I’m not the first to remark that a lot of what we’re calling “zines” aren’t really zines. They’re fine, glossy magazines, or beautifully crafted books. While these products may share zines’ craft ethos, they don’t share another, equally important quality: Ease of reproduction and distribution. Zines come from a tradition of democratizing print media; fancy books and lavish magazines do not. 

You might say, well, zines are often PDFs, and PDFs are easy to reproduce and distribute. But damn near anything can be a PDF. The PDF is a digital expression of a print format.1 A zine is a print format. If your RPG product is, at its core, a PDF and not meant for print, don’t call it a zine.

Am I language policing here? Sure, why not. I think the original sense of the word matters and is worth preserving, worth insisting upon. I think zines, as a non-luxury print media are important.

One of the things that makes zines democratic print media is they are cheap and easy to print, bind, and copy. They should be DIY friendly. I’m going to put a very fine point on this: DIY friendly. That means that anyone with access to a printer and a stapler should be able to print off, bind, and enjoy. This is what makes them zines, and not magazines. I am an avid DIY printer and binder and let me tell you, most of these PDFs are nightmares.

Many of the products OSR folks are calling zines are none of these things, and I call stolen virtue. Here are my guidelines for making a zine you can call a zine.

1) Cheap

If you’re charging more than $5 for your product, don’t call it a zine.

2) Printer friendly

This is the most important thing, obviously. It also touches on a lot of different facets, so I’ll have to break it down.

Universal paper size

I think someone came up with this before me but I can’t remember who. Was it Yochai Gal? It seems like a Yochai thing. The point is, not all countries have the same standard paper size. Most (all?) use either Letter (215.9mm x 279.4mm / 8.5” x 11”) or A4 (210mm x 297mm / 8.25” x 11.75”). Getting the other size can be surprisingly expensive. The difference may seem small, but converting from one size to the other always means you either have to shrink the page to fit or crop part of it out. When dealing with small print, it’s the difference between readable and eye strain.

Some folks offer separate PDFs for letter and A4, but that’s a pain in the ass for the author. So your documents should be laid out to fit both sizes without scaling down: 210mm x 279.4mm, or 8.25” x 11”. This will mean your margins will be a bit funky, but now people all around the world can actually read your zine.

Don’t forget the margins

Most consumer printers can’t actually cover an entire page and need about a quarter-inch / 6.35mm margin on all sides to print without shrinking. That means we need to shave another half-inch, or 12.7mm, off our universal page size. So your working area is actually 197.3mm x 266.7mm or 7.75” x 10.5”.

Colour optional

Do you have any idea how expensive colour printing is? Avoid information designs that rely exclusively on colour. Besides being a nightmare for people with colour blindness, it also makes your zine way more complicated and expensive to print. Preview your layout in black and white to make sure they read clearly with or without colour.

Ink/toner efficient

This is more a polite request than a guideline: Be kind to readers’ printers and avoid layouts that make heavy use of dark tones. Be especially judicious with white-on-black text.

3) Stapler-friendly

Yeah it turns out binding introduces a bunch more issues. Most people don’t have access to fancy bookbinding equipment (or the requisite sewing skills to do without). Most people do, however, have access to a short-arm stapler, and can bind your zine by printing it, folding it in two, and stapling along the fold.

Foldability

Remember your universal page size? That’s actually the size of a whole spread. An individual page is half that: 137.9mm x 210mm, or 5.5” x 8.25”.23 Don’t forget the margins!

Page count

So there are two important factors here: the amount of paper your average desktop stapler can handle and the weird vicissitudes of booklet printing. The short version is, the total page count of your PDF should not be above 48 (including the cover page and back!) pages, or 24 spreads. The page count should also be a multiple of 4, or an even number of spreads.

The 48 page cap is because most desktop staplers can handle around 10 pages without jamming, or 12 with a little coaxing. 40 or under is ideal.

The multiple of 4 thing will make immediate sense if you’ve ever tried to use Acrobat’s booklet printing feature with a document that doesn’t have a multiple of 4 pages.4 If you don’t have enough content to fill exactly that many pages, just stick blank pages before the back cover until you do. It is way, WAY easier to insert blank pages in your word processor/layout software than into a PDF.

Actually that reminds me: Booklet form

Some people are stuck with shitty computers or laptops or even just their phones to print things from. Don’t assume your reader can convert your 1up/spread document to a printer+stapler friendly form. The desktop version of Acrobat can do that for you. Most publishing software can do that for you. I’m pretty sure Word can do that for you. If you can, offer a pre-formatted file specifically for booklet printing.5

Oh yeah one last thing

4) Fuck your IP

Let people print copies of your zine. Let them print as many as they want, and give the copies to their friends, and let their friends make copies and give those to their friends. Give them explicit permission, ideally in the text of the zine itself. Use a Creative Commons license if it makes you feel better. At the very least, do not prohibit these uses. If you love your IP, you’ll set it free…….

Also they should be PWYW. Sorry! That’s praxis baby!™ If you don’t like it, just don’t call it a zine :)

So that’s the guidelines! I know this is a long post, and my tone can be abrasive, but these are basically a set of little kindnesses you can observe to greatly increase your RPG product’s suitability for DIY printing and really earn the title of zine.

Hell, if you do all the above (yes even the IP/PWYW) you can slap on the uhhhhh Distant Lands Zine Seal of Praxis and show it to me and I’ll link it on a special page on this blog. It’ll be in excellent company.

  1. Don’t quibble with me here, you know what I mean. ↩

  2. I guess you could also do 105mm x 274.9mm / 4.125” x 11” if you’re feeling adventurous. ↩

  3. If you’re feeling extra praxis-y, you could cut the size in 2 again for an 8-fold zine that you can assemble without the need for duplex printing, but that’s a whole other can of worms I can’t get into here. ↩

  4. If you haven’t: you understand, right, that a sheet of paper is going to contain 4 pages, 2 on each side. And also, that in order to print as a booklet your computer needs to rearrange the pages so that you have, for example, the first and last page on the front of the first sheet, and the second and second-to-last page on the reverse, etc. Right? The pages need to be jumbled around so that they appear in the right order after binding. You get it. So when you tell your printer to print a booklet with a number of pages that isn’t a multiple of 4, it needs to figure out where to stick the blank pages to reach that number. I have been doing this shit for years and I still can’t figure out exactly how it decides where to put them, but it can completely fuck up your layout and make binding go from *clunk* *clunk* done! to Pure Hell. ↩

  5. I’d call this point, like, Optional But You Better Have A Good Reason ↩