Why I still make zines
Every few months I print sixteen pages of writing on a risograph and mail them to thirty people. In an age of newsletters and subscriber counts, this is an act of deliberate inefficiency.
Every few months I print sixteen pages of writing on a risograph and mail them to thirty people. There's no website. There's no archive. There's no subscribe button. If you want to read it, you have to email me and ask, and I'll put you on the list, and in six to eight weeks a small brown envelope will show up in your post box.
An act of inefficiency
In an age of newsletters and subscriber counts and engagement metrics, this is an act of deliberate inefficiency. I write in a text editor, lay out the pages in InDesign, email a PDF to a print shop in the Alfama, pick up the copies on my bicycle, hand-stamp each envelope, and walk them to the correios. The whole process takes about a week of evenings. The total audience is smaller than a mediocre tweet's impressions.
And it's the most satisfying writing I do.
Constraint is not the enemy of creativity. Constraint is the medium.
What the constraint does
Sixteen pages is roughly 4,000 words. That's one essay, or three short ones, or a handful of observations. The physical limit forces editorial decisions. You can't publish everything. You have to choose. And choosing — the act of deciding what is worth printing on paper that costs money and weighs something — is a quality filter that the infinite scroll of the web does not provide.
The audience limit does something similar. Thirty readers is small enough that I know most of them. I write differently for people I know. I write more honestly, more personally, with less padding. There's no algorithm to optimize for. There's no growth target. There are just thirty people who thought it was worth asking.
The point
I'm not arguing that everyone should make zines. I'm arguing that the constraints of physical media — the cost, the permanence, the limited audience — produce a kind of writing that the web's infinite, free, frictionless publishing pipeline does not. The zine doesn't replace the blog. It complements it. One is for thinking out loud. The other is for deciding what you actually think.
If you want to read the next issue, you know where to find me.