c/diy-zine-culture

Realized I was stapling my zines backwards for months

I was putting together issue #4 of my art zine about local graffiti and kept wondering why the pages felt off when flipping through. Then my friend Sarah looked at it and said the center spread was upside down compared to the cover. Has anyone else had a dumb assembly habit that took way too long to notice?

My old GBC printer jammed halfway through a 50-copy zine run

I was trying to print 50 copies of my new mini zine last Saturday in my basement in Cleveland. The GBC DocuBind 180 I got at a garage sale for $30 jammed on page 12 of every single copy. I had to pull out the drum, clean off toner with a paper towel, and reset it each time. Took me 5 hours to get through the whole batch instead of the usual 2. Has anyone else had trouble with older binding machines acting up with heavy cardstock?

Question about binding my first zine with a stapler that totally backfired

I spent 45 minutes trying to staple 20 A5 pages together with a normal office stapler before I realized the arm can't reach the center fold. Has anyone here found a cheap long-reach stapler that actually works for zines under $30?

Unpopular take: that "community zine library" at the coffee shop actually hurt more than it helped

So there's this cafe downtown, Ground Up, that started a zine library shelf 8 months back. I was excited at first. But then I talked to the owner, Jen, and she told me zines just "vanish" every week so she stopped restocking. She said people grab them like free magazines. I asked if she put a sign up about trading or borrowing. She shrugged and said "it's not my job to police it." That conversation stuck with me because it showed how easy it is to call something a community space without actually building the community part. Has anyone else seen a well-intentioned zine spot fail because nobody set basic ground rules?

Finally finished my first zine after fighting with the binding for 3 days

I spent way too long trying to figure out saddle stitching with a long arm stapler. Thought I could just use a regular one but the pages kept sliding and the staples looked awful. After like 6 failed attempts I went to the craft store and grabbed a cheap long reach stapler for $15. Took me another hour to get the hang of folding the paper so the edges lined up. Ended up making 20 copies of my little poetry zine with some collaged covers. It's nothing groundbreaking but they actually look like a real zine. Has anyone else struggled with a simple step that took way longer than it should have?

I was dead set against digital zines until a friend showed me her process

For about 2 years I swore handmade meant paper only, no exceptions. I thought digital zines were just lazy PDFs that missed the whole point of the DIY spirit. Then my buddy Marie from Portland sent me a link to her latest zine she made entirely in Canva and Krita. She spent 3 weeks arranging collages, adding hand-drawn doodles, and even recorded herself flipping pages for a tiny video version. I read through it on my phone and honestly the layout and care she put in felt just as personal as any stapled booklet I've gotten at a show. She also told me she can print on demand now for like $4 a copy instead of doing 50 at a time and hoping they sell. Has anyone else gone digital after being a paper purist for a long time?

Traced a zine by hand instead of scanning it and I'm never going back

My scanner broke last Tuesday. Dead. Kaput. I had a zine due for the Chicago Zine Fest swap and no way to get my hand drawn pages copied. So I grabbed some tracing paper and a light board and copied each page by hand. Took me 6 hours for a 20 page zine. My hand cramped bad. But the final copies look way more alive than my scanned ones ever did. The lines have this energy I can't explain. Like each copy is its own little original. Has anyone else tried making zines without any digital help at all?

Heard a zine maker say "staples are fine" and had to speak up

Last week at a small art fair in Portland, this girl selling her zines told me she just uses a regular stapler to bind them. I looked at her stuff and the pages were already falling apart after a week on the table. Look, I get being cheap, but if you spend 10 hours on content, spend the extra $5 on a saddle stapler or some thread. Has anyone else noticed bad binding killing a good zine?

Had to decide between tape binding or stapling my latest mini zine

I went with the tape binding because it felt fancier but now the pages are starting to peel apart after 3 weeks and I'm kicking myself for not just using staples like usual, anyone else ever regret trying to get too artsy with their binding?

Dropped $80 on a risograph drum refill and it changed my whole zine setup

I got tired of running my little home risograph with those old used drums I was picking up for cheap. Figured I'd try one official refill at $80 and see if it was worth the hype. Turns out, the ink flow is way more consistent and I'm not dealing with those ghost streaks on every other page. It basically saved me from tossing a whole run of 50 copies I printed last Saturday because of bad registration. Anyone else take the plunge on official gear or stick with the thrifted parts?

