When most people think about buying zines, they imagine paying a dollar to a grubby kid at a coffee shop or grabbing a dusty copy in the foyer of a bookstore. What they don't realize is that these home-made, paper-based publications have already infiltrated some classy establishments, including New York Public Library and Barnard College.
In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
Until I met you, I didn't know what a distro was. Could you explain them for my readers? How do they help zine writers? Do you recommend we visit any particular distros?
Jenna Freedman:
Distros are like bookstores or what we call in the book trade jobbers for the zine community. Like zine makers, zine distros are rarely out to make a profit.
They just want to serve the zines they love by facilitating their distribution. Nowadays most distros sell other merchandise as well, like crafts, buttons, and punk gear.
I guess I still haven't explained what a distro is or how it works. It's where a person collects multiple copies of zines s/he likes and makes them available for resale.
The biggest distro I know of is Microcosm Publishing, but there are zillions (hundreds?) of others. Zine Street has a good list.
I just bought a bunch of zines at the Boston Zine Fair from Learning to Leave a Paper Trail. The way distros help zine writers is it frees them up from having to go to the post office a lot. It also often gives their zine a web presence, as most distros operate online.
Some zinesters are very tech savvy, but not all of them have the time or the inclination to bother making a website for their zine. Distros are also great for zine librarians, incidentally, because of the reviews provided and the one-stop shopping.
» Library Zines from ThePublishingSpot
After exploring the world of zines with Jenna Freedman, I turned up some multimedia links that bring zines and librarians together. Greig Means published the definitive text in this area, a little publication called Zine Librarian Zine. Me... [Read More]
Tracked on: May 3, 2006 12:03 PM | Permalink to Trackback