@songofsaraneth / songofsaraneth.tumblr.com
Tomorrow “Sending This Message Was Important to Us” debuts MICE in Boston! Possibly the first and only comic of its kind printed with Riso’s experimental clear UV activated ink. This comic’s story changes if you read it under a black light or not.
If you like really weird zines and/or nuclear semiotics, come to table 66A! Coming soon to my online shop as well.
P.S. each copy comes with a mini UV light keychain for your reading convenience.
i think everyone should make zines. about everything all the time. make a zine about a playlist, about a good sandwich you made, about a cool bug you saw, about a skill you can teach, about a cause you care about. put them everywhere. pin them to community boards and tape them to poles and leave them in cafes and in between library books. i hate how social media has been taken over more than ever now by big greedy corporations and people and has become a mess of churning shit out for the algorithm. zines have no algorithm it is just the love in your heart the passion in your soul whatever your pencil decides to put on paper!! and it's beautiful!! make zines now!
A second example of my 7-fold zine design, and another way to lay out the pages. First example and instructions on how to fold this in this post here. Printable scan below!
last year i played around with different zine formats/ways to get creative with page layout. this design resulted in two distinct halves around a center spine, so i thought it'd be fun to add in a 90º rotation as well.
A lot of people have asked or expressed interest in how this was folded. I don't have the finished copy from the video anymore (i mailed it to a friend), but digging around I did find the mock-up I designed first, and took some photos to describe how to recreate it. This style is fun in part because there's multiple ways you can arrange the cover/pages as well--see another finished example of that here!
Here you can see the zine unfolded, from an 8.5x11 printer paper. You will notice that the thing that makes this format possible (the center space that divides it into two halves) and unique from most other's I've seen is that I divided the paper into sevenths. Most zines are folded based on even numbers or thirds--so the page can be divided in halves or back-and-forth just once--while 5ths, 7ths, etc are way harder to do. I will go into detail on how to do this and then cut/fold it up under the readmore. You could also do this by measurements with a ruler--each section is about 1 and 9/16th inches wide--if you prefer, but it's hard to be exact.
Spotlighting my dragon zines because they were two years in the making!!! When I first tried to get all my Big Dragon Feelings (zoology, spec bio, fantasy, gender, rage) on paper I got frustrated and shelved the project for a year. When I came back to it I thought "This is okay actually but it's still missing something." A year after that I drafted a whole new zine that was more of a short autobiographical essay. Then I rewrote bits of the original zine (which is more of a poem) and suddenly they worked as a pair. The Reality of Dragons is illustrated with historical public domain images and The Reality of Dragons: A History features photos I took of my own dragon collection (plus one Albrecht Dürer artwork). I wanted to present my toys with the gravitas of museum pieces in a completely sincere way. When this run sells out I might reprint them as a double-sided stapled zine because folding minis is actually murder on my bad shoulder /:
Went to an indie book fair today, accidentally bought two books (what), and stumbled over the guy who runs Open Press Project - where you can download the open source files to 3D print your own small, fully functional printing press.
It's an incredibly fascinating project but I've been waffling about maybe buying one or maybe contacting my local makerspace to 3D print a printing press, but now that I could play around with one and saw them in person I absolutely definitely must have one.
You can professionally produce little prints with it! You could make tiny zines or postcards or art books or bookmarks or...
Look, I printed a leaf!
The only question is, which size press do I want? Teeny tiny one, medium sized, or normal sized?
I am SO jealous - I'm going to have to contact the people from our local-ish makerspace and ask if they'll teach me how to 3D print. If your brother prints it and could share his experience, I'd gladly hear it!
Today's the last day of April, and to belatedly celebrate my birthday I'd like to share a comic with you: it's about getting revenge against the people who wronged you, and it's called Werewolf's Lament.
Werewolf's Lament is printed with florescent orange and mint risograph inks on light brown paper; cut and folded in the shape of a wolf. Physical copies are for sale in my online shop.
Halloween Zine! I made this in october 2023, but I don’t think I ever fully shared it here because some were sent to tumblr mutuals and I wanted it to be a surprise.
