this method gives your zine that home-made, punk rock look. Just use common sense in putting it together( like use an even # of pages and don't glue anything until you have the whole page planned out).school glue vs. rubber cement... the former makes it stuck forever, but sometimes wrinkley. The later can be unstuck and moved easily, but in the long term your original copy will fall apart alot and get yellow.
I've used clarisworks, word, and stuff like that before. It can really help to align paragraphs and photos, but it can make your zine look too much like a textbook or research paper if you aren't careful. Use a crappy printer if you want the convenience of computer layout but want to keep that cheap look going.
1. raise money by hitting up local buisnesses, record labels, etc for advertising space. Take the money you raised and get the zine printed by a printing co-operative, a printing company, or a copy shop. This helps you make your zine cheap or free.2. save your own money and get it printed, but now you will have to charge a little more.
1. get a job at a copy shop and live like royalty making yourself free copies all night long.2. find out which friends or aquaintances of yours work at copy shops and work out a deal for free copy cards with them.
3. Get in your "unsuspicious person" clothes. Go to kinkos at a busy time, like lunch. Get a red card and make lots of copies. Sneak out when you are done.
4. Go to the local big ass chain store for office supplies and go to the self serve copy machine. Make all the copies you need and put most of them in your backpack. When you go to the counter to pay for them, tell them you made 50 copies or something small but believable like that. You only pay a couple of bucks this way.
5. think sneaky....you will find many opportunities under your nose for making free copies.
Hand it out at shows and school. Take it to local stores and ask if you can put it out on consignment. Put ads for it in windows of stores, in other zines, etc. Send it to other zines for review and this will help get kids interested in it. Send your zine to other kids who do zines you like and ask if they would like to "trade distribution" by sending eachother copies of your zines and getting them out in eachother's cities. This is my prefered way of doing it.
Dig around and find out which distributors are putting out zines like yours. Send them a friendly letter and a copy of your zine asking them if they would like to carry it. This rarely works for me. Most of my distributors have come to me through this website.
if you have access to a computer, put up a website for your zine. Don't forget to register on all the search engines. This has worked pretty darn well for me.
thats it. good luck to you.
- dinki