What is a zine?

A zine (rhymes with "bean," short for "magazine" or "fanzine") is a small, independently published booklet. Someone makes it, usually alone or with a couple of collaborators, and puts it out into the world without going through a publisher.

How a zine differs from a magazine

A magazine is produced by a company, sold on a schedule, and built to appeal broadly. A zine is made by one person or a small group, on no fixed schedule, often about something that matters to just them. Print runs are small. Layouts are hands-on. Nobody is optimizing it for the widest possible audience.

What goes in one

Almost anything. Art, photography, comics, personal essays, poetry, research on a very specific subject, scrapbooked ephemera, or just a collection of thoughts that didn't fit anywhere else. The format is loose enough to hold whatever the maker wants to put in it.

Why the format still works

A zine is cheap to make and easy to pass along, which means the barrier between having an idea and putting it in someone else's hands is small. That's the whole appeal: no pitch, no approval, no algorithm deciding whether it's worth seeing.

Next

Browse what people have already made in the Maigz index.