In Defense of Self-Publishing: Zines and Blogs, Part One

Alissa Nielsen is a fiction writer, editor and teacher. She has worked as a zine curator/librarian for Richard Hugo House literary arts center, editor-in-chief of Silk Road literary journal, and much more. The hyperlinks in this post provide equally engaging reading, and part two of Alissa's guest blog post in defense of self-publishing will appear in September.  

In 1999, poet Samuel Green visited my writing class at The Evergreen State College. We worked on a poetry prompt, and with the poems we’d composed, Green taught us to make an 8-page booklet from a single piece of 8½ x 11 printer paper. Following class, I walked out onto Red Square, midday—there must have been swarms of students bustling on foot or bike, huge Douglas-firs and Western Hemlocks surrounding us, the highway not far off, but I was transfixed by a little book that fit in the palm of my hand. How empowering, this freedom of expression and creation, what pleasure to have this tiny physical object for me to hold or pass along at will.


Even then, when print media still dominated over digital, I felt a certain nostalgia in hand-crafting a book, part of the literary tradition of printing and distributing for oneself. I think of Charles Dickens’ pamphlets. Ben Franklin’s letterpress. William Blake. Edgar Allen Poe. Walt Whitman. Mark Twain. Virginia Woolf’s publications off her own press. All these writers with different or marginalized voices, who despite, and perhaps in resistance of, the publishing trends, found a way to make public their writing. Self-publishing was not only prevalent, but a necessity for all writers who were defying convention, simply because commercial publishers believed different, experimental, or avant-garde literature wasn’t a risk they could afford to take. Look to authors of any major literary movement, and you will find that self-publishing and small press was at the forefront.

Self-publishing continues to thrive in the 21st century, creating a space for writers to have full control over the literature they create and distribute. What I find most interesting about publishing now is not just the many paths a writer can take, but also the ways these routes intersect, cycle, mirror and build off one another. A writer can design and edit her poetry book through InDesign, go to a Publishing Resource Center and create a letterpress cover, hand-bind the books, advertise on a website, and tweet about her public reading later in the week—an event which may be digitally filmed and could appear on her website, blog, Facebook and promo video for her next publication. Ways in which writers can “make public” their work have become more dynamic, more interactive and recursive—the digital subtly mirroring print mirroring life mirroring digital, and so on continues this living loop. The labyrinths of how information is processed and disseminated have become increasingly complicated, especially when attempting to track down an original source.

I see many benefits to both digital and print media, particularly in the realm of self-publishing. Zines and Blogs—those rebellious, messy, uncontrollable, bastard children of the print and digital age—are perhaps the most scrutinized. Though they are of a very different media, people have likened blogs to zines. While there are some similarities (self-produced, often uncensored writing and visuals ranging in content and quality), the two are vastly different modes of self-expression. Zines are hand-made, with a small print run—which means they are rare, physical objects that vary in circulation, production and reproduction turn-over. You could wait for months, in anticipation, never knowing for certain when the latest issue of Cometbus will arrive in your mailbox. Annoying for some, thrilling for others.

Blogs, on the other hand, have a large circulation, immediate turn-over for production and reproduction, and can be altered and hacked at any moment. Blogs are temporary. A blogger can delete an entry at anytime, whereas a zine remains once it’s printed. However, blogs do incorporate a larger, more immediate community of responses and links, while zines (though there may be references to other zines and include “letters to the editor”) are not interactive. Where creating a zine allows for limitless ways of creative design, most bloggers work within a template and are reliant on the formatting. As stated in her excellent article “Zines Are Not Blogs,” Jenna Freedman writes, “Part of what makes zines so great is the total freedom not afforded to, but taken by the zinester.”