So You Want To Make a Zine: Part II

Although my zine is out, and has been well received thus far, I have had a number of serious misadventures that all could have been avoided. So I though I would share my experience with this for posterity, so that my suffering would not be in vain, and you could avoid the problems I brought on my own head.

The whole problem arose from the following immense miscalculation. I planned on doing a print run of around 200 zines (plus a few more for contributors copies, and so on). I worked out all the kinks in production to my satisfaction. Things were humming along. I had produced around 100 (half) of the zines I was going to sell. I had the product sitting there, it was all ready to go, and I was really itching to share it with people. So I decided to start selling them, figuring that I could just keep producing the remaining zines until I hit my goal of 200. Hahaha. Here are the problems that accrued:

(1) My zine sold very quickly, much faster than I thought it would. So supplies started to get low very quickly. Meanwhile, UPS lost an order of the cardstock I was using to print the cover of my book. Then the paper supplier told me they had run out of it, but found a couple of replacements. They charged me for it...and of course, then UPS finally found my package. So production was delayed and now I've got a lot of cardstock cover paper, more than I need. Not the worst problem but...

(2) In the meantime, my brand new printer broke. Like a catastrophic failure. So I ordered a new one, since it was under warrantee, and got the replacement for free. So production was delayed and I wasted a lot of paper in the process of trying to make the broken printer work. Not the worse problem but...

(3) So I set about using my brand new replacement printer for my brand new printer. It turned out to be a little finicky, to get high quality prints on the paper I'm using for the interior it's requiring me to forgo duplex printing. This make each zine take twice as long to print. That's not the worst problem but...

(4) The pages are coming out skewed, tilted to the side, using the fancy paper I've been making the interior of the zine from. When I try it with ordinary copy paper, it comes out straight. I assume somehow the replacement printer can't handle the fancy paper. I try everything to correct it for a couple of hours. And then it dawns on me. The fancy French Paper Co. ream of 1000 sheets of simple white 100t has been MISCUT, and is not in fact an 8.5x11 rectangle at all, but rather some kind of hideous parallelogram. You can see the skew of the paper sitting on the perfectly square bed of my scanner/printer below. Luckily, they are good people who immediately overnighted me replacement paper. That's not the worst problem but...

(5) All of this slow down in production with my zines was putting me under constant stress, because it was always the case that if I didn't fix the current problem quickly, I would be unable to fill existing orders. Under this stress I raced through things, trying to be as careful as I could, but working feverishly to fill orders. One person has reported to me that the pages were out of order in his zine. I also caught a zine without staples in it just today. So I'm about to send out a quality control email to each purchaser of a physical zine, to ask them to check the page order, stapling etc., and tell me if there is a problem so that I can send them a replacement immediately. The last thing I want is someone out there feeling unsatisfied. I'm trying hard to make a thing of quality, and I want it to arrive in the purchaser's hands exactly as it should be, period, end of story. So please let me know if there's a problem and I will fix it. 

My main reason for wanting to tell this story is that all of this could absolutely have been avoided. Had I merely printed my entire print run before selling, then I could have solved production problems in a leisurely fashion as they arose. I also would have been able to do a quality control test for each zine. In fact, I would recommend not only doing your entire print run before you begin selling a single zine, but also going down an explicit quality control checklist zine by zine, maybe every 5 or 10 zines you produce. Check that each is stapled, has been pressed and trimmed (if that's what you're doing), check that page order is right in each one, check that there are no print nozzle errors (white lines) on each of the major illustrations, etc. It pays to be patient, anal, and very careful. Otherwise you'll constantly be scrambling. I'll never do that again, and you shouldn't either.