As big magazines lose readers, home-made “zines” are springing up

NOVEMBER’S issue of Glamour, a popular women’s glossy, will be the last monthly edition to be printed. After losing half its readers in a decade, the title is retreating to the web, promising only biannual “collectible” print issues. Its predicament is not unique: British paid-for magazines lost 6% of their readers last year. But as the big names struggle, tiny titles put together with staplers on kitchen tables are enjoying a boomlet.

“Barely a week goes by without a new launch. I keep thinking we’re going to reach peak indie mag soon, but then some new genre will open up,” says Ruth Jamieson, author of “Print is Dead, Long Live Print”, a book about the micro-publications known as zines. Since 2011 half a dozen zine fairs have popped up around the country, from Bristol to Hull. At the Offprint London fair in May, 140 independent publishers squeezed into the turbine hall of the Tate Modern gallery. Stack, a subscription service that delivers a different indie magazine every month, saw a 32% increase in its turnover in the year to March.

The home-made titles have a countercultural spirit. An outfit called Shy Bairns publishes work by northern English artists in zines with names like The Only Pizza Shop Where I Live Burnt Down and Where’s Your Coat You’re Going to be Cold. Others are gloriously hyper-niche. Bedspread is entirely devoted to sunlit photos of good-looking beds. Three Paws Press produces a “100% factual guide” to cat activity in a Leeds neighbourhood. Pricey Jumpers examines “some really quite pricey jumpers from a ridiculous catalogue”.

Readers see zines as an antidote to the internet, reckons the director of the Bristol Comic & Zine Fair, who goes by the name of Esme Betamax. “As we spend so much work time looking at screens, reading a print publication for leisure can be a very attractive prospect,” she says. Most zines are hobbies rather than real businesses. Pricey Jumpers had a print run of 20, priced at £1 ($1.35) each. So Young, an indie music title, makes about half its money from a 500-copy print run and half from an online shop selling prints and T-shirts. The title started in 2013 and began making money a year ago, although the two 27-year-old founders still have part-time jobs.

Zines’ fun, creative look attracts companies who want zines’ cool factor to rub off on their own products. Polyester, a staple-bound zine celebrating feminism and “bad taste”, has run a series of online posts sponsored by Converse shoes. Some amateur publishers worry that this sort of thing may spoil what makes zines special. “Zinemaking is about the process of creating without authority,” says Lu Williams, who runs an organisation called Grrrl Zine Fair, which throws “punk publishing parties” around the south of England. “I think with the commercialisation of zines, zine history is being lost.” Yet for much of the print media, excessive interest from advertisers would be a nice problem to have.