iamserio.us

The entire contents of the zine I made this week could have been poured into this website. How boring would that have been. Now I have something tangible. 47 somethings, actually. It was supposed to be 50 but there was one instance of me flipping out and tearing a zine into pieces and two more instances of me screwing up enough to throw away the one I was working on.

The zine is called Wish you were here. I made the contents entirely in notepad.exe which was probably a terrible idea considering notepad has no formatting options whatsoever. Its saving grace is that it prints in monospaced font so I could (not so) easily make a half-page design (two pages per each side of an 8.5×11 sheet of paper).

The cover is heavy cardstock that I bought in bulk at the store months ago for a different project. Each cover has a Polaroid picture attached to the front, on to which I fed through an old typewriter and printed the title of the zine. I had to buy a long-arm stapler so that I could bind the zine down the middle with two staples.

Each copy has a CDR in the back which relates to one of the entries. I fed the paper cases through the typewriter as well so that I could print the zine title on them.

All told, I probably spent almost two hundred dollars making these things. Between the Polaroid film, the stapler, the copies at Kinkos, the typewriter, the paper CD cases and the CDRs… it got sort of expensive. Oh well. If I wanted to recoup expenses I’d probably have to charge about four dollars a piece for them but I don’t really care about all that.

I’m not sure how I’m going to distribute it yet. I was thinking of dropping some of them off at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard and Fremont and maybe seeing if the news stand next to the Fremont location would consign the zine (just to see what kind of interest there is this sort of thing in Seattle). If you think you want one, email me with your name and address and I’ll send you one.

And if you just want to look at it and don’t want to deal with me mailing you a copy, then here you go:

Wish You Were Here Issue #01: wishyouwerehere-01.zip
Wish You Were Here Audio CD: wishyouwerehere-01-audio.zip

I’ll definitely do more issues of this zine. It was fun to make and I like it a lot more than a blog. It’s like a magazine that I have full control over which is very exciting for me. I plan to schedule some interviews with bands and maybe do some record and concert reviews for the next issue. I have some ideas for the design and since the next one won’t require Polaroids (nor will I have to buy the stapler or typewriter again), it will cost a lot less.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 12:36 AM and is filed under Journalism, Main.