How to make a punk zine: paste, photocopy, fold, trade

Start with the thing you can’t stop thinking about

A zine doesn’t need a mission statement. It needs a reason to exist that isn’t “I would like to be a publisher”. The best punk zines come out of obsession, annoyance or a scene that nobody else is documenting: a gig diary, a review sheet for tapes nobody’s heard, a rant about a venue that keeps cancelling shows, a comic about your terrible job. If you can describe the zine in one sentence to a stranger at a gig and they don’t look bored, you’ve probably got one.

Decide the format early, because it shapes everything else. A5 is the classic: two A4 sides photocopied and folded down. A4 folded to A5 gives you four pages per sheet of paper, so an eight-page zine is two sheets, folded and stapled. A6 is cheap and cute and fits in a jacket pocket. Anything bigger gets awkward to post and expensive to copy.

Cut-and-paste layout without a computer

The whole appeal of cut-and-paste is that it looks like a person made it. You need: a scalpel or scissors, a glue stick (not liquid glue — it wrinkles), a ruler, a black fineliner, a stack of old magazines and photocopies, and a cheap long-arm stapler if you’re stapling on the fold.

Work on a master sheet the same size as your finished page, then remember the imposition problem: if you’re folding A4 down to A5, page 1 and page 8 sit on the same side of the same sheet, as do 2 and 7, 3 and 6, 4 and 5. Get a sheet of paper, fold it, number the pages, unfold it, and you’ll see the layout immediately. Do this before you glue anything down. It’s the single most common beginner mistake and it wastes a whole evening.

A few practical rules:

Leave a margin of at least 10mm on the outer edges. Photocopiers crop, and folding eats into the page.
Keep text away from the fold. A 15mm gutter on the inner edge saves you.
Type body text at 10–12pt if you’re printing it out; hand-lettered text should be big and dark. Fine pencil vanishes on a photocopy.
Half-tones and grey photos turn to mud. High-contrast black-and-white images survive; mid-grey does not.
Glue sticks let you move things. Tape yellows and photocopies as a grey stripe.
Write your page numbers in pencil on the master before you start, then ink them at the end.

If you want to use a computer for some of it, that’s fine — plenty of zines mix typed columns with glued-in collage. Just don’t let the software make it look like a newsletter. There’s a long tradition of zines that are deliberately ugly, and a long tradition of ones that are beautiful and hand-drawn. Both work. What doesn’t work is a Word document with default margins and clip art.

Photocopying: the bit that costs money

A photocopier is the whole medium. Learn yours. The two settings that matter are exposure (lighter/darker) and whether it’s set to text or photo. Run a test copy of your darkest and lightest pages before you commit to a run of 100.

Where to copy:

A local print shop or copy shop is usually cheapest for runs over about 50. Ask for double-sided and for it to be folded and stapled if they offer it — many do, and it’s often cheaper than you’d think.
Library and university copiers are cheap but often have card payment and page limits.
A home inkjet is fine for ten copies and miserable for a hundred. Toner-based laser printers are cheaper per page and give that flat, slightly grey look that reads as “zine”.
Risograph printing is worth it for a special issue, but it’s a different budget and a different look.

Paper matters more than people admit. 80gsm copier paper is standard and fine. 100gsm or 120gsm for the cover makes the thing feel like an object. Coloured paper for the cover is the cheapest way to make a zine look intentional.

Stapling: a long-arm stapler lets you staple on the spine from the outside. Two staples, about a third of the way in from top and bottom. If you don’t have one, a normal stapler opened flat and pressed through the fold works, then bend the legs over. It’s fiddly but it’s what people did for decades.

Folding, trimming and the physical object

Fold the whole stack at once, not page by page. A bone folder or the back of a spoon gives a crisp edge. If you’ve got a lot to do, a folding bone and a straight edge will get you through 100 copies in an evening in front of the telly.

Trim the outer edge with a guillotine or a scalpel and steel ruler if the pages stick out unevenly — a ragged edge is fine, a wildly uneven one looks careless. Don’t bother trimming the top and bottom.

Number your copies if it’s a limited run. People keep zines, and a numbered copy is a nicer object.

Distribution and trades

The old distribution network is still the best one: hand-to-hand at gigs, distros, and the post.

Gigs and shows. Take a bag. Sell for a couple of quid or give them away. A zine that costs you 60p to make and sells for £2 funds the next one.
Distros. Small punk and queer distros will take zines on consignment, usually a 70/30 or 60/40 split in your favour. Send a polite email with a photo of the cover, page count, price and postage costs. Don’t send unsolicited boxes.
Record shops and bookshops. Independent shops often have a zine rack. Ask first, leave three copies, check back.
Trades. The trade is the heart of zine culture: you post your zine to someone who posts theirs back. No money changes hands. It’s how people built networks before the internet and it still works. Put a trade address on the back page — “trades welcome, write to…” — and a contact email if you want one.
Posting. A5 zines under 100g go as a large letter in most postal systems, which is much cheaper than a parcel. Check your national postal service’s size and weight limits before you promise anyone anything.
Online. Put a PDF up, or sell physical copies through Bandcamp (yes, it works for zines) or a simple shop page. Don’t put the whole thing online if you’re trying to sell copies at gigs; put a couple of pages up as a taster.

Archive it. The Internet Archive and various zine libraries collect PDFs, and there’s a real chance someone will want to read it in twenty years. The Zine Libraries directory lists collections that take donations.

What it actually costs

Rough numbers, and they vary by country and shop, but the shape is consistent:

Photocopying double-sided A4, black and white: roughly 5–15p per side depending on volume. A 16-page A5 zine (four A4 sheets, eight sides) is therefore somewhere around 40p–£1.20 per copy.
Paper: negligible if you’re using the shop’s, a few pounds a ream if not.
Staples, glue, scalpel blades: a few pounds, and they last for years.
Postage: the big variable. A single copy in a large letter is cheap; ten copies is a parcel.

So a run of 100 copies of a 16-page zine is commonly in the £50–£120 range. You don’t need to break even. You do need to know the number before you print 300.

A few classics worth knowing

You don’t need to imitate these, but you should know they exist.

Sniffin’ Glue (1976–77), Mark Perry’s London punk zine, famously typed and stapled and produced at speed. The direct ancestor of a lot of what followed.
Maximum RocknRoll, a politically charged punk zine founded in the 1980s that became a global punk institution. Its review sections are a model of how to write about music without hype.
Riot Grrrl zines of the early 1990s — Jigsaw, Girl Germs, Bikini Kill — where the cut-and-paste aesthetic and the politics were inseparable.

You can find scans and listings for many of these through Discogs (which catalogues zines alongside records) and through institutional collections such as the Barnard Zine Library.

The only real rule

Make it, staple it, give it to someone. A zine that exists in ten copies and gets passed around is worth more than the perfect one you never finished. The second issue will be better, and the third will be better again, and by then you’ll have a trade list and a distro and a box under the bed with your name on it.

Start with eight pages. You can do eight pages this week.

FAQ

What size should a punk zine be?

A5 is the classic format: two A4 sides photocopied and folded down, giving four pages per sheet of paper. A6 is cheaper and pocket-sized, while anything bigger gets awkward to post and expensive to copy.

How much does it cost to print a zine?

Double-sided black-and-white A4 photocopying runs roughly 5–15p per side depending on volume, so a 16-page A5 zine costs somewhere around 40p–£1.20 per copy. A run of 100 copies commonly comes to between £50 and £120.

How do you lay out pages for a folded zine?

Take a sheet of paper, fold it, number the pages and unfold it to see the imposition. Folding A4 down to A5 puts pages 1 and 8 on the same side of a sheet, as do 2 and 7, 3 and 6, and 4 and 5. Do this before gluing anything down.

How do you distribute a zine?

Sell or give copies away at gigs, place them with small punk and queer distros on consignment (usually a 70/30 or 60/40 split in your favour), ask independent record shops about zine racks, and trade copies by post with other zinesters. A5 zines under 100g often go as a large letter, which is cheaper than a parcel.