Micropublishing Rules, Part 1

Ultra-short-run publications—like Murder—can be fun

Of late this blog has evolved into yours truly giving out tips on small magazine publishing, which is fine by me. My computer is slightly broken, and I’m waiting for the Santa Monica sun to get a little less bright before I go out and baste myself in it. So we write a bit of this, until I trike over to The Wee Chippy.

In a sane world—that is, whatever things were like when you were 27, plus or minus—I would be able to sell a book on this topic, but that is no longer the timeline we inhabit. The only real way to make money in publishing, micro- or otherwise, is to somehow tie it into Bitcoin.

On the other hand, I would feel very sad if all the stuff I’ve learned over the last 35 years was eaten up by juvenile Great White Sharks after I fell off the Santa Monica Pier in some “engrave your name on a grain of rice” mishap.

[Are there juvenile Great White Sharks in Santa Monica Bay? Indeed there are, some as close as ten feet from the surfline. I tease them by hollering “Juvenile Great Whites are Merely Promising Whites” and they laugh and splash at me and say, “Come out here and say that.”)

When I use the term “micropublishing” I’m talking about multi-issue bound printed matter with a print run of less than the effective minimum run of an offset press, which was about 2,000 copies when I was 27.

1-2000: micropublishing, usually but not always distributed one-at-a-time
2001+: regular ol’ magazine publishing, usually but not always distributed via wholesalers

Rule #1: Micropublishing is not a ‘zine
Before it spawned micropublishing, the very same typesetting and repro tech caused an explosion of ‘zines, ultra-small run eccentric magazines on esoteric topics like clip art, serial killers, and riot grrls. Though fanzines had existed for decades, the heyday of mainstream ‘zines seems to have been from 1985-2000. After that, it was much easier to start a blog, which is why—even though the printing tech has gotten even better—there aren’t as many ‘zines around as there used to be. They still exist, but as readers’ informational diet has shifted online, and bookstores and newsstands have disappeared, ‘zines have returned to a niche interest.

‘Zines thrived when HTML/CSS were too primitive to do much graphically, and connection speeds made images inconvenient. Some of the most prominent ‘zines—most still active today—are Boing Boing, BUST, Murder Can Be Fun, Crap Hound, Duplex Planet, and Ben Is Dead.

’Zines are wonderful, and they can, with luck, grow large and beloved enough to become first micropublications, then regular ol’ publications, like BUST has. Even when they don’t grow, they can seem a lot bigger than they are/were. George Meyer’s Army Man, for example, was a multi-sheet typewritten newsletter that collected jokes from himself and his funny friends, which he mailed to some other friends, probably less than 100.

But the hilarious Army Man spread from there. That pamphlet was hugely influential within the comedy business, like Tom Paine-level influential. And strictly from a print run perspective, you might call it “micropublishing.” But while Army Man was micro in scale, it’s “just” a ‘zine, because a ‘zine is produced primarily for the enjoyment of the editor and/or its small staff, without thought to financial gain.

Now obviously George could turn Army Man into a micropublication with ease. He could solicit subscribers, charge something over the cost of production, and he’d be micropublishing. And given how funny George is (he’s a Bystander, so I’m biased) and his standing in the comedy world, he’d probably rocket past micropublishing scale and into regular old publishing.

But I’d be shocked if he’d ever did that, because of the second rule.

Rule #2: Micropublishing serves the reader.
It’s the difference between “What do I like?” and “What would they like?”

’Zines begin with an idea—“I always liked Famous Monsters of Filmland. It would be fun to re-create a magazine like that.” Micropublications begin with a market—“Some of the hundreds of thousands of people who used to read Famous Monsters of Filmland are still around, and there’s no publication that really serves them and younger people with the same interest. I should create one and sell it to them.”

This is a completely different, and somewhat opposed, pair of ideas, attracting a different type of person, and potentially producing a very different finished publication.

To some degree, ‘zines are substantially easier to produce because it’s simply your own taste. How long is it? However long you want! What goes on page four? Whatever you want!

