Two friends found us in November 2016 by typing "zine printers uk" into Google. Ruby Maris-Stephens and Phoebe Plant, an illustrator and a fashion photographer, were launching FOULmouth, a submission-based zine "founded by two friends brought together by love and cemented by heartbreak", and Issue One, themed Love, went to print with us the following March. In June 2017 Ruby came back with Issue Two, and it was more than twice as long.
The Bloom issue is a proper brick of a zine. At 240 × 168mm it sits between A5 and A4 in the hand: 126 inside pages of 120gsm uncoated in a 200gsm uncoated cover, matt laminated on the outside, printed in full colour and perfect bound around a 9mm spine. Inside is everything a submission-based arts zine should be: fashion photography among ivy and cherry blossom, a poem on a pink page beneath a monstera, an orange portrait beside an essay titled Let Your Self-Love Bloom, and a figure sketched in red beside the words "I want to bloom". Mike's verdict on our file copy, "classic zine, bit of everything", is high praise.
Our first quote was for 146 inside pages on 170gsm uncoated, and Ruby replied the next day: "It's still slightly out of our budget. Is there any thinner/cheaper paper that you could suggest that would bring down the cost?" She asked whether a thinner cover would help, too. Our answer: dropping the inside pages to 120gsm uncoated would save a little, but going down to A5 or editing the page count would save far more. On a book this long the money is in the page block; the cover is four pages out of 150. Ruby kept the format, edited hard and took the lighter paper. "Thanks for the advice/help! I've managed to reduce the pages to 126 pages." The requote came in roughly a fifth lower, with the cover unchanged.
Uncoated paper is soft, matt and tactile, and colours sit into the sheet rather than on top of it. For a zine that jumps from photograph to poem to illustration every few pages, that consistency is a gift: nothing glares, and drawings look closer to the paper they were made on. The matt laminate guards the cover against scuffs, and on our shelf copy the cover has plenty of spring: pick the zine up and it wants to close. Stapling tops out at around 72 pages, so a block this thick needed perfect binding, and its 9mm spine is wide enough to carry lettering.
When the artwork arrived on 29 June, our preflight flagged two things. Several images were under 300dpi, so we suggested high-res replacements where Ruby had them. And on a handful of pages the text sat just 6mm from the spine gutter. At an outer edge that would pass; at the spine of a perfect-bound book it is perilously close, because the binding takes a few millimetres of the inner margin and the page curves into the fold instead of lying flat. We asked for the text to move a few millimetres out, to make it easier for the reader. Ruby replied, "Will fix these changes asap!", and the next morning wrote of the PDF proofs: "everything looks great to me!"
⚠️ PRO TIP: Laying out a perfect-bound zine? Give the inner margin more room than the outer, keep text 5mm inside the trim, and extend anything that runs off the page by 3mm of bleed.
Asked for a rough delivery date, Mike told her: "If we go ahead tomorrow then delivery next Friday should be no problem." Ruby paid the next day with a note: "Would be amazing if we were able to get them by Friday. Thank you so much for all your help!" The zines left us on Thursday 6 July, and on Friday 7 July 150 copies were delivered to Ruby in Cambridge by courier. Issue One had been quoted at 100 copies; Bloom went to 150, the curve we see in many periodicals we print, such as Cunning Folk magazine. Start at a comfortable run length and grow with each issue as demand builds.
If you are collecting submissions for a zine of your own, from a sixteen-page stapled first issue to something the size of Bloom, get an instant price for zine printing at exwhyzed.com, or talk it through with Harriet and Mike on hello@exwhyzed.com
