Notes From the Brain Jar: A Zine (001)

For the past few years I’ve been running a more-or-less weekly newsletter that goes out to a couple of hundred loyal readers. What started out as an exercise in promoting new books and updating folks about projects gradually evolved into a weekly missive where I stashed write-ups about publishing, writing, technology, creative processes, culture, and other interesting things I came across while working.

Basically, all the things I used to blog about back in the days when folks read blogs.

And it turns out I wrote long newsletters. They average about two thousand words a pop, plus a handful of graphics. A lot of the time, my clumsy attempts to sell books either got lost amid more interesting elements or felt like an awkward intrusion.

I haven’t been happy with that balance for a while, so I did something about it. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull back on the overt marketing in my weekly emails and embrace the idea of treating the newsletter as my own personal, eclectic zine full of things that interested me.

Today, I pulled the trigger on the next evolution of thinking: I’ve compiled all the mini-essays, articles, and write-ups I did across May and June into a 44 page zine folks can download to the ereader of their choice. You can grab your copy for free by clicking the cover below.

It’s an intentionally quick-and-low-budget project, adapting the newsletter content into a form that’s better suited to archiving and revisiting. The audience for it will likely be small, but they’re also quick to produce.

To pull this together was about an hours extra work, and much of that was a proof of concept thing. I loaded the content of each newsletter into Vellum week-by-week, then pulled together a standardised cover design that’s easy to update. Every new issue involves changing the issue number and pulling a new image from my photo album. Vellum compiles everything into files compatible with most ereaders and kindles with the touch of a button, and everything gets uploaded to Bookfunnel who’ll handle the distribution.

All in all, the biggest time investment in getting the first issue together lay in writing a short introduction, and that was mostly because I had to grapple with the fact that a writer I quoted in an early newsletter was hit by #MeToo in the middle of June.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if more than a half-dozen download it, at least in the short-term, but for me the main point lies in the production rather than the consumption. It’s all too easy to get trapped in thinking that stuff you write for one medium is only ever going to live there, when in truth it’s relatively easy to proliferate it out.

And like most things in digital publishing, the value doesn’t really kick in until you’ve invested in something for a stretch. I suspect this will be a lot more interesting when I’ve got an archive of 20 or 30 zines rather than a single issue.