How to make a zine

What a zine actually is

A zine is a small self-published booklet. That's the whole definition — there's no minimum quality, no gatekeeper, and no format police. Zines have carried poetry, political organising, band interviews, recipes, comics, grief, and instructions for fixing bicycles.

The one rule worth keeping is scope. A zine is short, so it should be about one thing. "My neighbourhood" is a magazine. "The six best benches in my neighbourhood" is a zine, and it's the better read.

The one-sheet, eight-page fold

This is the format most people mean. One sheet of paper, three folds, one cut, and you have an eight-page booklet with a cover and a back page. Nothing is glued or stapled.

1. STEP 1

   Fold into eighths

   Fold the sheet in half the short way, then in half again, then once more. Open it back out — you should have eight rectangles.

2. STEP 2

   Cut the middle slot

   Fold in half the short way again and cut along the centre crease, from the folded edge to the middle. Stop at the halfway point.

3. STEP 3

   Open and push

   Open the sheet, fold it in half lengthways, then push the two ends towards each other. The slot opens into a diamond.

4. STEP 4

   Fold it flat

   Keep pushing until the four panels meet, then fold the whole thing flat around one panel. That's an eight-page booklet.

The counterintuitive part is that the pages don't sit in reading order on the flat sheet — half of them are upside down. Fold a blank one first and number the panels in pencil as you go. Then unfold it, and you have your own template to work on.

Planning the pages

Eight pages goes fast. A workable shape for a first one:

• Page 1 — cover. Title and nothing else. Resist explaining.
• Page 2 — a short intro, three or four sentences on why this exists.
• Pages 3–6 — the actual content, roughly one idea per page.
• Page 7 — something lighter: a list, a picture, a joke.
• Page 8 — back cover. Your name, how to reach you, the date.

Put the date on it. In two years it's the detail you'll be glad is there.

Making it digitally instead

Handmade is the tradition, but it has real costs: mistakes are permanent, the layout is whatever your handwriting does, and you can't send it to anyone who isn't standing in front of you.

Building it on screen fixes those and keeps the format. That's what this site does: you write the sections, it applies magazine typography — columns, drop caps, pull quotes — and gives you a PDF laid out one page per sheet, plus a link you can send. Making it is free, and the clean print-quality PDF is a one-off $2.99.

Printing it

• Paper: ordinary 80–100gsm copier paper. Anything much heavier fights the fold.
• Margins: keep about 10mm clear of every edge. Home printers can't print to the edge and will crop what's there.
• Sides: a one-sheet zine is single-sided. Longer ones want double-sided — print odds, flip the stack, print evens.
• Quantity: print one first and fold it. Errors that are invisible on screen are obvious on paper, and it's a cheap check before you run fifty.
• Copy shops: hand them a PDF. Ask for the cheapest black-and-white on their house stock — that's exactly the right look.

Getting it to people

Leave copies where the right people already are: a café counter, a record shop, a library noticeboard, a bookshop that will take a few on consignment. Zine fairs are worth the table fee mostly for meeting other people making them. And post the link — a shareable page costs nothing and reaches everyone who was never going to be in the room.

Common questions