Sheer Spite isn’t my first time running a zine-selling operation: from about 2012 to 2016, I ran a couple of zine racks in person in Ottawa, where I was living.
I got started running a distro when I went to Dépanneur Le Pickup in Montreal, when I was living in Ottawa. It’s a little corner store with a lunch counter that makes excellent fancy sandwiches, and at the time, my friend, and the author of the wonderful zine Ghost Pine, Jeff Miller, curated a zine rack there.
When I went back from that trip, I was griping to a friend over coffee at Pressed(which is now, incredibly, an oatmeal restaurant) that I wished Ottawa had something similar. He gave what is, I am sorry to say, the only correct answer, which is to say “You could do it.” And although I would have preferred someone else have already been doing it so I could just buy zines and enjoy the fruits of their labour, that’s just what I did.
(Sidebar: people love to complain about Ottawa not having all of the same amenities as larger cities do. However, in my years living there I found people very enthusiastic to support fun projects that I or other people started. Any cool thing only exists because someone does it, actually, so I get mad about people complaining about the place they live without organizing stuff that would make it more fun.)
I began by asking Jeff’s blessing to rip off his idea, which he enthusiastically gave. I then asked a different Jeff, the one who ran Pressed, where I’d had this conversation, and which was the main place people in my life were seeing and playing shows and otherwise hanging out, if I could run a zine rack there. I built a freestanding zine rack out of wood and hauled it in. I was fortunate that they didn’t take a cut of the money: they just kept track of zine sales, and I’d come by every once and a while and drop off zines and pick up the money for what I’d sold.
By and by, I ended up also running zine racks or shelves by request at Gabba Hey, a little record store inside a jam space where a band I was in practiced, and which also put on shows, and at Cafe Alt, a cafe on the uOttawa campus where a friend worked as a manager. But the Pressed one was the busiest and longest-standing location.
I ran the zine racks for about 4 years, and sold about 3,000 zines over that time. I sold things on pretty much a break-even basis from what I’d paid for them, usually just marking them up a little bit to make up for the zines that someone took without paying for or that the venues forgot to count. According to my spreadsheet, my net profit from the zine rack over those 4 years was -$85.04. I prioritized zines by queer, trans, racialized, and/or disabled writers, mostly because that was the writing that interested me personally, and was able to move around $7,000 to zine creators over those years.
Running this zine distro was actually the basis of the majority of my friendships in Ottawa! I mail-ordered wholesale zines from people elsewhere, but also really enjoyed getting zines from people locally, not least because that way I didn’t have to factor the cost of shipping into the zines’ pricing. When I met anyone locally who made a zine I thought was cool, I would ask them if they wanted to sell it via the zine rack. To get the copies from them, we’d usually meet up at a cafe, have a coffee, chat, and bam, I’d already tricked them into being my friend. >:)
It is a nice start to a friendship, because I was able to offer them something (a small sum of money for a stack of their zines), encourage them in a creative pursuit, have a reason to meet up in person, and have a built-in thing to talk about.
In some cases, if I met someone I thought had really interesting things to say, I’d encourage them to make a zine, and offer them support and resources around how to do that, and an offer to distro it if they did. Sometimes I just paid for the print runs of zines I really wanted to see exist, so that the person making them didn’t have to put up the initial cost of printing, and could make more money than usual.
If all of that cost me eighty five dollars (and four cents), it was a very, very good use of my money.
I believe that one of the best things you can do for your life is give yourself some kind of role and create an ecological niche for yourself in the ecosystem of the place where you live. Take photos at shows, or always bring cookies or Narcan, work the door, table for a group or project or distro, offer people something, show up consistently in a particular capacity, become “the _____________ [whatever] person.”
Running the zine racks was this for me for several years, and it brought a lot of joy and meaning to my life. It was also massively, massively easier and less of a hassle than running a zine distro that has an online store, as I do now. It had more of the fun parts (getting to talk to people about zines and support their work) and less of the admin stuff (packing and mailing orders, updating the site, bla bla). The zine racks never had a website, social media presence, or even a name.
Whenever someone asks me about starting a zine distro, or expresses interest in doing so, I always recommend this, in-person format. I’d honestly love to have an in-person zine rack somewhere in Montreal eventually, in addition to the other forms Sheer Spite takes. If you’re interested in starting something like this and you have questions or run into issues, feel free to drop me a line at lee@sheerspite.ca and I’ll help you out if I can.
some notes on logistics
- For the zine rack at le pickup, you paid for zines at the register, in cash that went into a special little bag for Jeff. For my zine rack at Pressed, you could pay for your zines along with your food or drinks, and they kept track by peeling the price tags off the zines, sticking them into a notebook, and tallying up the total every once in a while and cutting me a check.
- At the zine racks I ran, I put the zines in plastic comic book sleeves. The sleeves were open at the top so people could slide the zine out, and then there was a price sticker on the front of the plastic wrapper. This was by far the most annoying part of the operation, and I was not thrilled to create a bunch of garbage. However, since the zines were at a cafe, it felt necessary: otherwise people would probably pick them up, read them in the cafe, spill stuff on them, and put them back.
- As much as I loved Pressed as a venue, if I were doing it again, I would probably try and just have the zine rack at a retail business if I could, so that they were in a location where people expect to buy things, not to just get crumbs on them, so that I could avoid having to put stuff in plastic bags.
- However, running a free-to-read-and-take zine rack at a cafe is an extremely cool thing! If you have access to free copies, there are many zines that are free to print and give away, thanks to the generosity of their authors. You’d just need to put up a little shelf (something like a Montessori bookshelf is ideal, and very DIY-able) and a sign to indicate that these are free zines, and that people can also leave free copies of their own zines. If you have a cool local cafe in your neighbourhood, it is totally worth approaching them about this: it doesn’t cost them anything and would probably help bring people in!
- Friend of the press Amanda Wyatt Visconti also wrote this great post on how to physically build a zine rack.
Some of the text of this post was adapted from my zine Making Friends With Zines.
