My Love Affair with Self-Publishing

Category: Zine
Last article published: 9 June 2014
This is the 6th post under this label

These days, it all seems so simple. The tools for creating your own documents, images and layouts. Most people have decent color printers, but in any case, most "publishing" is done online, which removes obstacles related to distribution. But I come from the olden days, when you'd abuse your workplace's photocopier, laid things out with glue, and likely didn't have the benefit of spellcheck.

I've always been into "content creation" as a way to bring small communities together. When I was a teenager, I was part of a gang who tried to revive an underground newspaper (it was all jokes, no activism) and got into trouble for it. (Me? An honor student? Threatened with expulsion? It happened! And yet the same parody articles appeared in the actual school paper later without notice.) First year of university, I was minted editor-in-chief of the school paper and had a budget of 20$ per issue (Canadian!). I went to the photocopier rather than the printing press. I'm was already a do-it-yourself kind of guy.

In the late 90s, I wasn't content with the way our improv league was being covered in the (larger) university newspaper, so I decided to create a 'zine devoted to our shenanigans, with several members contributing articles, humor, and even comic strips. These didn't have big print runs and you couldn't exactly say they were getting the message out there except to super-fans, but they WERE a fun way to do an internal newsletter, which could then act as a souvenir of one's time in the league. (They've been pretty helpful when trying to track down some of the history of improv in the province too, so it's pretty unfortunate it wasn't a viable project, long term, as the websites that followed weren't always as detailed nor, as it turns out, permanent.)

I believe I was inspired by The Happy Mutant Handbook, a publication out of the Boing Boing zine, which encouraged a lot of reality hacking and cutting out the middle man with a DIY attitude towards what we now call content creation. Why deal with agents and publishers when you can just do it all yourself?! Well, the answer to that is obvious: Reach, money, blablabla. I don't really care about that, and one could say the internet has global reach.

Blogging, podcasting, these are certainly "self-publishing". As are, in my case, various free games and gaming aids I've made available here on on siskoid.com. The day of the 'zine is pretty much over. No one cares about print. Save the trees. I don't disagree. But I do miss their tactile nature. The smell of the toner on the page. Bending staples into place with your brittle fingernails. Collecting a couple quarters from friends so they can read it and hopefully draw a chuckle or two from them. I do miss that.

This is the last label that needed to be covered in this project! Oh wow, what am I going to do on Mondays now?!