How to make zines! - Jason Luther

Looking for someone to introduce your peoples to zines? I’ve lectured, led workshops, and designed activities for several organizations and institutions, both online and in person. Most recently these include St. Johns, Virginia Tech, University of Louisville, Syracuse University, Rowan University, Transilvania University of Brașov (Romania), Onondaga County Libraries, South Jersey Children’s Book Festival, and more. Get in touch if you are interested in discussing ways we could make this happen: jwluther [at] gmail.

Where to order

Several indie shops & distros sell zines online. Here are a few I recommend, though you can also find a thorough and mostly up to date list here:

Quimby’s — Famous underground bookstore in Chicago that carries thousands of titles.
Antiquated Future — Distro out of Portland, OR.
Brown Recluse Zine Distro — Seattle distro that specializes in POC zines and radical politics.
Wasted Ink — Distro, shop, and primary host for the PHX Zine Fest focusing on marginalized voices.
Atomic Books — Another great underground bookstore specializing in weird stuff.
Blue Stockings — NYC activist center and bookstore.
Printed Matter — Book art and edgy zines out of NYC.
Crapandemic — newer goth distro that carries more than goth.

Examples online

Quarantine Public Library — Great collection of one-page zines made during the pandemic.
Printed Matter — free digital downloads from this NYC bookshop.
The Small Science Collective — Great downloadable zines all focused on science.
Zinelibraries.info. Tons of resources about zine culture and zine libraries (digital or irl), including an important and radical code of ethics.
Barnard Zine Library. Emphasis on zines by feminist, queer, trans, and BIPOC makers. Lots of amazing resources here.
Sprout Distro. Anarchist archive hosted at archive.org.
Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library. Collection of zines from “a non-hierarchical collective for the purpose of sharing and distributing information.”
Anarhiva. Romanian zines.

How to make

Books

Stolen Sharpie Revolution by Alex Wrekk (originally 2005, currently on 6th edition)
Make a Zine! 20th anniversary edition by Bill Brent and Joe Biel [borrow at archive.org]
Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?: The Art of Making Zines and Mini-Comics by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson (2006) [borrow at archive.org]

Tutorials

There are many many more on the web, but these are some of the better ones I’ve encountered.

“The Secret to Making Zines” & “How to Fold a Sheet-O-Paper into an 8-Page Zine” from Umami Design (pdfs, n.d.)
“How to make a zine” from The Creative Independent (2018)
“A Beginner’s Guide to Making Zines” from Vice (2018)
“Ten Tips for First Time Zinesters” by Spill the Zines (2011)
“An Introduction to Zines ” by The Public Studio (2013)
“How to Make a Zine” by Rookie (2012)
“How Do You Do: A One-Page Zine” by Kickstarter (2015)
“How to make a quarter-sized zine” by GoofyGeek (2020?)

Tools, templates, and spaces

Electric Zine Maker — open source freeware for making your zine in a unbridled, wacky digital interface. thanks, alienmelon!
Seashore — free, powerful photo editor for Mac OSX
Glimpse — another free photo editor
Zines! A Primer mini-zine (pdf) by Syracuse In Print
Digital templates for mini-zines [docx] [pages] [indd]
More templates from Jenna Freedman & Barnard Zine Library [dropbox]
Heyzine — free and simple to use flipbook maker.
Shrimp Zine — simple, no frills digital zine making tool

Connecting with others

Aside from the obvious hashtags like #zines and #quaranzines on Twitter & Instagram, these are some spaces where you might find zinesters gathering.

Behind the Zines — Fascinating, bi-annual meta-zine by/for/about zinesters and wrangled by Billy McCall. Find print copies at Antiquated Future and free digital copies on billy’s site.
Broken Pencil — Longtime, but recently defunct, Canadian magazine that specializes in North American zine culture. Published quarterly.
r/zines — Subreddit for zines
POC Zine Project — Important resource that advocates for nonwhite zines and Black Lives Matter through materiality.
Razorcake — Punk magazine that reviews like-minded music zines.

