from a zine modding advice compilation doc. I am planning to make a zine, but I have no experience modding. I was wondering if I could get your advice on how to make realistic/fulfillable plans as a newbie?

Hi there! I'm in a zine mod advice doc? 0: I had no idea, could you send me a link? I'm curious!

So, I ran my zine solo and it was my first time running any sort of project like this. It was saddlestitched 30-40 pages (I don't remember exactly; this was several years ago) and we did merch: an enamel pin, a sticker sheet, a die-cut sticker, and two holographic prints. In the end, we made enough money to cover our costs and pay out $6 (approximately) to each contributor, but did not raise enough money to offer complimentary copies of the physical zine/merch. I was aiming to have enough for complimentary copies, which is why I'd call the project a semi-success.

This got long! But here's pretty much all the advice I got:

Know your audience. Is it a fandom zine? How big is the fandom? Original content zines will struggle more to gain interest. How big is YOUR platform, specifically? As lead, the onus is on you to get the word out at the start to attract contributors and potential buyers. Try to gauge how many copies you might sell from this. Lean conservative on your estimate and base your plan on that. (This is where interest checks come in!)

Pick your vendors. Familiarize yourself with the terminology they use. Compare and contrast prices and services using the sales estimate you devised in the last step. How long does shipping take? What is the policy if products come out defective? There are always going to be some defective products when producing en masse. Check reviews. Have you bought zines yourself? Contact the creators of zines you like and ask them which vendors they're using for their assorted products. (I had a great experience with mixam.) Don't forget to look into acquiring packaging and shipping costs (domestic and international)!

Decide how you're going to sell the zine. Kickstarter's great if you're using a vendor that has a set MOQ (minimum order quantity) or if you want to guarantee to be able to provide a certain level of compensation for your contributors, but it also takes a fee and means that, if you don't get enough orders, you have to start the campaign all over again. Bigcartel has more flexibility in terms of sales windows and such, but it's difficult to customize like kickstarter. Also, if you're using bigcartel and don't sell enough, you're on the hook for either refunding or fulfilling all the preorders you do get. You'll also need a stripe and paypal business account.

Make a budget. So you have an estimate of how many you think you'll sell. You know how much your vendors cost. You've accounted for your incidentals (kickstarter fee, packaging, gas to get to the post office, etc). Refer to other zines for what typical prices for your products are and set your prices based on that. (Analyzing what other zines are doing is generally a good idea.) What's the absolute minimum number of sales you need to cover costs? (Fewer orders usually increases production cost.) How many sales do you need to make to compensate your contributors? What will you do if there's excess money? What if it's not enough to split it among your contributors evenly? ($40 is a lot for one person, but it's basically nothing split 30 ways.) Are you going to make stretch goals?

Make a timeline. Interest check, contributor apps, concept submissions (you'll want to know what people are doing before they start working), periodic WIP checks to make sure everyone's on task (there will always be a few people who need to drop out), preorder period, manufacture time, shipping timeline. People will want to know what to expect, especially contributors. Ensure the contributors have plenty of time to work, since, chances are, they're effectively donating their time and effort. Keep in mind major holidays and school schedules; people will need more time if those are happening. Give yourself plenty of pillow space for unforseen issues, so you can stick to this timeline as much as possible throughout the process.

Have the full plan written out for your contributors before they arrive. Be clear and concise. Timeline, expectations in terms of content and behavior, instructions, how you're going to fulfill the zine, expected compensation. Not everyone knows how to prepare an image for print, so include that in your instructions. You're gonna want a discord for this. I also used google forms to manage check-ins and other such things.

Be involved, and COMMUNICATE. Talk to your contributors outside of check-ins. You're their hypeman! Hype them up! Make sure your passion's there for all to see! Nothing, and I mean nothing, kills a project faster than a disinterested/aloof leader. You'll also want to communicate any issues to contributors and buyers asap. It's not embarrassing; people will be patient (mostly) as long as they have communication. Silence is upsetting.

Consider marketing. I've written this as if you're going solo, but these next few bullets is why people usually run zines as a team. Once the contributor team is assembled, that's when you need to hit the bricks. There's a lot of waiting time and you need to gain a potential audience and keep them interested. Marketing is a weak point of mine, so I don't have much advice, but it's critical for the success of a zine. Contributors can advertise a little, but the bulk of that's on you. You'll want an account dedicated to the zine, I can say that much.

Is graphic design your passion? Even if a contributor is designing the cover, what will be on the inner page? The back cover? Do you have any writers contributing fic? That will need formatting. (Do you know how many words fit on a page? It's different depending on the size of the book.) You'll need to make some sort of credits page, or will you put credit information on the same page as each contribution? Quality graphic design can make or break marketing attempts.

Double check your contributors' work. There are going to make mistakes. Most people aren't used to preparing things for print. Having room for bleed (edges of an image that may be cut off during the printing process, or hidden when bound into a book) was a particular issue in my zine. Even if all this is written in your instructions, you'll get files with not enough bleed room, or in RBG (files must be in CMYK for print), or in too low a resolution (300 dpi minimum). Any issues need to be caught, corrected, and all the files compiled for submission to the printer.

Don't forget postage. I mentioned this briefly earlier, but don't forget to account for packaging and shipping in your budget and time. Things like pins can make a slim package too thick and change the postage class. You'll need room in your house to hold the product. You'll want to pack things to ensure nothing's dented or bent. I highly recommend against having a shipping mod, unless it's someone you know and trust very much. I've seen too many projects fall apart because a shipping mod ghosted or stole all the materials or similar issues.

