The Complete Guide to Zine Making

Chapter 1: What Is Zine Making and Why People Love It

Imagine walking into a record store and seeing a small stack of booklets on the counter, maybe 20 pages each, with covers that are clearly hand-made — off-center text, a photo that looks slightly grainy from being photocopied, a spine held together with two staples that aren't quite straight. You pick one up. It costs three dollars, maybe five. You flip through it and find it's a collection of someone's bus-stop doodles, or an essay about their grandmother's recipes, or a comic about a haunted laundromat. It's personal, slightly messy, and completely unlike anything a publisher would put out.

That's a zine. And making them is the hobby this book is about.

At its simplest, a zine is a self-published booklet that you make yourself — usually in small quantities, usually with nothing more than paper, scissors, a printer, and a stapler. You write the words, you draw the pictures, you arrange the pages, you print them out, you fold them, you staple them, and then you hand them to people or sell them for pocket money. No editor approves your work. No company decides whether it's worth printing. You are the entire publishing house, from the first scribble to the final fold.

A typical zine is half-letter size — that's a regular piece of paper folded in half, which gives you four pages per sheet. If you make a zine with three sheets of paper, that's 12 pages.