By now you’ve probably seen countless posts by me announcing my first photography zine (sorry about that!). To be honest, the final publication was far better than I could possible have hoped for, and certainly made my reservations about putting it together completely mis-placed. In fact, before we even get into the substance of this post I will say this: if you are mulling over making a zine yourself, but are scared of the process or worried no-one will buy it, don’t be! If you’ve got a collection of photos you are proud of and you can make them work in a collection…do it! Get organised, stop procrastinating, and go make that zine!
There, pep talk done, now onto the substance…
I figured it might be a good idea to run through the entire process of creating the zine, from the initial idea to making it available via my online store. But whatever else you’re thinking as you read through this, do not think it is too complicated or there are too many steps. Don’t let anything convince you not to do it, because the rewards from putting it together and getting it out there far outweigh all the work you need to put into making it.
So let’s get into it…
The Idea Stage
First you need an idea. Some sort of focus for the zine. Will it feature a particular style of photography? Is it focused on a particular location? A particular commonality between people, places or things? Is there a single thread that can bring together all the images you have? If so, that’s a great start. A zine needs to have some kind of focus, not just a random collection of your best photos. It needs to be a collection that makes sense together (more on that later).
In this case, I decided to build a collection orientated around night street photography. At the tailend of the summer I picked up the Fuji 33mm f1.4 lens, partly because I wanted the larger aperture as I was starting to get into low light photography. As we moved into winter, I began to formulate the idea of a project: night street photos in a variety of locations across the county, and elsewhere if possible (London, specifically Soho and Chinatown were particularly in mind). I hoped that, by the time we moved into spring, I’d have enough images that I could start to look at putting together a zine. Fortunately, that turned out to be the case.
The Post-Procrastination Stage
Of course I then spent a long time telling myself not to bother doing it as actually the photos weren’t that good, no-one will buy such a zine, the publishing process is too complex, it’s too costly, there are too many unknowns…and on and on it went. Round and round, the thoughts telling me why I shouldn’t over-powering the ones telling me I should. But then I pushed past this stage and figured “what the hell, let’s take a chance.” And so I did some research…
The first thing I re-visited was Sean Tucker’s excellent video on zines:
This was critical for me, not only in terms of wrapping my head around the whole process, but also in encouraging me to take those first steps and actually put together the zine. Furthermore, Sean recommends a print company (ExWhyZed) to bring to life your vision. On digging around more and learning about what this printer has to offer, I decided they would be the company I would liaise with to put the ideas I had into print.
ExWhyZed offered a range of options for zines, different sizes, different bindings…I decided early in the process I wanted to go for an A5 zine (nice and pocketable) and I wanted wire-stitching (stapled pages). The maximum they recommend for this format is forty pages…so I decided to go for the full forty pages. What the hell, right? Might as well go all in.
So I now had the motivation, the print company and the format sorted…next step was going through my images and trying to decide what I would include.
The Selection Stage
Fortunately, to make life easier for myself, I’d already sorted all of my night street photography images into a folder in Lightroom. This left me with the simple (!) task of picking out the “best” ones…I knew the zine was going to be forty pages, so I whittled the images down to around 42. I then downloaded them onto a USB stick and took them to Canterbury Camera Centre and had them printed out. This was crucial for two reasons: to check the images actually looked ok in print, and to help with sequencing the zine.
Sequencing is a critical part of the process. You don’t want to just shove a load of photos into the zine in whatever way they come. There needs to be some thought behind it. Some kind of logical sequence that both connects the images together, and helps the reader make sense of what they are viewing. To help with this, once the images were printed, I took them home and laid them all out on our dining room table and started to move them around, deciding on whatever sequence was best and had some sort of narrative flow.
I moved images around, took some out, shifted it around until I was happy with it. As I noted above, I printed out around 42 images and I had 40 pages to work with…but in actual fact, I had around 34 pages to work with. The cover pages weren’t going to have images on them, and two pages would have text on them. As a result, I had plenty of images to choose from and could afford to be fairly choosey with what was included and what wasn’t.
In the end I found a narrative structure I was happy with. A part of me thinks I shouldn’t share the narrative here, because I wonder if people will spot it without the spoiler. But what the hell…full disclosure, spoiler ahead! I tried to sequence the images into a kind of “night out” narrative. It opens with a shot of a car (two shots actually), moves onto people making their way home in the early evening, to places getting ready for the night ahead, people entering restaurants, people in restaurants, people in bars, people in club mode, and things closing down for the night. It’s imperfect (for me anyway, as I know the story behind every image), but I think it works and tells a story of a night out somewhere, anywhere. Of course these images are from a variety of locations, but the typical night out is a universal thing. And so the locations didn’t matter, what mattered was what the images could convey.
