Here are some issues that are very important to us that pertain to people who make zines: finding content, keeping physical quality up, keeping file size down, paying zinesters.
Let’s go through those in reverse order.
Paying zinesters.
To start with ZineDistro has yet to make a single penny. We have spent several hundred pennies. That’s not a defense, just honesty. Hopefully, that equation changes someday. If it does, I’ll rewrite that line about pennies. But let’s just suppose that someday down the road there are hundreds or thousands of ZineDistro members where a good deal of those are Pro members paying some amount of money. Further let’s suppose that ZineDistro is making more money than it is spending. There becomes a point where it seems only fair that some of that money goes to the people who made the zines that fill up the ZineDistro site.
How much of the total surplus money goes to zinesters? How is that divvied up amoungst zinesters? How often is it sent out? How is it sent out? And so on…
Here are some possible pay scenarios: Let’s say, just arbitrarily, there’s $1000 to give to zinesters. The first hurdle is how many zines have current contact information? How many are anonymous? How many are dead? Of those living with known whereabouts, let’s say we split up the $1000 based on number of downloads of each zine. That creates the problem where people could create unlimited free accounts and download their own zine over and over. No good.
So what about only counting the downloads of the members who pay (after all, that’s where this make believe money would come from)? The problem with this is that it discredits the importance of the free members. What if you make ‘zine-x’. Zine-x is what drives a lot of people to come to ZineDistro in the first place and sign up for free. Surely, most of the Pro members will be people who upgraded after once being free. So everything they downloaded at first, arguably the zines they were most interested in, wouldn’t factor into the pay out to zinesters. Also, no good.
We could just pay a one-time up front fee for using someone’s zine. ZineDistro wouldn’t get very far, very fast (see above about the pennies). Also, let’s say ZineDistro pays $100 (again, total arbitrarily) for zine-x which later goes on to be downloaded 1000 times per month. That doesn’t seem fair either.
We don’t have the answer here. We’re still trying to come up with a solution that works for everyone. The upshot is that there’s no money to deal with yet. Still, this is important to us. If you have any ideas on this, let us know. We’d love to hear what you think.
Next, zine quality.
Everyone’s seen a zine that looks like it’s a 9th generation photocopy, pages are crooked, what was once photos are now just black smudges, the type gets thinner and thinner, text is cut off, pages missing or out of order. We’ve all been there. So a big part of the ZineDistro mission is to replenish quality in the zine world where we can.
One way we do that is to completely redesign / layout the zine. We try honor the original spirit of the zine as much as possible. This is easiest with zines whose ‘look’ is just like an old book: one column, no pictures, no pull quotes. That still takes some time, but its the easiest. The result is that print quality is the highest possible and file size is as small as possible. Small file size means faster downloads.
Zines that don’t have a very basic layout require more time and attention. So the best situation for us, zine makers and ZineDistro members would be if could the original design files from the zine makers, files like InDesign, Illustrator, Quark or PageMaker with the appropriate fonts and images. That’s the dream version of this set up. Next best is a final PDF of the zine ready to uploaded to the site (we can impose the pages easily, so that’s not a problem). Next would be just the contents of the zine; the text, images (if there are any) and any special design notes, then we could design it up. Least good, but still better than nothing, would be high quality scans of each page that we could then OCR and redesign (OCR converts an image of text to actual text). And finally, if none of the above are possible, a hardcopy of the zine could be mailed to us to work our magic on.
Finding Content
To keep up with the never ending task of getting our hands on new zines, we employ a series of tactics.
Our personal collections. (This actually gave us a serious leg up in the beginning).
Infoshops, radical bookstores, zine conferences, book fairs, and collective houses. Anytime we’re in other towns, a band comes through our town, a conference/fair happens nearish to us; we try to go and stock up on as many zines as we can.
The Digital Interweb™. We constantly scour the internets to find zines that are already in pdf format. That’s really handy, if not rare. We also look for just the text of zines online as web pages or text file or word .docs. That’s also pretty helpful.
Finding zines in person or mailorder is all fine and well, but its still a lot of leg work to find them and to get them all processed to go up. Getting them in some digital form expedites the process significantly. So…
If you make a zine that you think fits the ZineDistro profile, please send it (preferably digital source files) to us or get in touch with us and we’ll sort something out.
This post is also on the ZineDistro site in the about section.
