sheer spite press

I spent most of the spring in Europe doing a ~*~ zine business tour ~*~, which is kind of a wild thing to be able to do!

I sold about a thousand zines, made amazing pals, ate great food, saw fascinating things, and saw so much wonderful artistic work. And, I am so happy to be home in Montreal.

I wanted to write down what I learned, both to reflect on it for myself, and in case it’s useful for anyone else contemplating a similar trip. Honestly, I stressed out so hard about logistics before my trip, and here are some things that I am glad I did, and some that I wish I had done differently.

1. Research events way ahead of time

I put together this trip by basically finding three events that were relatively geographically and temporally nearby, applying, and crossing my fingers. I feel extremely lucky that I got into the Paris Ass Book Fair, the Mainzer Mini-Presse Messe, and Miss Read Berlin, which were each two weeks apart, allowing me some time in between to recuperate, explore, and tend to other zine business like bookstore outreach, as well as keeping up with my freelance work that actually pays the bills.

Tragically, one of the best ways to find out about zine fests and other annual events is to hear from a friend or see on social media that they have just happened, feel sad to have missed them, and make a note of them for next year.

I maintain a running list of events that I have applied for, want to apply for, am tabling at, etc, and when I see one that I am sad to miss, I just add it to the list for next year.

If you find a faraway event that you want to attend, I would recommend starting with that, then talking to other people in that region to find other events that you could add on to your trip. This was how I found out about the Mainzer Mini-Presse Messe, which wouldn’t have been on my radar without a helpful German pal!

2. Research bookstores

In addition to my big weird spreadsheet of zine fairs, I also maintain a big weird spreadsheet of bookstores. When I am going somewhere, I look into cool bookstores in that area and send them my wholesale list to see if they are interested in stocking the things I carry.

1. Books Peckham, London, England
2. Cailleach Books, Drogheda, Ireland
3. Dash Press, Berlin & Frankfurt, Germany
4. einbuchhaus, Berlin, Germany
5. Folkestone Bookshop, Folkestone, England
6. Good Press, Glasgow, Scotland
7. Het Fort van Sjakoo, Amsterdam, Netherlands
8. Prismatic Pages, Oslo, Norway
9. Rotor Books, Leipzig, Germany
10. She Said, Berlin, Germany
11. Tekstallmenningen, Bergen, Norway
12. Other Nature, Berlin, Germany

(also, you gotta shoot your shot pretty widely– 12 bookstores is really cool and exciting, but I contacted over 100!)

3. Apply for grants!

I was incredibly fortunate to receive a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts that covered most of the cost of my trip, which is HUGE. It would have kinda wiped me out financially otherwise, which I was willing to do, but it is certainly much easier not to have to stress as much about money and sales.

The grant I got was from the Market Access Strategy for Official Language Minority Communities (OLMC) Fund. Yes! I am an official language minority as a person in Québec whose first language is English. Yes! This is very funny. Yes! I am incredibly grateful. It is an odd grant– I tried really hard while I was applying to find anyone to talk to who knew about it or had gotten one, and couldn’t, so thought it was a very long shot and it was a wonderful surprise to receive it.

I also applied for a travel grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, which I thought was a lot more likely but which I didn’t receive. Arts grants are always worth a shot– even when my applications haven’t been successful, I have found them a helpful way to plan and scope out a project and think about why I am doing it.

4. Organize pop-ups

One of the highlights of my trip was getting to be a junior bouquiniste in Paris thanks to La Lézarde, who very kindly invited me to do a pop-up! It was so much fun, and amazing to learn a little about the culture and history of bouquinistes. If I were doing a similar trip again, I would try to organize more pop-ups.

5. Figure out what you can produce locally and what you need to bring

This was the hardest part of my trip! I brought a suitcase full of zines, up to the maximum checked bag weight limit: these were things that had specialty printing, like riso covers, that would be too complicated to print and assemble in Europe. The rest of my zines, I printed in Europe. I decided to print most of my stock for all three of the fairs I was attending on my first stop in Paris.

This would have been kind of a bad call anyways, but sales at my first event were TERRIBLE, and I ended up having to buy a second suitcase to lug all my unsold zines to the subsequent events. I cannot stress enough how stressful it was to be manoeuvring two big suitcases around on public transit, and up and down stairs to top-floor apartments; it almost broke me physically and mentally lol.

It would have been a much better choice to either:

1. Do smaller print runs on the different stops of my tour, or
2. Print everything on the first stop, then ship it to the venues

A lot of zine fairs aren’t set up for vendors to ship things to the venues where they take place, but fancier “book fair” type events that attract a lot of international tablers will often have that option. I strongly recommend you take it!!! Don’t be a DIY-pilled fool like me. Because I had to take more cabs than I would have otherwise because of my giant stupid suitcases, it probably would have been cheaper just to ship things, and dramatically less miserable.

(Ultimately I got a bunch of big bookstore orders and then had to reprint a bunch of stuff anyways. Truly the worst of both worlds, oops!)

This experience did also convince me to start keeping detailed track of how many copies of each title I sell at events. Usually, I only keep track of titles that I pay royalties on, and then just track my overall earnings otherwise, but it is actually really helpful to have a less vibes-based reckoning of what has sold more or less well where, for future planning.

6. Make zine libraries a part of your plan!

Because quantities are so hard and my first event was a flop, I had a stressful amount of zines with me. However, thanks to having gotten a grant, and thus being less stressed about sales and money, I decided to deal with the situation by donating zines to as many European zine libraries as I could. I love zine libraries, it helped me reduce my load, and it is probably also good marketing to get my stuff into libraries and archives where more people can stumble across it.

Here are the zine libraries I donated to:

1. Canny Little Library (Newcastle upon Tyne, England)
2. The Cowley Club (Brighton, England)
3. Salford Zine Library (Manchester, England)
4. 56a Infoshop (London, England)
5. The Skye Zine Library, (Isle of Skye, Scotland)
6. Edinburgh Zine Library (Edinburgh, Scotland)
7. La Petite Fanzinothèque Belge (Bruxelles, Belgium)
8. The Shelf Library (Ghent, Belgium)
9. Bibliothèque associative de fanzines (Paris, France)
10. La Fanzinothèque (Poitiers, France)
11. Munich Zine Library (Munich, Germany)
12. Queer Zine Library (Berlin, Germany)
13. Papiertiger (Berlin, Germany)
14. Fanzinoteca d’Italia (Forli, Italy)
15. Fanzineteca de Coimbra (Coimbra, Portugal)
16. La fanzinoteca (Barcelona, Spain)
17. The Athens Zine Bibliotheque (Athens, Greece)

Even if you don’t end up with a surfeit of zines, I think it is a nice idea to factor zine library donations into your zine tour.

7. Figure out how to make it nice even if sales are bad

I am sorry to be the person to tell you this, but you are probably not going to get rich going on zine tour. 🙁

Since that’s the case, I would recommend assuming that your sales will be terrible, and figuring out how to make the trip a HUGE SUCCESS regardless of whether you sell much of anything. I had so much fun seeing some of my European friends, and meeting many many other cool new people. Ultimately, I did sell a lot of zines, but I think it is a good idea to build a trip that will probably be fun and rewarding even if the business end of things isn’t everything you could have hoped for.

8. Lay groundwork

I tried to set up my trip with an eye to future European zine travel, and I very much hope to go back.

Part of this is just making friends, and learning more about the places I visit. Next time, I’ll know more about how things work, have more people I am excited to see, and might be able to find couches to sleep on so I can spend less money.

One of my goals for the trip was also to find someone in Europe to distribute some of my zines. I ended up shipping all the stock I had left over to a European friend who is in the process of starting a zine distro, and can hopefully sell my stuff at events over there, and ship European orders from within Europe.

9. Leave with zines, come back with (different) zines

I left Montreal with a suitcase of zines, I came back home with a suitcase of different zines. At all the fairs I attended, I was looking for cool work: some just for my own enjoyment, or for gifts, but also things that would be a good fit with Sheer Spite. I ended up buying some wonderful wholesale zines from Lex Kartanė, Juliette Patissier, Club de bridge, and Postindustrial Animism, as well as some cool comics whose artist didn’t want them sold online, that you’ll have to find me in person to pick up!

10. STICKERS

I brought some stickers with me on the trip, and they sold super well– I ended up having to do a last minute emergency reprint of the “I Heart Zines And Gay Sex” stickers, which sold like hotcakes. Stickers are both much smaller than a zine, and for me at least, have a higher margin. I love stickers, and people love being able to buy something fun and small. I wish I had brought way more!

I hope this is helpful and inspires you to think about a zine trip of your own!