I don’t think I fully succeeded, but hopefully you get the idea. I had a narrative for my images in mind, and I used that to structure the zine before I went onto the next stage…putting it all together.
The Putting It All Together Stage
Of all the stages in the process, this was the most difficult. How was I going to pull together the zine and create the file necessary for the printer to work with?
I looked at the various desktop publishing tools available, but of course they mostly cost money. And, in the case of InDesign, a lot of money. Being a fan of open source software, however, I was happy to stumble across a free option that looked like it would do the trick: Scribus.
Now, I’ll be upfront right from the beginning. Scribus was not easy to use. I don’t know if it was because I was using a Mac (I’ve heard that’s not an uncommon problem), but I frequently found myself tearing my hair out and screaming in frustration (sometimes in my head, sometimes…well…).
Desktop publishing seems to be one of those things that are far more complicated to use than they should be (bit like video editing software). By now it should be all drag and drop and lots of user-friendly editing tools. Now, maybe InDesign is like that. Scribus…isn’t. Nonetheless, I ploughed through some of the documentation, learnt the basics (I was only really adding photos after all, not doing something too complex) and got to work.
Before starting on the structure, I had to set the template for what I was about to design. So I set it to A5, added a 3mm bleed (as per guidance from ExWhyZed), forty pages and, then started to transfer the images across from my computer to Scribus, page by page.
At this point I decided I wanted the images on a black background. I was interested to discovered from ExWhyZed that coloured paper is quite expensive and so they recommend you put a coloured background on your desktop publishing tool if you want coloured paper. This was ultimately part of the frustration I had with Scribus. I had to add a black background to every page and then add the images on top of that. Somehow this got to be really complicated (I was probably doing something wrong), but eventually I got there.
The black background also had to factor in the bleed. If the black background didn’t go over the bleed lines, there was a chance that when the pages were cut, there would be a white line on the edge of the page. It’s important to note that if you want anything going up to the edge of the page, you must factor in the bleed. In my case, it was just making sure the black background covered the bleed area, so it was relatively straightforward to deal with (well, apart from the software aspect…).
The other frustration was that it wasn’t easy to centre the images. I obviously had margins to work with, but I had to gauge the exact centre of the page. Seems a bit unnecessarily fussy doesn’t it? But then you factor in having two portrait orientated images on facing pages. If they’re not closely lined up they can very easily end up looking a bit…wonky. Again, I don’t know why the software can’t centre the image with one click but, well, it’s free software and sometimes you just have to learn to live with imperfections when you’re not paying for it.
I also decided to add some text at the beginning. One block on the first page to indicate the dates the images were taken, the second page to give some background on how the zine came to pass. Again, adding text wasn’t quite as easy as you’d hope. Rather than clicking on the page and then typing like on a blog post, you have to create a text box, click into the textbox, create the text, save the text… When it came to font choices, I went for a typewriter style font for the introductory text (kingthings trypewriter - downloaded for free from FontSquirrel), as well as for the front cover. It’s a style of font I quite like, partly because it looks more like someone has typed on it rather than it being created by a computer (it’s also a font style commonly used for the liner notes in some of my favourite albums).
Talking of favourite albums…that’s really the story behind the name of the zine. All Night Thing is a song from Temple of the Dog’s eponymous album (Temple of the Dog was a collaboration between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, led by Chris Cornell) and seemed a good fit for the zine. I sort of see the finished zine as a “thing” and all of the photos within it were taken at night…hence all night thing (I’m embarrassingly pleased with that, sorry, it’s not even particularly clever).
The Printing Stage
The next stage was the printing stage…the nerve wracking bit. The first thing I needed to do was make sure the saved PDF was in the correct format (pdf/x-1a - a high definition pdf format) and the correct colour profile (CMYK). The latter was particularly important as images for the screen tend to be in RGB, but for printing you need CMYK to ensure the colours are as close as possible to what they need to be. That said, one of the things that was flagged to me earlier on by the printers is that you need to be prepared for the colours to not quite match what you see on screen.