I made only about 25 of these to send to friends, and it involved a lot of hands-on work after printing to assemble them all, between the different paper types, cut outs, highlighter, stick-ins, and hand-stitched binding. featuring:
this remains my most ambitious and involved zine to date! 🧡
a zine about some of the plants i compulsively snack on whenever i wander past them. random leaves you find outside: put them in your mouth and see!!!
since this is a simple format zine, I've included a printable version of the US letter sized scan/jpg. I usually pick a pretty cardstock to make covers for this one, but I threw in a quick front/back cover so it's useable as-is. Feel free to print your own copy--or better yet, go outside and eat some leaves and rank them, and send it to me so I can see!
what's your process for zine-making, if i may ask!!
my essentials:
I was part of the @swimonzine Volume 10 a shark charity zine. You may still purchase it here which I highly recommend it to shark fans and enthusiasts. I'm always excited to be part of zines like these and this was no different! I picked two Deep Ocean Sharks, The greater green lantern shark, and the lesser known Megamouth cousin of the Whale shark and Basking Shark
we should start making zines about cool research papers
Re last post if I possibly can I am just going to make zines $1 with free shipping and ask you to occasionally buy a card with us to offset the costs
I think it’s the only goddamn way to future proof against social media companies grinding things to dust
I need To Do Math before I can positively make it a thing but I am working on it
Sorry. I feel like every time we get to the point things are going to click together, a network we depend on shifts focus.
Will figure this out always do okay back to work.
I will figure out the math and Give the Details on how we are going to solve this for us, and thoughts on how others can solve it for themselves, and all will be laid out in a blog post (one of the first) when the blog launches next year (target is Jan 2025)
I am splitting the advice into “if you have access to commercial printing, read this” and “if not, here is the math for a home set up”
Any business rambles offered on the blog and forward will have this split to make it as open and available as possible
God damn it I am so fucking tired of rich people and or giant corporations ruining things. I don’t even care why they are doing it.
Okay.
Back to work.
Solace through cooperation.
If someone orders 1 zine at this rate per month for a year and nothing else, you have lost $6.24 hoping to get that customer to shop at your shop.
on the back of the shipping manifest, you have designed a flier, "This is what we're working on, please drop a few coins in the hat someday!"
This is probably going to replace our Friday $0.13 promotion.
Once a month, or so, we'll say "For the next weekend, all zines ship free!"
Because of a huge chunk of the cost above is fixed ($0.30 order processing) and because additional postage is dramatically lower than the first ounce, if someone orders a few zines at once, it rapidly reaches "break even" territory.
If they order a few cards with the zine, it breaks even or profits.
I chalk up the loss to "marketing budget."
It is an acceptable cost.
I can pay for a banner ad somewhere in hopes of reaching you and you say "oh hey I like that" or I can pay $0.52 in hopes you come back because you liked the zine and remember we exist.
(Or both, I'm going to do both, to varying degrees. Welcome to business. :-)
If you do not want to / cannot afford a marketing budget, charge more than $1.00 and/or charge shipping. Maybe some shipping, say, half? Or all!
Even if you never shop in our shop again, never post about it, never share it with anyone.
I hope you do all those things, but for a few coins, increasing the joy in the world is worth it.
The gamble is some percentage of our audience will do the above and come back, enough to pay for all of this + profit.
An alternative path you could pursue for your shop, if it fits your needs, is to charge more than $1 and/or shipping and make it a subscription.
Congrats! You have a small magazine!
We use Shopify, which has a native subscription app, but it's not great. Subscription apps exist and add to the costs, which are settled to as low as possible for the reasons above.
Also... remember above how I said this doesn't necessarily need to be a permanent project?
If our marketing budget is thick? WE DO MORE ZINES.
If it's not thick? WE DO LESS ZINES.
If we have a zine idea that is bigger than what 1 sheet can cover? We do it as a normally priced item!
If you have a Patreon, this would work great as more-than-$1.00-no-shipping item. I don't want to do Patreon because I like having the flexibility of a single shop.
Came across this interesting tutorial today which caught my attention because it starts exactly like my favorite 16 pg zine format. But then it does something completely different with the covers and the spine. Two of the "pages" are used up on the accordion-folded binding, making this a 14 pg (12 pg + 2 covers) booklet.
I made a test booklet to see if there was maybe any benefit to it. I think the accordion spine could be aesthetically pleasing. And this person does point out that if you want to make a longer booklet, you can glue two or more together by the spine, which I think is cool. You can cut some pages apart to make more pages, which you can't do with a normal folded minizine. But on the other hand, this format requires some glue or stitching to keep it stable, making it a bit more labor- and materials-intensive. Overall, I still prefer the single-sided 16 pg format I've used before.
Templates in the blog post below:
