There's nothing like a completely, totally, unabashedly self-involved essay to get the blood really pumping. Whenever I find myself less-than-inspired, I sit down and ask myself: what can I write about me? and that usually sets everything in motion again. So recently someone on the Internet newsgroup alt.zines started a discussion which led to everyone talking about how they got started publishing their own zines, and this got me to thinking about it. Technically I started publishing a zine when I was 23, when the first issue of The Inner Swine was published. But as I thought about it, I guess I really started self-publishing when I was a wee little one. I don't know why anyone would be interested in this, but screw it: I have nothing else to offer in this column right now, so lap it up, and leave me alone.

I think it all started with a school project to write and bind your own book. This was in, I think fifth or sixth grade. You got a supply of paper and some instructions on how to lay it out, and then you were told to write and illustrate a story, which we would then bind in class. I guess it was educational, though why having a knowledge of 13th-century book manufacturing techniques was deemed a wise use of our time, I'll never know. At any rate, I remember being really excited about this project. Anything that didn't involve math I was generally excited about. I wrote a story about the Earth being created by aliens using some sort of shrinky-dink pill, where they added water and the planet just exploded into being. I drew little illustrations. We also created hardback covers for the books.

It was around this time that I began reading The Lord of the Rings . When you're ten, anything halfway cool really kicks you in the head because you've never ever seen anything like it before, so I thought J.R.R. Tolkien was a genius. So when the above project got me thinking it would be fun to pretend to be a writer, I chose, somewhat unconsciously, to rip him off. I took my Mom's typewriter (a fabulous 1950s manual Remington model, which I still use to write first drafts) and wrote a thirty-page novel called The Gem Untouched , which would land me in serious trouble with copyright lawyers if it ever saw light of day. When this first volume was received with critical acclaim from my parents and some beleaguered friends of the family (no doubt tired of my precocious dullness by this point) despite its lack of originality, or quotation marks (punctuation explained to me at some later date by a friend of my father's) I proceeded to pump out two sequels, mainly because at the time I thought all epic fantasy stories came in three volumes. The collected work, The War of the Gem, was ninety pages of crap, but then again, I was ten.

The reason I think this counts as zining history is that I took my 90 page manuscript, drew a color cover for it, drew some illustrations, had my Dad photocopy a bunch, stapled them together, and distributed them. Distributed them to my family, sure, but still. It could be viewed as my first zine. I still have a copy, in case anyone wants to buy it for $100,000 and publish it to the world. But be warned: I never did get around to adding quotation marks.

In High School, I disdained most of the activities offered. My high School was big on getting involved in the school community' (I guess they all are, and this is why so many of us stumble into college bitter, unhappy people searching for booze and sex desperately) and tried to goad everyone into getting involved in stuff. The only thing I found interesting in school was the Literary Magazine. I don't know how many high schools have literary magazines, but I'm glad mine did, because it was really a zine put out with school money. Oh, it wasn't even vaguely cool. It was called The Paper and Pen and it had that pretentious literary-bend you find in all academic publications. But it was student run, so it was filled with teenaged fiction, poetry, and art every issue. It was digest-sized and photocopied, and distributed free to all students. None of it was all that good, of course, but it was fun. It was the only thing worth my time back then, too, which should have been a hint as to the future.

Nowadays I wish I could still self-publish everything effectively. I wish E-books weren't such an abomination against nature, because that would be the easiest way to just publish my own novels and tell the industry to screw itself. While self-publishing a book is certainly possible, and even possible without spending millions, it ain't easy, and getting some company to pony up the cash is still the best option - but I wish I could just do it myself and still expect to reach a few hundred, if not a few thousand, people. I guess that's why I look back on my zining past so longingly: Back then, I had 100% confidence in reaching my target audience successfully, because there were 20 people, tops, in my target audience.

Still, when I put out the first issue of this zine in 1995 I had about 50 people on my mailing list, most of whom didn't know they were on it until they got their copies in the mail. Family, friends, old teachers - these were the only people on the mailing list back then. Today I ship out about 600 issues of TIS every three months. Probably 300 of those make it into the hands of people who give a shit, but that's still quite an improvement. Maybe self-publishing a book is the same: all about persistence of availability. In other words, if I spend a thousand dollars having 500 copies of a book printed, maybe I won't sell 500 in a year, but maybe three years from now I'll have to print up a new batch, and that would be cool enough.

I certainly get enough DIY come-ons in the mail these days. Having a published book, and having purchased a block of ISBNs recently (needed for the TIS collection The Freaks Are Winning , natch) I get more publishing-related junk mail than I can bother to read. But the legitimate junk mail from publishing service houses points out that you can self-publish, if you want. Here's how you could do it pretty effectively:

1. Lay out the book yourself in Adobe PageMaker, InDesign, or Quark XPress. If those two programs are beyond your budget, you probably can't afford to have the book printed anyway. People will tell you that you can lay out a simple book in MS Word or MS Publisher, but don't believe it, suckers. Well, you can, but try finding a Service House that can take your crappy MS Word files and actually produce a decent book, and I will congratulate you. MS Publisher is gaining some acceptance as it improves, but you're much safer going with one of the three packages mentioned above.

2. Buy an ISBN number for your book. You can buy a block of 10 ISBNs from Bowker, Inc. for about $250 (www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/index.asp ) and use them to publish your books. ISBNs are necessary if you're hoping to get your book sold in real-world and online bookstores, plus it gets you listed in Books in Print and the Library of Congress. Yahoo. If you're going to sell your book exclusively from your web site or basement, you don't need an ISBN, and you can always sticker one on later if you decide to at a later date.

3. Contact a company that will manufacture your book. You can look into local printers, or you can hunt for one on the web - search for book manufacturing' and you will get a load of hits on companies that will quote the job for you. This usually includes printing on a specified stock of paper, printing a cover, binding the books, and shipping them. This isn't cheap, but it isn't something that necessarily prohibits you - you should be able to find a quote that gets you 500 books for about $2000. Not cheap, no, but possible. A place to start is www.greenepublicationsinc.com . I don't recommend these people - I've never used them - but it's one of the friendlier web sites I've seen, and might help you get the idea.

4. Then, contact Amazon.com about joining their Amazon Advantage program (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/partners/direct/advantage-for-books.html/107 -1179595-5631760). Basically, this program means that Amazon will order a small number of your books, which you ship to them at your cost, and then they house those copies (typically 1-10) in their own warehouse. You get the usual listing on Amazon, and because they are doing the warehousing they can ship your book in 24 hours just like the big boys. You get less money per book sold than you would otherwise, but you do have your book available on Amazon.com. When they run out of books, they email you asking for more, and at the end of every month they cut you a check for books sold. Potentially this could work out very well for you. The advantage of having your book on Amazon.com is obvious: it's a national presence. You can and should also go to local bookstores and convince them to stock your book on their shelves, but if they do it's still only in your town. Get it on Amazon and you get both prestige (yes, I said that with a straight face - people take you more seriously if you're on Amazon.com) and someplace anyone in the country can order your book. Certainly you can and should also just sell the damn thing in any other way you can, and you should promote it as best you can, which I won't go into here. I'm seriously considering using all of the above resources to self-publish a future book - why not? But I haven't made the financial decisions yet, so it's probably years off.

Something to think about. Them there's my boring thoughts today, anyway. Until next time, I got more shit to do. Mail me if you want.

BLOATED LIKE A SEA-TOAD: Your Humble Editor considers himself something of a study in contradictions, in some things. One of these things is organization. On the one hand, I know where every book I own is located in my apartment, and can find scraps of handwritten manuscript from six years ago simply by closing my eyes and visualizing which red folder I stuffed it into. This is true, I can prove it, if you like, but you won't enjoy it, so don't ask me to, please. On the other hand, I am developing a theory of space-time that somehow explains how my Important Papers can turn into invisible, odorless dust the moment I stop looking directly at them. How do they know I've turned away? How can the Law of Conservation of Energy be applied to Important Papers that simply vanish? It's all very mysterious. So there's the contradiction: organized and disorganized at the same time.Therefore, running an underground publishing empire, as I do, is often a challenge. I'm expected to somehow keep all sorts of things straight at all times, which is difficult if you're a) very disorganized in many things and b) as drunk as I usually am1. The hardest thing for me to keep track of is my mailing list, because people are constantly changing addresses, sending me cease-and-desist letters, disappearing off the face of the earth, or fleeing the country just ahead of DEA agents. It makes keeping track of things difficult. So every few months I pull out the huge, leather-bound tome filled with my spidery, indecipherable writing and try to make sense of it all.Whenever I do this, I'm struck by the number of people on my TRADES list that have vanished just like my Important Papers. These are usually people who at one point or another produced cool zines (or shitty zines - I'm a trade whore and it don't take much) for a little while, often as briefly as one skinny issue. I generally continue to send them free copies of TIS every three months like an idiot, but it has got me thinking about persistence. And the lack of it in DIY publishing.

Persistence is, I think, about 50% of any success. Put simply, you've got to stick around long enough to get noticed - and you can never know how long that'll take. Sometimes one issue and you've got Hollywood mailing you checks. Sometimes you're old and feeble before everyone realizes how cool you are. And certainly there are plenty of Frank Stallones out there on whom fortune will never smile. Personally, I'm counting on persistence counting for something - eventually I'll morph into that DIY publisher who's cool simply because he's been doing it for fifty goddamn years. I'll turn up in Lifestyle sections across the country, a smiling old man surrounded by reams of paper, billions of words thrust out hot and steamy and ignored by a revolted world until they'd cooled into a grey mass.

Well, that's the plan, anyway.

Persistence, however, is one thing no one would attribute to most zine publishers. Many would even celebrate this as one of the cool things about self-publishing - the way everything is in constant motion, the way a zine has disappeared from the face of the earth just as you discover it, a tattered copy from two years ago in the zine rack at Tower. I wonder though. It's not that I think people should slave away on a publication for which they've lost all their passion, absolutely not. But I wonder why so many zines pop up in my mailbox, amuse me enough to send a trade, and then...disappear.

Part of what bothers me about it, certainly, is that these people usually don't just stop sending me a zine, they literally disappear, often without the tell-tale returned mail of someone who has moved. I mean, lots of ziners are students of some sort and after a few years of publishing from a fixed place it's natural that they'd move on, and break some connections along the way. But for many of these situations, it's like the person has vanished. being me, I start wondering if they've been murdered and consumed by Pagans after being allowed to be King for Day somewhere. But that's just me.

I also wonder if this kind of unreliable inconsistency makes people more dubious about self-published works. It's one thing if you're sure you're going to get a full subscription when you send in your money. It's quite another if you've got a 75% chance of being burned on your Five bucks. Five bucks ain't a lot, unless you're a voracious reader and you buy subs for every zine you dig out there. It's bad enough for we impoverished publishers who lose postage and stock sending issues to vanished ziners - we know what we're dealing with (or at least learn it very soon). But what about someone who sends you money after reading issue #2 in Tower or Powell's and then never gets anything in response? They're quite possibly not likely to ever chance cash on a similar publication.

Naturally, this being The Inner Swine and me being me, I have no solutions, just an endless list of sour complaints. Ha! That's entertaining your asses off, friends. I make it look easy, but it isn't. Easy, that is.

Still, I can't help but think that most of the zines that a majority of people recognize, no matter how deeply or long they've been into zines, are the ones that have persisted. Cometbus, Angry Thoreauan, Maximumrocknroll - these are zines well into their second or third dozen issues, zines that, even if they don't follow a definite publication schedule can be counted on to persist, to put out another issue. At the very least they can be counted on to not just disappear.

Here we are again, at the end of another column, and you're probably once again wondering the same thing you always wonder: was there a point to all that? Probably not. To decide yea or nay I'd have to go back and read what I just wrote, which might lead to proofreading. We can't have that. So let's just make up a point from whole cloth right now. The point is, you're all insane and terrify me. When I'm rich I'll build a fortress-like home that will keep me safe from all of you. There I'll be left in peace to let my fingernails grow, to wear tissue boxes on my feet as shoes, and to mutter to myself incessantly.

On that note: see ya! Send me an email if you want. Otherwise, check back in a few weeks for my next column.

