Steal Your Hearts: A Zine Primer

Steal Your Hearts: A Zine Primer

There are a lot of things to consider when beginning a serious, long-term magazine. While these facts will help individuals that are doing extremely small-run or one time only publications, the facts will be of much greater use to those individuals that eventually want their publication to be somewhat self-supporting. Also, be aware that NeuFutur/InterStitial is not that solid of a publication; we suffer from many of the same issues that seem to befall independent publishing. These include issues like uninterested staff and work and school drains of time. As such, we just might not come up with some of the best hints and tips that are available. If that is the case (and we've forgotten something), we'd like to eventually cobble together a collection of hints and tips that would make the zine creation process less of a hassle.

Step One: Talk Big.

Someone does not even need to have a zine together or have a monthly schedule established to start getting materials to write about. In much the same way individuals flock around people that are in a band (however much they are goofing around), bands themselves will flock around promises of reviews or interviews. Merely mentioning that one runs a zine ensures free entrance into concerts, free CDs from the local bands, and a tremendous number of invites into practices and closed shows. With the advent of MySpace, the amount of acts that one could conceivably touch and listen to is exponentially higher than it was a scant few years ago; one could go for hours simply messaging bands explaining quickly about the zine and be awash in CDs. For example, when I started the site that would eventually be http://www.neufutur.com I made it a point to e-mail 100 bands a day requesting materials for about a week; I quickly became so backlogged in material that I had to actually pick and choose what I wanted to cover. In much of the same way, after a person gets their name out to a few local bands the buzz will gradually increase to the degree that bands will be soliciting you for show reviews, interviews, and the like.

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