There's nothing like a completely, totally, unabashedly self-involved essay to get the blood really pumping. Whenever I find myself less-than-inspired, I sit down and ask myself: what can I write about me? and that usually sets everything in motion again. So recently someone on the Internet newsgroup alt.zines started a discussion which led to everyone talking about how they got started publishing their own zines, and this got me to thinking about it. Technically I started publishing a zine when I was 23, when the first issue of The Inner Swine was published. But as I thought about it, I guess I really started self-publishing when I was a wee little one. I don't know why anyone would be interested in this, but screw it: I have nothing else to offer in this column right now, so lap it up, and leave me alone.

    I think it all started with a school project to write and bind your own book. This was in, I think fifth or sixth grade. You got a supply of paper and some instructions on how to lay it out, and then you were told to write and illustrate a story, which we would then bind in class. I guess it was educational, though why having a knowledge of 13th-century book manufacturing techniques was deemed a wise use of our time, I'll never know. At any rate, I remember being really excited about this project. Anything that didn't involve math I was generally excited about. I wrote a story about the Earth being created by aliens using some sort of shrinky-dink pill, where they added water and the planet just exploded into being. I drew little illustrations. We also created hardback covers for the books.

    It was around this time that I began reading The Lord of the Rings . When you're ten, anything halfway cool really kicks you in the head because you've never ever seen anything like it before, so I thought J.R.R. Tolkien was a genius. So when the above project got me thinking it would be fun to pretend to be a writer, I chose, somewhat unconsciously, to rip him off. I took my Mom's typewriter (a fabulous 1950s manual Remington model, which I still use to write first drafts) and wrote a thirty-page novel called The Gem Untouched , which would land me in serious trouble with copyright lawyers if it ever saw light of day. When this first volume was received with critical acclaim from my parents and some beleaguered friends of the family (no doubt tired of my precocious dullness by this point) despite its lack of originality, or quotation marks (punctuation explained to me at some later date by a friend of my father's) I proceeded to pump out two sequels, mainly because at the time I thought all epic fantasy stories came in three volumes. The collected work, The War of the Gem, was ninety pages of crap, but then again, I was ten.

    The reason I think this counts as zining history is that I took my 90 page manuscript, drew a color cover for it, drew some illustrations, had my Dad photocopy a bunch, stapled them together, and distributed them. Distributed them to my family, sure, but still. It could be viewed as my first zine. I still have a copy, in case anyone wants to buy it for $100,000 and publish it to the world. But be warned: I never did get around to adding quotation marks.

    In High School, I disdained most of the activities offered. My high School was big on getting involved in the school ‘community' (I guess they all are, and this is why so many of us stumble into college bitter, unhappy people searching for booze and sex desperately) and tried to goad everyone into getting involved in stuff. The only thing I found interesting in school was the Literary Magazine. I don't know how many high schools have literary magazines, but I'm glad mine did, because it was really a zine put out with school money. Oh, it wasn't even vaguely cool. It was called The Paper and Pen and it had that pretentious literary-bend you find in all academic publications. But it was student run, so it was filled with teenaged fiction, poetry, and art every issue. It was digest-sized and photocopied, and distributed free to all students. None of it was all that good, of course, but it was fun. It was the only thing worth my time back then, too, which should have been a hint as to the future.

    Nowadays I wish I could still self-publish everything effectively. I wish E-books weren't such an abomination against nature, because that would be the easiest way to just publish my own novels and tell the industry to screw itself. While self-publishing a book is certainly possible, and even possible without spending millions, it ain't easy, and getting some company to pony up the cash is still the best option - but I wish I could just do it myself and still expect to reach a few hundred, if not a few thousand, people. I guess that's why I look back on my zining past so longingly: Back then, I had 100% confidence in reaching my target audience successfully, because there were 20 people, tops, in my target audience.

    Still, when I put out the first issue of this zine in 1995 I had about 50 people on my mailing list, most of whom didn't know they were on it until they got their copies in the mail. Family, friends, old teachers - these were the only people on the mailing list back then. Today I ship out about 600 issues of TIS every three months. Probably 300 of those make it into the hands of people who give a shit, but that's still quite an improvement. Maybe self-publishing a book is the same: all about persistence of availability. In other words, if I spend a thousand dollars having 500 copies of a book printed, maybe I won't sell 500 in a year, but maybe three years from now I'll have to print up a new batch, and that would be cool enough.

    I certainly get enough DIY come-ons in the mail these days. Having a published book, and having purchased a block of ISBNs recently (needed for the TIS collection The Freaks Are Winning , natch) I get more publishing-related junk mail than I can bother to read. But the legitimate junk mail from publishing service houses points out that you can self-publish, if you want. Here's how you could do it pretty effectively:

    1. Lay out the book yourself in Adobe PageMaker, InDesign, or Quark XPress. If those two programs are beyond your budget, you probably can't afford to have the book printed anyway. People will tell you that you can lay out a simple book in MS Word or MS Publisher, but don't believe it, suckers. Well, you can, but try finding a Service House that can take your crappy MS Word files and actually produce a decent book, and I will congratulate you. MS Publisher is gaining some acceptance as it improves, but you're much safer going with one of the three packages mentioned above.

    2. Buy an ISBN number for your book. You can buy a block of 10 ISBNs from Bowker, Inc. for about $250 (www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/index.asp ) and use them to publish your books. ISBNs are necessary if you're hoping to get your book sold in real-world and online bookstores, plus it gets you listed in Books in Print and the Library of Congress. Yahoo. If you're going to sell your book exclusively from your web site or basement, you don't need an ISBN, and you can always sticker one on later if you decide to at a later date.

    3. Contact a company that will manufacture your book. You can look into local printers, or you can hunt for one on the web - search for ‘book manufacturing' and you will get a load of hits on companies that will quote the job for you. This usually includes printing on a specified stock of paper, printing a cover, binding the books, and shipping them. This isn't cheap, but it isn't something that necessarily prohibits you - you should be able to find a quote that gets you 500 books for about $2000. Not cheap, no, but possible. A place to start is www.greenepublicationsinc.com . I don't recommend these people - I've never used them - but it's one of the friendlier web sites I've seen, and might help you get the idea.

    4. Then, contact Amazon.com about joining their Amazon Advantage program (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/partners/direct/advantage-for-books.html/107-1179595-5631760 ). Basically, this program means that Amazon will order a small number of your books, which you ship to them at your cost, and then they house those copies (typically 1-10) in their own warehouse. You get the usual listing on Amazon, and because they are doing the warehousing they can ship your book in 24 hours just like the big boys. You get less money per book sold than you would otherwise, but you do have your book available on Amazon.com. When they run out of books, they email you asking for more, and at the end of every month they cut you a check for books sold. Potentially this could work out very well for you. The advantage of having your book on Amazon.com is obvious: it's a national presence. You can and should also go to local bookstores and convince them to stock your book on their shelves, but if they do it's still only in your town. Get it on Amazon and you get both prestige (yes, I said that with a straight face - people take you more seriously if you're on Amazon.com) and someplace anyone in the country can order your book.

    Certainly you can and should also just sell the damn thing in any other way you can, and you should promote it as best you can, which I won't go into here. I'm seriously considering using all of the above resources to self-publish a future book - why not? But I haven't made the financial decisions yet, so it's probably years off.

    Something to think about. Them there's my boring thoughts today, anyway. Until next time, I got more shit to do. Mail me if you want.