Turn to page 3 of Confessions of an Ex-Zine Editor, Issue 3, and you will find an email to our Harriet, reprinted with the address blacked out. In it Alison, who writes as The Ex-Zine Editor, announces that she has made “zine editing history” by sending her artwork on the day she promised. The page then hands the verdict to her readers: “Was Issue 2 truly a zine?” Everything else in the issue is as candid, a season of old diary entries laid against the present, full of gig tickets, vanished venues and a cat called Marbles. We printed it as an A4 zine of 32 pages, a matt laminated colour cover on 300gsm silk wrapped round 28 pages of black on 115gsm uncoated, wire stitched, one of the builds you can price on our zine printing page.
Spend colour where it is seen first
Colour lives only on the cover, and it is printed on all four of its pages. Andy Tilley’s illustration fills the front: a four piece band in black and acid green, playing beneath a pair of huge green cat eyes, with a black cat prowling the bottom corner and a block of topic tags along the foot. Open it and the inside front cover is a full colour collage contents page with an “I’M A MESS” badge in the corner, because the cover sheet goes through the press in colour on both sides. Alison used that for free real estate.
Inside, all 28 text pages print in black on 115gsm uncoated. That split is where the budget was won. Colour on every page of an A4 zine costs more than black, and this content does not need it. Typed columns, diary scans and grainy photographs read cleanly on an uncoated sheet, which drinks the ink without glare and feels like paper rather than a brochure. The laminated 300gsm silk does the opposite job: it carries the colour, gives an A4 zine enough backbone to hold its shape on a fair table, and shields the illustration from scuffs. Our guide to choosing zine paper lays out the other pairings.
Put extra pages inside, not on a fold out
Before the series began, Alison asked whether the front cover could open out as a gatefold. Mike gave her the honest answer. A fold out has to run on our B2 press, complicates the binding and would have cost two or three times as much, “a big uplift just for the extra 2pp”. His advice was “Much cheaper to add another 4pp action inside.” Alison reworked the material, settled on A4 with a tighter page count, and the issues that followed kept that build.
The binding follows from the extent. A 4pp cover round 28 text pages makes 32, well inside what staples can hold, since a stitched zine can climb to 72 pages so long as it grows four at a time. Glue was not an option: our perfect binding starts at 32 pages inside the cover, enough paper to give the glue a 3mm spine to grip, and this zine stops four short. Staples also let an A4 diary lie open across the spread, which matters when the left page is a contents list and the right page is the story. When Alison later wrote a longer zine, it crossed that line: Disordered Readers Anonymous now sits on a 6mm glued spine.
Let the paper trail into the zine
Alison flagged page 3 herself when the files arrived: “Do keep an eye out for some (partly redacted) correspondence about the printing of the last issue on page 3....!” Printing your own admin is a brilliant zine move, because it makes the reader feel let in on the process. She does it all the way through. The Rachel Stamp questionnaire on pages 12 and 13 went out by post, and the band’s answers came back handwritten, stick figure stage outfits included, then went straight onto the page as scans. On uncoated paper those pen strokes print as flat black ink, very close to the originals.
The back of the zine has the neatest trick. A numbered collage of badges, tickets and keepsakes fills the final cover pages, and a Photo Index facing it keys each number to the story behind it. It turns a pile of memorabilia into a second contents list, and it costs nothing but planning.
Paste the same spec every time
Issue 3 reached us on a Sunday afternoon, with the PDF on WeTransfer and the full spec pasted into the email exactly as it had been quoted at the start of the series. With nothing to rethink, Mike sent the invoice on Monday morning, Alison paid before we had even sent the proof, then approved it early that afternoon. The zines left us on Wednesday morning and reached her in Colchester on Thursday afternoon, four days after the files.
Alison has kept bringing us new zines since. If your own zine has a paper trail worth printing, send us the spec through our ready to order form and keep it on file for the next issue.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