Finally finished a zine project I started in 2019

I pulled out an old folder of half-finished pages from a zine about neighborhood cats I started in 2019. Three years later, I finally sat down last month and finished the last 8 pages using just scissors and glue stick. The difference between the early pages (cramped text, messy borders) and the later ones (cleaner layouts, better spacing) is pretty wild. I think taking that long break let me see what looked bad without being precious about it. Has anyone else gone back to an old project and found the break actually helped?

Can we talk about how zines from the 90s had way more messy glue and tape than the clean digital layouts everyone uses now?

I pulled out a batch from 1997 and the cut-and-paste chaos felt so alive compared to the sterile PDFs I've been seeing in distros since around 2019, and I'm wondering if people still do that hand-cut collage thing or if it's gone fully digital now?

My friend said I was overthinking my zine layout and she was totally right

I spent like three weeks on a single 8-page zine about local bike routes, fussing over margins and font sizes. My friend Jess who has made like 40 zines told me to just photocopy the whole thing and staple it without worrying. I finally did it and honestly the messy version looked way better than my careful one. Has anyone else had a friend give advice that felt too simple but actually worked way better?

Tried stapling a zine with a long-arm stapler and it missed half the pages

I bought this cheap long-arm stapler off a guy on Craigslist in Seattle for 15 bucks thinking it would make my life easier. First run of 50 copies turned into a mess of crooked staples and loose pages, had to pull half of them apart. Has anyone else dealt with a finicky long-arm, or is it just this model being a piece of junk?

My first zine library submission got rejected for being 'too personal'

Dropped off a stack of my zines at a local DIY space in Austin last Tuesday. The owner called me the next day and said she couldn't take them because it was "too much about my own life" and not enough of a "broader theme." I thought the whole point of zines was sharing personal stories. Has anyone else run into gatekeeping like this from a vendor or library?

Lost a whole week of zine work because my cat decided to sleep on the drying ink

Is there a line between zine community and personal branding? Found a stat that blew my mind

Shoutout to the zine I botched completely and turned into something

My last zine project went totally WRONG when my printer jammed halfway through a 50 copy run last Sunday. I ended up cutting all the mangled pages into little bookmarks and stapling them to the good copies. Has anyone else had a happy accident like that save their whole print run?

Am I the only one who gets annoyed when people call a stapled booklet a zine

I've been making zines for about 8 years now and I keep seeing folks on Instagram calling a single piece of paper folded in half a 'zine'. That's just a pamphlet or a flyer, not a zine. A real zine has some thought put into it, multiple pages, and usually a theme or a story. I get that DIY is about low barriers but calling a grocery list a zine waters down what the culture is about. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just being picky about definitions?

Finally finished a zine after 4 false starts...

I've been working on this little comic zine about my road trips through Nebraska for like 6 months. Kept getting stuck on the order of the pages, something just felt off. Then I laid everything out on the floor of my apartment and walked around it for 20 minutes, seeing it from different angles. The whole flow finally clicked and I stapled the last copy last night. Does anyone else have weird rituals for figuring out page layouts?

That guy at the coffee shop who called my zine "cute" and I still think about it 2 years later

Stapling zines backwards saves so much time

Used to fold and staple each zine one by one till I realized if you staple the whole stack first then fold, it's way faster. Cut my time making 50 copies of my latest 8-pager from 2 hours to maybe 45 minutes. Anyone else got a weird shortcut like this?

Stumbled on a stat that said 70% of zines never get more than 50 copies printed. Found it in a library research paper about underground publishing.

Shoutout to the person at the zine swap who told me to use a bone folder instead of my fingers

I was at the Portland Zine Symposium last month and someone watched me folding my zines with my thumb, handed me a $5 bone folder, and said 'your edges will look way cleaner.' I finally tried it last week and yeah, my fingers were leaving little oily marks on the paper. Does anyone else have a random tool that just changed their zine-making game?

Hit up the Brooklyn Zine Fest last Saturday and it felt off

I went to the Brooklyn Zine Fest last weekend and got kinda bummed. Maybe half the tables were selling stuff that looked more like fancy printed booklets than actual handmade zines. One seller had a $20 risograph print that was just a single folded page with no staples or any soul in it. Am I just being a gatekeeper about what counts as a zine, or do other people miss when it was more about photocopies and messy stories?