Raised over $200 for @dfwsupportcommittee yesterday with zines and stickers and stuff at the local people’s pride thing, just by offering everything free with optional donation.
You can do this too! The price of zines is too damn high! Distroism will win! Free em all!
@riotmuffin A good idea for small #zines! But aren't zines very different? I know photography zines as perfect as small books, with weeks of work ... and the author must make a living.
When is a price too high?
@NatureMC the origins of zines, and my own use of them, is as a small scale means of distributing info and experiences amongst friends and comrades, for the benefit of marginalized groups and social movements. there's definitely when i call a "boutique" zine scene these days where people use zines as part of their main income. my view is that the type of zines you describe are indeed more like books than the type of zines i usually make.
This is my zine-length take on the matter: https://archive.org/details/the-price-of-zines-is-too-damn-high/The%20Price%20of%20Zines%20is%20Too%20Damn%20High%202ND%20ED%20-%20print/
@riotmuffin I like your ideas about zines, I remember well their origins far away of any market.
What I don't like: your exposing of certain #zinemakers/libraries in a way that people could recognize them personally. Where I live, that would be considered defamation.
You can make your point while remaining sufficiently anonymous about others.
For me, both can exist together: free zines and those of artists, photographers, and bookmakers who have to earn a living. We shouldn't badmouth them.
@NatureMC nah imo any #zinemakers who wanna profit from their $20 #zines about a #global #uprising that started in my hometown where people #fought, died, and are still #imprisoned, deserve to be #calledout. I could have done much much much more of that but chose not to.
Not to mention profiting (both financially but more importantly via name recognition and uplifting themselves over collective movements) on the #backs of those same freedom fighters.
@riotmuffin Well, let's just agree to be different. I don't know the situation in your hometown well enough but can see that there might be cultural differences.
Where I live, it is a sign of appreciation and solidarity, even a political one, to help professional artists, cartoonists, and other creatives to make their living. They often publish their activist work as zines.They also have free zines. And they sell zines. Both is possible.
Jun 28, 2026, 5:31 PMUK's somewhere in the middle - few people would pay £20 for a zine and would laugh at the price but they /might/ buy a cool piece of art for that price.
At the anarchist bookshop £20 would get you some full size book on praxis (maybe even in French or German), although that was almost 40 years ago! they did also sell some alternative publications at slightly higher prices but those were more like books than zines (and still more than a teenager could afford)
That said, I've not seen a zine fest in my region since I moved here 20 years ago. I did find some zines (presumably published in London?) going for higher prices, but they've all got online shops, even with Klarna!
@vfrmedia It's nearly the same here in Eastern France: if a price is too high, people just buy other stuff ... it's so easy.
But we have e.g. very good comic artists publishing their more risky work not with a publishing house but as a zine, professionally made. Some use crowdfunding, some take money for the comic. People decide if they want to pay that for art in book quality or not. There's a zine scene quite near to self publishing.
And here, it doesn't damage the free scene.
@riotmuffin
Jun 28, 2026, 5:49 PM@NatureMC @riotmuffin I learned that in België Franquin did a lot of that and contributed to a lot more polticial stuff (some of which was given out as free leaflets), but he had constant income from such things as Gaston Lagaffe (which itself was quite subversive!)
Perhaps the difference is already having that culture of the bandes dessinées, so from youth people were used to paying a bit more than a kids comic in the UK for something better written and worth keeping hold of? (also in UK kids tend to grow out of comics by age 10/11 whereas in FR/BE most BDs are aimed at those well into their teens and adulthood)