There’s nothing wrong with this, and a lot right with it; after all, conventional magazines are hardly thriving. And if an audience is small enough, it’s basically the same as you.

Sometimes a person will get lucky and their taste will be loved by enough others, or the demographic so underserved, or their approach to the topic so fresh, that the ‘zine will grow into a micropublication and then a publication almost in spite of itself. (See Army Man above.) But this happy future is much more likely to blossom if Rule #3 is present.

Rule #3: Make a profit.
The form and scale of a micropublication is determined by how its audience will pay for it, how many of them there are, and how they pay for it.

Say you live in an apartment building with 100 other tenants, and you think you could write a funny weekly about your neighborhood. You could type it into Word, print it out, and put 50 photocopies in your laundry room. That might be fun.

On the other hand, if you took that same writing, applied some layout, went to Kinko’s and printed it onto slightly heavier stock, folded the sheet into two so that it was a little booklet, and sold a coupon to a local dry cleaner on the back page, that’s micropublishing.

That all may seem like no fun—a pain in the ass, even, compared to just making it a blog—but it’s likely to make you a bit of profit, which will keep you doing it, week after week. And it would make it something that could grow, rather than something where growth is actually a problem. It’s the difference between “people love this but I can’t afford to print up more copies” and “People love this so I am actually making more money from it.”

In other words, it’s the difference between Army Man and The Harvard Lampoon. Stradding the space between amateur and professional, it’s nevertheless the Lampoon’s existence as a commercial enterprise that has allowed it to thrive over the decades, and train many of the people who made Army Man so great. Without Ma Poon, Army Man would probably not exist, and George might be a really funny yoga instructor. (My downstairs neighbor used to teach him Kundalini style.)

Why do I make this point? Because the internet is steadily—one might even say systematically—decommercializing content. This goes under the cover of “democratizing access” and “getting rid of gatekeepers,” but Big Tech populism isn’t any more authentic than the Trumpian kind, and perhaps equally dangerous. They are attacking the very idea of being paid to make content, whereas the idea of being paid to write code, for example, is not similarly questioned.

The web has killed or impoverished unto death most of the commercial institutions that allow for glorious hobbies to flourish. Micropublishing can be a way to reverse this trend, one tiny beloved publication at a time. In a world where rent must be paid, content-as-commerce must be protected…and anyone who tells you different is looking to pick your pocket.

The final tip for today is:

Rule 4: Create an environment your readers will love.
To micropublish successfully, your publication should be an experience, the more intense the better. If it’s about Matchbox cars—ooh, I would read that!—the layout should evoke that product. It should be full of competent, well-lit photos of the cars; full of deep dives of various rare models; interviews with collectors and designers; and behind-the-scenes info.

This depth of service is what you are selling.

In the comments of earlier posts, I’ve mentioned Beatlefan, a truly excellent Beatles fanzine I used to receive in the 1980s. It was full of exactly this type of depth, and I loved it. “But can’t you get the same thing from a website or YouTube channel?” Sure, but in my experience, the affinity there is fairly weak—I used to run one of the biggest Beatles fan sites on the web, and herds of people came and went freely, and the moment I quit, those thousands just went to other sites. Nancy, Devin and I put in a huge amount of effort to Hey Dullblog over the years, and there just wasn’t that much affinity generated.

Now if we’d been publishing a magazine—say a quarterly with 1000 annual subscribers at $25 per—the relationship would’ve been totally different. Our work would’ve been a little sharper; the connection would’ve been personal in a way that money changing hands always makes things, and it would’ve been possible to give them a much deeper experience—something designed, a world.

A website, no matter how great, is just another website. A great publication, regardless of scale, is a whole world.

That’s why we micropublish—to create that world. The money, as essential as it is, is just a means to that end.◊

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MICHAEL GERBER has been printing and selling things with his name on them since 1987. He is currently Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander, a ten-year-old all-star print humor magazine. You can subscribe to it here.