Once I was happy with the PDF and completed multiple checks (especially for typos, but also to double check every image was placed as I wanted), I got in touch with ExWhyZed to get a quote for my zine. At this point I asked for a quote for 1, 50, 100 and 150 copies. Given economies of scale, I took the scary decision to go with 100 copies (eek!). I probably should have started off small scale but, hey, in for a penny…
One thing I didn’t do, which is probably a good idea, is get some paper samples. Of course images look different according to the paper on which they are printed, and so that needs to be factored in. However, I’d already decided I wanted uncoated paper as I preferred the more natural look to the zine. I accepted this might mean the neon lights in my images weren’t quite as vivid as they might have been had I chosen a gloss paper but I also wasn’t keen on the reflective nature of gloss paper and, well, these things are all about compromises.
Following guidance by ExWhyZed on their website, I went with 300gsm uncoated paper for the cover and 115gsm paper for the internal pages. They seemed a good choice for the kind of zine I was looking to create. Something that feels more like a zine than an expensive magazine with thick paper throughout. It’s also worth adding that, as per their advice, I also went for matt lamination to the outer cover. This protects the integrity of the print and helps prevent cracking…particularly important given the pages were to be coloured black.
Upon receiving the quote, I went ahead and prepared the PDF for submission. Using WeTransfer, I uploaded the high res PDF (which was around 240MB) and sent it to ExWhyZed. After a few hours, I received a digital proof of the zine for checking to ensure that the text was fine, the images were good and everything was ready to go. I checked it a few times, left it alone for a bit, went away and did other things, then came back and checked it again. Once I was happy, I hit the approval button and that was it…the zine was on its way to the printer and it was now a case of waiting…
The process was remarkably quick. I approved the proof on the Thursday, on the Tuesday I received confirmation the printing had completed and it was now on its way via courier the very next day. Of course, by this stage I was incredibly nervous. I’d ordered 100 copies after all. What if they weren’t what I was hoping for? What if the colours weren’t right? What…what if my photos weren’t as good as I thought? The doubt crept in once more…I should have just kept the images in Lightroom and never even have considered a zine, right?
Then the box arrived…
I decided to hold off opening them until my lunchbreak. I wanted to shoot a little video to help me promote the zine, the kicker being my idea for a video meant I had to record the opening of the box. What if I set the camera up, started recording and the zines were crap? I went ahead anyway. Let’s just do this…
Camera set…
Pen knife in hand…
I sliced through the tape sealing the box…
Opened up the cardboard box…
Pulled the bubble wrap off the zines…
Shit!
There it is.
Oh god. Oh god.
This is it.
I picked the first one from the box and…
OH MY GOD.
It felt so good. It looked so good.
I’ve done it! It looks better than I could have ever have hoped for. Amazing printing. It looks like a proper zine. It is a proper zine. All those doubts and now I have this in my hands.
I’d already prepped the entries in my store in anticipation. I was so relieved to see that I was now able to publish the pages on my online store and make the zine publicly available. It was now…for sale! I did it!
The Selling Stage
Of course, now it’s on my website and you can order it with a few clicks which is great. But as well as a print version, I decided to make a digital version available too. Selling at half the price, I thought it might be a good option for those who want a cheaper option, but also want an edition that they can flick through on tablets, smartphones, whatever. This was not as easy as it appeared.
Obviously the original high resolution PDF was huge (around 240mb), far too much space for most people. So next came the question of how do I scale down the file size and make it a good quality product to view on screen? My chosen solution was to drop the dpi (from 300dpi for the print version) and therefore decrease the quality of the images and the size of the file. Ultimately, alongside space constraints for people, I don’t want to give away large high resolution copies of my photos, so I worked on a number of different options before I got to the point that both the file size and the resolution were good enough for sale. In the end I think I got a decent compromise (the file size is around 50mb), but time will tell as to whether people think it is a worthwhile option.
Then came the promotion, which takes us right back to the beginning and posting videos and Instagram stories all over the place to raise awareness. At the time of writing, I’ve had 595 visits to my website since launching the zine and sold thirteen copies (12 print, one digital). Frankly, I’m blown away - so pleased with how the zine has turned out and the response to it. It’s better than I could ever have hoped for.
So of course there’s a lesson here…stop procrastinating. If you’ve got photos you’re proud of and you want to try something different to showcase your work, consider creating a zine. Get a theme, create a sequence, a narrative to structure the images, get some quotes and get that zine out there. Ignore the devil on your shoulder giving you reasons not to. Shift that mindset from Why Should I? to Why Shouldn’t I?
All Night Thing is available in print and digital formats in my online store. If you have ordered a copy, I’d love to hear your thoughts below!