Hello beautiful humans!!
The sun is coming back to us here in the northern hemisphere! I can feel that particular color in the un-obstructed northern sunlight that just feeds my body!
Anyway, it's been two years since I first got my 5 zines printed. 200 copies of each. Most of which I loaded into some giant luggage, and lugged (see that 😅) down to Anarchapulco.
It went off wonderfully! I only had about 40 copies (or less) of each zine when I left Acapulco, and I had already gotten tons of great feedback. I included a page in the back full of QR codes for crypto wallets, and explaining that these booklets cost me about $1 each (actually about $0.30 more for the ones in Acapulco because of that luggage fee.)
I gave anyone who was interested the whole set of zines, or whichever one(s) that person was drawn to, often giving a brief description of the Gift Economy.
Last time I printed 5 different booklets, at 5.5"x8.5" and 24-36 pages each. Those ones were:
- Real Life: The Role Playing Game
- Capitalism: Exploring Markets, Competition,Incentives, Ownership, and Freedom
- So You're an Anarchist?: Essays on Personal Freedom, Escaping The Matrix, and other Radical Ideas
- Mind of a Wanderer: Essays on Manifestation, Trust, Service, Storytelling, and Love
- The Rainbow Gathering: Five Decades of Beta-Testing Anarchist Society
This time around, I'm thinking I want to go bigger, at least with some of it, and make something more like a book than a zine (bound instead of stapled, 100+ pages), but I haven't quite decided... so I'm here to ask for your help.
I've been going back through my old blog posts, of course starting with the ones from the last two years, but also taking a look at some of the ones from pre-2019 that I just didn't print this time. I'm sort of putting posts (or sections of posts) into little piles, based on a particular theme, subject, or style. So far, the piles I'm looking at include those first 5 zines (some of which I've already updated anyway), and:
- Talking about words
- "Conspiracy Theories" (My We're All Conspiracy Theorists, plus parts 1 & 2 of Down the Vaccine Rabbit Hole, and a few others)
- Crypto Stuff
- Neither Left Nor Right (environmentalism vs climate change, right to bear arms, and probably rolling in the whole "capitalism" zine)
The thing is, I also kind of want to make a book, or multiple books. For some reason, I feel like holding 2 books (bound 120 pages), feels like more of an accomplishment than holding 6 or 7 zines each with about 40 pages.
Haha! As I wrote that, I realized I can totally do both. I'll print zines of the things that work best as stand-alone topics, and which are somewhat more introductory (Rainbow, Real Life, Conspiracies for example), then also print one book, that includes all the zines, and a bunch of other stuff, like special edition features or whatever.
So... ya.
What are your thoughts?
The big plus side to zines is that they're so small, cheap, and people who don't read books still seem willing to take them.
With a book, I can feel accomplished :-P But really, being able to hand somebody one item and basically catch them up on my years of writing, is pretty awesome. Also, the price per page goes down the bigger the project.
Should I stick to the more red-pill/black-pill stuff, the super useful stuff, or wander into things like my "Let's Talk About Words" series, "Sunday Cinema Reflections," etc?
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I love your 'neither left nor right' deep dives into topics the best. They are a bit more friendly than the so called 'conspiracy theories' - not that you NEED to be friendly, but they are a nice way to enage people's latent ability to think in more complex ways.
The zines are like the categories for the book whose last chapter ties everything together. I tried to do something similar with a website. First thing that became apparent is the enormity of the information. What to include and what not to include, best avenue for successful communication, is there a target audience, and on and on it goes. A person could think themselves to death. lol
Catherine Austin Fitts said that the solution is transparency and I quite agree. Anything you do in this regard can only help. What are the biggest disconnects humans are suffering from might be a theme.
I really don't know, just sharing a thought or two but high five on the idea.
I say go for it all. The zines really attract those who just want a lighter read whereas a book is for those who wish to dig deeper.
I think there is a huge need to keep writing about the truth, to get folk to think more critically, but also we need the lighter stuff too. Cos shit can get too serious as well. If you can manage it, I say do it all xxxxx Oh and keep us informed xxxx