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Do You Want to DIY?

© Kelly Love Johnson

I frequently receive emails from people asking me how they can start their own zine. "Zine Queen," they say, "I want to be a DIY zinester too!" I haven't always been the experienced zine publisher I am today. I, too, was once an aspiring zinester with the spark of an idea and a can of rubber cement. The beauty of DIY is that anyone can do it! And I can tell you how.

First, you have to have an idea.

Most "successful" (as long as you don't equate success with money - we'll get to that later) zines have a theme. Let's say, for example, that you really love books. Not just books themselves, but also reading. You're a reading freak. You have a burning desire (most good zine ideas start with a burning desire) to share your love with the world. You want to recommend books, tell people about books you are reading, about collecting books, share lists of books, and draw pictures of characters in books. There is your idea. Books.

Next, you need a name for your zine.

Some people go with the obvious. There is a zine about collecting eight-track tapes called Eight Track Mind. There's one about shopping thrift stores called Thrift Score - get it? Pagan Kennedy, former zine publisher, wrote a zine about all the stuff that was going on in her head. Guess what it was called? Pagan's Head.

It's okay if the name doesn't mean anything to anyone except you, as long as it's cool. One of my favorite zines on the net is Squiffy Ether Jag - it came from a line in a book. And it's cool. My zine is called Jelly Jar and the story behind it means little to anyone but me - but I like it, and it has come to have a number of meanings for people who read it.

So you could name your zine about books pretty much anything you want. Something literary, like "Much Ado About Books" (kindof chees-y). Or something obvious like "BookWorm." You could personalize it, like Pagan did. If your name is Betty, you could call the zine "Betty's Books". It doesn't have to mean anything at all. There's a zine (which you may have read about due to some negative press in Florida about the content of the zine) called Boiled Angel. I think the story behind that is two guys sitting around and asking each other "what's really gross?" The answer: "boiled angel." Cool name for a zine.

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