Until next time, you can reach me here, and I remain. . .Jeff

[1] Whenever I make comments like this one, I know one thing is for sure: lots of emails from well-meaning but terribly high-and-mighty relatives will flood in begging me to turn my life around. I wish the relatives would go away, but if ignoring them for twenty years won't do it, what will? Oh, the horror....2

[2] I swear one of my relatives is Marlon Brando, pretending.

THE POST OFFICE workers are now protected like the goddamn Pope, you know, sealed up inside plexiglass boxes which even Imperial Stormtroopers couldn't blast into. At least they are around here. You walk into the post office and there they are, pathetic, trapped, so safe they can't even get out any more, holding up signs like PLEASE CALL MY WIFE AND TELL HER I CANNOT GET OUT. What really makes me pull out the old hip flask and take a contemplative snort is the question of who, exactly, we're protecting out postal workers from. Isn't it usually the postal workers who end up shooting up the post office? In those situations the plexiglass cages will just make the murderous postal workers' jobs easier, since their coworkers will be trapped. Although the ricochets, I think, will be a bitch.Of course, I look at the security cages in the post offices around here, and I think to myself what anyone in my shoes would naturally think: "When I'm rich, I'll have my whole house built out of that stuff, and I'll challenge the cops to come get me."This inevitably leads to wonder when the hell I'm going to be rich. This is just taking way too long. I decided to analyze The Inner Swine's books and see if maybe there's a reason I'm not rich yet. Most ziners claim to lose money or - maybe - break even on their publishing exploits. We do it for the love, right? And certainly I love it so much I've never really considered how much anything costs, which means I am a total financial fuckhead. But hey! You can't write good and be a bean counter at the same time. It's a physical law, go look it up.First, let's examine the costs involved in creating a single issue of The Inner Swine. Naturally, every issue is actually priceless. You just can't put a number on a creation of such passion and awe-inspiring artistry. Well, you can, of course, and I'm going to in a few sentences. What was my point again? Never mind.

Paper: Stolen

Copies: Stolen

Cover Stock: $20

Staples: Stolen

Postage: $130

Envelopes: $5

Gnomes and Midgets to amuse me whilst I stuff envelopes: Expensive, but not in money

So every issue costs me about $155 to produce and distribute. Multiplied by four issues, that is some number over 155....calculator...calculator...uh, that's HOLY CRAP! That's $620 a year I spend on you people! I can't believe it. It is just suddenly so not worth it. All the joy of self-publishing just drained out of me and pooled on the floor here, a cooling mass of enthusiasm. Ah, but look at my gnomes and midgets, dancing so gaily! They cheer me so, and give me the will to go on.

It can't all be vinegar, so let's take a look at monies earned through the zine, and yes, I say that with a straight face. I will not be naming actual numbers in this section because it ain't none of your damn business how much money I make or lose by breaking off pieces of my genius and mailing them to you, bubba. So we'll use imaginary numbers. Using imaginary numbers, I made roughly jumbabwa dollars in 2001, which is great because there's actually some money left over when you subtract what I spent from jumbabwa. Not enough to retire on, but beer money. To be honest, I never looked up from my humble middle class beginnings long enough to dream of anything more than beer money, so it's all good.

But the fact remains - beer money and jumbabwa aren't going to make me rich, and my dream of owning an entire island on which to conduct my secret experiments with genetically-altered human-like animals I will call humanimals continues to elude me. There's so much money in the world, yet I have so little, it's mysterious. In my biggest writing year ever, capitalism-wise, I earned $1600 directly from writing. That was a lot more than jumbabwa . At my job, I earn twenty times as much, so you figure that to maintain my level of beer-intake and cable-fondling, I'd have to start generating at least 80% of my current salary through writing. So far, I am about 78% short. Or, in imaginary numbers, polugula short.

I can see my treasured plexiglass bulletproof house flying away...the gnomes and midgets gather around me excitedly, shouting "One of us! One of us!"...and I stare glumly at the stack of $1 stamps waiting to be used to mail issues to ungrateful bastards, like you. I wonder why no one ever steals stamps. They're money, after all, in a sense. Where's the mafia? Why aren't they hauling off millions of dollars in stamps and selling them at half price on the street? I ask only because I'd be one of their willing customers. Then I could list `postage' as `stolen' too. And suddenly jumbabwa gets to be a much nicer number.

