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.

2 comments

2 Comments

But wait does that 50 copy number count zines that exist as PDFs or only physical ones? Because I feel like there's a huge difference between someone printing 50 zines for a show versus someone who just uploads a PDF to their blog and technically has infinite copies. The way they counted might change the whole story. And what timeframe did the research cover is it zines from the last 5 years or going back to the 90s when photocopying was basically the only option? Also did they include one-off personal zines people made in like art school workshops? That would skew things way down since those aren't meant for distribution.

brians274d ago

Yeah that's the thing with any kind of data like this, the counting method changes everything. It's like how people talk about "books read per year" but some count audiobooks and some don't, or how "average grocery bill" means different things if you include toilet paper and cleaning supplies or just food. Same problem happens with music stats where one service counts a stream after 30 seconds and another after a full minute. The numbers are useless until you know how they got them. And with zines especially, a PDF is basically infinite copies so calling it "50 copies" is misleading compared to someone who actually stood at a photocopier and ran off 50 physical ones. That's why I always take these averages with a grain of salt unless they spell out exactly what they included.