Have a backup plan. What will you do if you only get five people wanting to be contributors? What if you don't sell enough to cover your costs? What if you get bad product? What if you don't hit the MOQ of your chosen vendor, or if they announce a spontaneous price change before you get your order in? Have answers!

Be confident. If you're not used to leadership, it can be weird to have everyone looking to you, but if you've prepared, then there's no reason to be nervous. The people you work with will respond to your energy, so put out those good vibes.

I enjoyed making my zine very much, but also, it was still very much work! I discovered I hate marketing and graphic design, and love the technical bits of arranging the vendors and budgeting and handling the materials. I probably wouldn't go solo again, but I'm glad I did it at least once because it taught me the ins and outs of every aspect. A lot of people, for their first zine, do digital only because, needless to say, physical product is complicated!

If you made it this far, congratulations. xD It felt nice laying out everything I learned; I hope it's just as useful for you to read.

Feel free to ask if you have any further questions!

#zine #fanzine #zine advice #fandom zine #zine creation #zine tips

[dinguszine]

Color_Zine_Preview_1.png

#35mm film #digital zine #photography zine #photography #canon #canon photography #zine #zine creation #print #media #the xx #dingus

[siennahrobek]

Okay I don’t know if anyone would hear this and would like to answer but someone I know wants to do an artist zine and she doesn’t really know where to start. I’ve participated in zines so I can help ish but never in a managerial or organizational capacity. Anyone know anyone able to give/write down a basic rundown of how it basically works/what you do?

It doesn’t have to be super detailed or anything. Just kind of a basic starting point

That would be real helpful

#zine #zines #fanzine #zine creation #fandom zine #zine help #fan zine #zine promo #art zine

[avalonlights]

"The view is pretty great from up here, huh? "Yeah... It's not so bad, pretty boy."

Here is my creation for the @harringrove-relay-race! Next up, please look forward to a wonderful work from @desperate-not-serious! 🏁

#harringrove #harringrove fanart #steve harrington #billy hargrove #harringrove relay race #avalonlights art #I just wanted to draw them on the roof of the pool lol idk #putting them on roofs has been a theme for me lately lol #i did it for the zine and it happened again here #i've been SO insanely busy lately it's been pretty stressful #glad i was able to get this done!!! #can't wait to catch up looking at other creations this weekend

[justabunchofdragons]

so i made my first zine :) yippee :D

#aaaaa i have not posted art on here in AGES! #zines #zinetober #mini zine #chaos creations

[anonymous-witness777]

Dear Wilderness, a zine I made for class

#my poetry #my art #zine #glory in creation #nature poetry #changelingcore #illustrated poem #poetry zine #digital art

[ravenatural-art]

ayyyyy here’s one of my merch pieces for @dfoanthology !!  did y’all know some interpretations of the ten of swords include a heavy emphasis on betrayal?

#midoriya izuku #bnha all for one #dfo theory #dfo zine #boku no hero academia #bnha #fanart #ravens creations

[cranity]

I really miss seeing your original stuff and oc content, I know fanart gets way more attention but I always wish I could see more of your original ideas and stuff! I’m happy you’re getting the recognition you deserve as a super rad artist and I’m glad you’re getting to draw stuff you like though! I hope this isn’t offensive or rude I just really like your characters :)

thank you sm for liking my original art ToT <3 I'm actually working on some of it rn >:] My plan for the summer was originally to make a bunch of original riso and a few zines for an upcoming art market next month, but it seems like I haven't had the time to really start ToT While I do love fanart a lot a lot I do want to shift to more original stuff at some point :]

#praying that i can finish this lookbook zine and a graphic makeup zine in less than 3 weeks #i miss drawing in sketchbooks a lot too! #mindlessly doodling ocs in my notes during college was peak art creation time #not art

[marvinpontiac]

— [PAGES FROM THE PASTELS’ ZINE “PASTELISM”

#stephen pastel #the pastel #twee #indie-pop #indie #C86 #creation records #zine #zine culture #indie zine #80s #90s #kurt cobain #shoegaze

[springtimebat]

Work-In-Progress Zine (Part Two)

#creative writing #writing #american gothic #southern gothic #cryptids #weirdcore #cryptidcore #zines #zine making #zine creation #wanna create a zine with more of a collage aesthetic because I can't draw lol but need to get more materials #suburban horror #suburban gothic #religious themes #religious trauma #surreal #I'm very proud of my Richard Nixon tho

[wingsofahoneybee]

i think unicorns should be little weirdo freaks, actually

#i also think they should be opportunistic omnivores #PLEASE ask me about mythological and fantasy creatures i have Opinions #i have been thinking very hard about making a zine of my interpretations of fantasy creatures #some of which would be my own creation #my art #bee draws #unicorn

[harpersbizarresketchbook]

Some spreads from my new zine were I cannibalize misprints from my Hannibal zine to talk about dealing with imposter syndrome as a designer.

#zines #zine making #zinemaking #imposter syndrome #graphic design #artist on tumblr #the woes of creation if you will

[queriesntheories]

i made a thing about the internet a while back and now i'm putting it on the internet! crazy huh? featuring words from my friends and funky images! made with this neat little thing called engine.lol

hope you like it :D

#q's creations #itch.io #collaborative writing #zine #zine promo #indie art #engine.lol #web 1.0 #old internet #old web #websites #internet

[mechanical-demon]

CATALOGUE

another zine i made at pride, this time of some of my flags

#queer #lgbtq+ #asexual #aromantic #arogender #gendervoid #agender #genderqueer #transgender #zine #🟢⚪️🟣⚫️™️ #creations