Short videos about zine culture

“But I Love the Zine” by Fiona McDougall & KQED about the San Francisco zine scene (2019)
“Shopdrop + Roll” by Laura Houlberg & Nicole Betancourt — about Portland OR’s Independent Publishing Resource Center (2013)
“Zinester: The Art of Individualism in the Era of Mass Media” by Jake Carroll, featuring the Denver Zine Library (2014).
“Zines: The Power of DIY Print” by Belinda Cai (2015)

Zine studies

Zine Studies. A group bib on Zotero I’ve been maintaining since 2014. Includes hundreds of interdisciplinary citations from scholarship on zines & DIY publishing.
“A Citation Analysis about Scholarship on Zines” by Anne Hayes in Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (2020). A good starting point that surveys trends, key disciplines, and gaps in zine studies.
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Microcosm, 2017). Originally published in 1997 with Verso and now on its 3rd edition, Stephen Duncombe’s landmark study is still fascinating, timely, and useful.
Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY Press, 2012). Adela Licona’s wonderful, theoretical book about the interventionist rhetorics of zines that are made & circulated by voices from the margins.
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009). An important book by the late Alison Piepmeier that approaches schisms and continuities between second and third wave feminism through girl/grrrl zines.
After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur (Utah State UP, 2013). Frank Farmer covers more than zines in this his book about counterpublics and writing studies — but they are prominently featured.

Histories

Factsheet Five Archive Project. My ongoing blog that documents the history of the most significant review magazine in zine culture, Factsheet Five which published 64 issues between 1982-1998.
Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom by Alexandra Edwards (2023). This book challenges the “fandom creation myth” including that fanzines originated with sci-fi communities of the 1930s.
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines (Phaidon, 2023). Thoroughly researched book about the history of artists’ zines that accompanied the Brooklyn Museum’s 2023-24 exhibit of the same name.
Science Fiction Fanzine Reader by Luis Ortiz. Comprehensive look at sci-fi zines from the 1930s-1960s.
ZineWiki. Not necessarily historical, but a solid encyclopedia of zines spanning time.
From Staple to Spine: A Compendium of Zine-Related Books. A great index of books that were based on zines.
“Write Your Own History: The Roots of Self-Publishing” by Anne Elizabeth Moore. From Handbook of Public Pedagogy (2009). This short chapter is witty, coherent but also reflexive. Worth tracking down.
“The Secret History of Zines” Impressive Storymap’d history by Cal State Fullerton’s Zines to the Future! curators
“The Zine Revolution” — Solid history of 80s & 90s zine culture by Josh Glenn of Hilowbrow.
“Approaching the 80s Zine Scene” Originally published in 1992, this is a multi-part history of zines from Stephen Perkins that includes an annotated bibliography along the way.

Teaching tools

Assignment: “Reflecting with Zines: A Multimodal Alternative to the Final Reflective Essay” A helpful chapter by Kelli R. Gill from the Rhetorical & Genre Awareness section of Writing Spaces.
Courses: “Using Zines in the Classroom.” A survey of ways I’ve used zines while teaching creative nonfiction and DIY Publishing at Syracuse University (HASTAC)
Lesson plan: “Zine Workshop” by Aisha Conner-Gaten (Community of Online Research Assignments)
Lesson plan & workshop: “Make a Quaranzine.” Accessible 1-hour workshop sponsored by The Believer magazine and hosted by longtime Runcible Spoon publisher, graphic memoirist, and NPR contributor, Malaka Gharib.
All the things. Barnard Zine Library. Several different lesson plans, videos, and other resources, with classes and workshops ordered from newest to oldest.
Zine kits. Many zines fests and public programs have adopted to COVID-19 by mailing out zine-making kits in advance of an event or workshop. [Lancaster Zine Fest] [Austin Film School]