Oh well. None of you care, I'm sure. I'll keep handling the money matters, you bastards, which is just more shit I gotta do, and you can just keep on assuming fake identities and asking me for free `sample' issues because you won't spare $5 for a sub. I'm on to you! I'm on to all of you! Just wait until my House of Pain is completed. You'll all pay.

Anyway, until next time, I remain. . .Jeff.

Zoiks! That this zine takes up far more of my energy and attention than is healthy can't be denied, but at least I have a healthy capitalist attitude towards it: mass production. Sure, I don't make any money off the damn thing (more's the pity), but at least I don't futz about with various precious schemes like individually hand-drawn covers, numbered issues, or ridiculously inefficient manufacturing techniques. I am ready to admit to myself what many of my fellow zine-publishers can't: zines are entertainment, and are therefore consumed. Sure, some people might collect them, but those people are probably a little strange, just like the people who collect any regular periodical. I slap the issues together with gleeful speed and fart them out into the world without any concern for quality control or consistency, which I regard as my trademark. My trademark: no quality control or consistency. And repetition. If it's low quality and inconsistent, you're holding an Inner Swine!

So I don't know exactly what to do when I get zines which are treated like little pieces of art. The most curious thing is the hand numbered zine, "issue 34 of 344" and the like. To put it as eloquently as my huge, HAL2000-like brain can, what the fuck is up with that? You're writing quite a large check when you individually number the issues of your zine, mi amigo, and I have yet to find the numbered zine that can cash it. In my opinion, the only things that should ever be numbered are things with actual cash value , like money itself, bubba. Things I get free in the mail should not be numbered.

I could start numbering The Inner Swine I guess. Something like "Number 22 of as many as I can scam out of my employer before they go Enron and it's back to butcher paper and crayons for me". Hmmn...I like that.

There have been quite a few zines in my mailbox which are actually very beautiful pieces of art, with gorgeous hand-painted covers, little pop-ups doohickies in the middle, all sorts of arty touches. Some of these, of course, did not survive the cruel, delirious handling of the outpatients who populate The United States Postal Service, unfortunately. This saddens me, because I imagine little Jimmy or Suzy Zine-maker sitting at home up until the wee hours painstakingly constructing all twelve issues of their limited-run zine titled For God's Sake Take Me Seriously or I Will Write More Poetry, then deciding to send me one of those twelve issues (number seven, let's call him Rusty), getting out their very special calligraphy pen to scratch the number onto each cover. They wait breathlessly for the torrent of twelve stunned emails to come back and affirm their genius. Meanwhile, when I get the damned thing it is damp, torn, and apparently stepped on. And possibly read by postal employees, who then took the time to scrawl editorial comments on the zine in disturbing red pen. Prying apart the glued-together pages, only a sad remnant of ole' Rusty remains. His last gasp is to bleed sad arty ink all over my hands, and in a fit of rage I burn him to ashes. You bastards in the USPS!! The day is coming when we won't take it anymore!!! The streets will run red! RUSTY WILL BE AVENGED!

Don't get me wrong, most of these precious zines are actually quite good when you get past the bullshit and read them. I just wonder about the value of the dressing. When McSweeney's does shit like that I sit around with my zine friends and laugh my ass off at Dave Eggers' incredibly shiny ego and idiotic, smug irony in place of actual talent. Doesn't Dave Eggers' smug lack of talent bother ANYONE else? Jesus, people, come on! So why should I cut a break to the more self-important buggers in zineland? All that matters to me if whether the zine has something interesting to say and plenty of it. All the dressing doesn't hurt, but it doesn't help either.

Then again, zineland is a place where people actually dislike you if you distribute too many issues, so what the fuck, do what you want, the Red Queen will be out later to play cricket.

Anyway, until next time, I remain. . .Jeff.

