Self-Publishing, Zines and the Niche Audience
Q&A with Marta Chudolinska
Should you focus on creating work that is meaningful to you and hope that someone out there will engage with it? Conversely, should you create work that you know will sell? If you put your blood, sweat, and tears into producing something, will there be an audience for it? A-h-h, the never-ending conundrum of someone who creates things.
In most cases, artists, writers, and creators have to demonstrate that there is an established audience for their work before they are given opportunities to exhibit, sell, publish, or get grant funding for their projects. Although the barriers to getting your work out there have somewhat diminished because of the internet and social media, opportunities for meaningful and profitable exposure are still hard to come by; even harder for those belonging to historically underrepresented and marginalized communities.
Although there are countless opportunities to publish online and the audience, if you know how to effectively leverage social media, can be vast, there is still something valuable and important about producing work for a niche audience in printed form.
Felicity Taylor, in her essay on Moral and Legislative Economies of Artist-Run Publishing, notes the importance of print media in concurrence with digital media in our current digital culture:
“Digital culture encourages fragmentation and fluidity of identity across networked media platforms. Print and other analog media continue to be important venues for expression, as they compliment the unique capacities of digital technologies. At times, print culture can also offer a space of resistance to digital culture’s tendencies to value speed and quantity of consumption over engagement with content” (Taylor, 57).
Hailed as being inherently democratizing, self-publishing can also be enjoyably radical, and powerful. Take, for example, zine culture. An increase in artist-run publishing and a resurgence of chapbook and zine making has contributed to a revival in printed publications, with its advocates shouting: “print is not dead.”
Where the Internet has replaced many forms of printed material, zines seem to have survived in the digital age as meaningful representations of resistance, but also documents of their time, reflecting the social and political currents of their maker’s generation. Prior to the Internet, zines afforded access to perspectives that were not generally expressed or published in mainstream media: the voices of marginalized communities and subcultures, feminism, activism, queer issues, and identity politics. Zines have always had a niche audience.
The Internet didn’t eradicate the zine; there is still an audience for the physical, tactile, and intimate object. Self-publishing for print, in this sense, also provides something the Internet can’t: the ability to express one’s thoughts without surveillance, or judgement. Although zine making won’t necessarily lead to lucrative exposure, that isn’t really the point. Zines, while often being a physical representation of personal experience or thought, also act as a means for artists and writers to get their voices and work out there — to build an audience.
Case in point: Toronto has a vibrant and growing zine community. Marta Chudolinska, OCAD University’s Learning Zone Librarian and manager of the university’s zine collection, can attest to that. An OCAD alumni, Marta has been working as the Learning Zone librarian for seven years. She remembers making her first zine around 2007 with her own drawings and poems and subsequently developing an interest in publishing; shortly thereafter she became involved with the newly launched zine library.
“Making art within an elite community didn’t really appeal to me. I was more interested in creating art that could be accessed by a lot of people — zines and self-publishing just made more sense to me.”
The OCAD U Zine Library was originally founded in 2007 by artist and printmaking student, Alicia Nauta, and has since evolved into a rich archive and point of access to zine culture in Toronto. Since taking over as zine librarian, Marta has helped to grow the collection, developed a cataloguing system, and established general guidelines for zine libraries. The library can also be accessed online, which provides great insight into the scope of the collection.
I recently had the opportunity to sit and chat with Marta about zines and self-publishing at the OCAD Zine Library’s 10th anniversary event:
Ingrid: Why do you think people are still so interested in zines as a form of self-publishing?
Marta: People are interested in zines as visual objects and as personal objects. There is something very different about the experience of writing something very personal… about let’s say mental health or trauma, and putting it into a zine that maybe one hundred people will see, rather than on the Internet where millions of people will ultimately see it…where it could be archived online, or duplicated, or where it could grow beyond your original intentions.
Ingrid: What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
Marta: Self-publishing is just really popular now. I think we are in a place in society where people are really interested in personal control over producing media, like publishing on blogs, for example, or YouTube, and zines are really just an extension of that. Access to printing has become cheaper and I know that people in the alternative comics community, a community I am very involved with, are actually choosing to self-publish more, because you have control over the means of production.
Ingrid: When you make zines, do you make them for a specific audience, or do you make them for yourself and hope there’s an audience for your work?
Marta: Most of the time, I come from a place of making something for myself. A lot of zines I have made have been motivated by something I wanted to get off my chest or process, or make a physical object to represent something I was carrying with me psychologically. I sometimes think, OK someone will be into this, but I don’t ever really focus too much on the audience. I actually think that can be a dangerous thing. Some people are really good at it though and it works for them. It definietly comes from a personally motivated place for me. I think that is also part of my philosophy as an artist. Part of the reason why I pursued library studies, was so that I had a career that didn’t depend on my art to make a living. I can make whatever work I want now and am not dependent on that work to be financially viable.
Ingrid: Zines have also historically provided a voice for marginalized communities. Do you think that is still a valuable part of zine culture?
Marta: There are definitely a lot zines that are also just silly and fluffy and they’re great, but they are not really engaging things in a social or critical context. But, there is still a lot of that happening. The Toronto Queer Zine Fair is pretty new and has been going on for about four or five years now. Their goal was to draw more attention to creators that would maybe otherwise get lost at larger zine fairs. Next week is the first Asian zine fair here in Toronto. I think there is still that representation. We have a politics section in our collection that is pretty strong. We have also seen a lot of zines come out of the Black Lives Matter movement as well. I think zines are still very much used to mobilize communities and create knowledge. Although we have a small budget to purchase zines, we always try to use it to purchase zines that are from less represented communities or makers, like queer zines, black or indigenous creators, and marginalized groups.
Work Cited
Tayler, Felicity. “Moral and Legislative Economies of Artist-Run Publishing.” The Grey Guide to Artist-Run Publishing and Circulation, edited by Anne Bertrand, Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, 2017, pp. 57–58.