My brain is fried like a banana after driving to and from Chicago last week to read at Quimbys, but since most of my writing is inane drivel anyway I doubt anyone will notice any difference here. I've been sitting at home drinking Plum Schnapps and burning my collection of cassettes onto CD; when I was in high school and college I couldn't afford CDs so I bought everything on cassette. My cassette deck is currently on its last legs, barely playing tapes, and I decided that instead of either buying a new tape deck, or replacing 500 cassettes with CDs at $10-20 a pop I would just record them as MP3s and burn `em. Sure, this means that some of that low-fi cassette hiss and warping gets captured forever in digital, but that's how I've been hearing the songs for years anyway. Error-free digital purity would just frighten and confuse me, anyway.

So I sit here in the dark eating pretzels, drinking schnapps, and listening to my entire music collection one song at a time. I've gained 50 pounds, grown six inches of beard, and am now so photophobic even the dim light of my computer monitor is paining me. Soon I will be 100% mushroom, and the world will rejoice.

Then my reluctant columnist Tim the Angry Clown wrote a piece about how much NYC radio sucks, and I started to wonder about some of the songs that are currently on the radio - especially the songs which are on like three or four radio stations at once, which is, of course, a bean-counters wet dream. A song being exposed to the over-40 classic rock crowd, the MOR teenie-boppers, the 20-30 post-collegiate alterna-slackers, all at once? Holy crap! That means sales, motherfuckers. I can almost sense the marketing drool coming out of my speakers when these songs (e.g. This Is How You Remind Me by Nickelbach(sp?)) come on. I started wondering why it is that these terrible, awful songs got so much airplay. The simple fact is, they get this kind of airplay because they're bland, flavorless. They have enough rock bite to get played on the rock stations, but are soft and mushy enough to get played on top-40 pop stations. They satisfy weak-kneed sappiness and have a crunchy riff at the chorus for air-guitar. These songs are successful in spite of sucking because they are bland. Simple.

That hit me like a truck. Bland=successful. Holy shit.

It's so true it's frightening. We live in a country that is increasingly divided up into opposing camps of style and taste, after all; in order to have blockbuster success you must appeal to a wide range of different tastes. You must dilute your style and message with bits and pieces of other people's style and messages, or else the teeming millions will not be interested. If you cast your net too narrowly you might win a lot of strong fans in one cross-section of the country, but your sales will mire in the thousands and you will never reach national prominence. The truth is, the more successful you are, on a national level, the less interesting, daring, and worthwhile your work must be.

I know that for most of you, this probably wasn't a newsflash, and you're wondering (not for the first time) why I'm so dense. I had just never really clarified my thoughts on this; I knew it too, but in a subconscious way. Now it's on the top of my brain, clear and bright.

This means, of course, that I now realize that Zines and all other DIY publishing or distribution are pretty much doomed to small-scale success. It's simple: we're all too narrow in our appeal. Not necessarily because we're geniuses or even talented; some DIY stuff, some zines, some indie music just plain sucks. No, we're doomed to obscurity because we don't consciously appeal to the lowest common denominator in a bald pitch for sales. Since we don't water-down our idiosyncratic styles, our opinions, or our technique to allow dimwits and suburbanites across the country access our work without fear, we'll never get their sales. Without their sales, we're trapped down below amongst the Mole People, who also happen to be the smartest, the most dissatisfied, and the least assimilated people in the country. The Mole People don't mind independent thought and weird, wacky ideas - they love them, and embrace us.

This doesn't bother me. I used to dream of being rich and successful and famous, but I've grown up and now merely dream of being able to quit my day job. I'd love to sell a book to Hollywood and walk away with enough money to quit and live on for the rest of my life - not because that would be a possible entry into fame and fortune amongst the Surface Folk, but because it would give me the means to burrow deeper underground and sever my ties with the Surface for good. Who gives a shit if the Surface People make a book of mine into a terrible movie starring Brad Pitt? I'd take the money, wash my hands of the whole thing, buy a nice house and start up my own small publishing business, and publish my own stuff for my fellow Mole People. No, the blandness of success doesn't bother me, I'm just surprised it took me this long to figure it out.

So that's my thoughts from my dark, carefree bunker, where fungus has started to grow on my shoulders. If any of you Mole People want to say hi, you know where to find me.