Realizing (and paying for) a zine dream

Creation for creation's sake still costs money.

My zine collection lives on my bookshelf, right between The Pie and Pastry Bible and The Art of Eating. No rhyme or reason, that’s just where I put them among the traditionally published. Eye-level. I spot them on the shelf whenever I come in from the front door. Queer Earth Food, a story collective from artists and writers on “art, food, the earth, and queerness”, bound by a neon green spiral, is wedged next to the Short Stack Edition, Butter, written by Dorie Greenspan, full of recipes and bound with what was marketed as baker’s twine, but is actually staples. Next to that, a friend’s poetry zine with a celestial silver cover and gold wax seal, held together romantically with black ribbon. Some, like Wicked Cake, lean more design-wise toward professional magazines complete with ads than the printer paper diy versions I had always associated with zines. A zine can be whatever you want it to be, and the ones on my shelf make up a varied collection through design and content.

Growing up, magazines lined my bookshelves just like zines do now. Seventeen, Rolling Stone, Bazaar accompanied my childhood collection of Frank L. Baum works. It fascinated me endlessly as a teenager to think about how a magazine was made, all the decisions that eventually became a glossy magazine sold on newsstands and destined for the belongings of my teenage bedroom. It was an adolescent obsession that led my ideas for Panadería. More design-forward short format magazine than a recipe zine I printed myself.

I knew I wanted the five recipes to be the backbone of it all, with an intro essay and pantry page to bookend. Just five recipes meant fewer total pages to print, meant less money to the printer, and that was my very basic reasoning for choosing just five. There needed to be some cakes, masa harina throughout, a concha. I thought I could get away with no color photography for any of the recipes—let’s bring them to life with illustrations instead? Neither cake recipe has a head note, blasphemy in recipe writing as I learned it, but were omitted for spacing reasons. Ultimately I felt like the instructions as I wrote them were clear enough to stand on their own, and I had faith in the readers’ self-possession in the kitchen.

The choice between three colors for printing, or the zine being spiral bound was made for me when the printer, Lucky Risograph, came back with a quote of nearly $3K for the spiral. Spiral bound dreams denied. Prior to this zine I had no connections to a risograph printer, wasn’t even familar with the printing style, what is basically digital screen printing.

Long time At Heart designer Elizabeth Goodspeed was always going to be at the design helm. She is the kind of creative that every creative needs in their corner. Understanding about budgets if you happen to be a small bakery owner; comfortable taking the design lead but always with my vision leading the way. Because of our ongoing relationship, Elizabeth brought up me paying her in installments which helped alleviate some of the financial stress. Using her skills and printer and illustrator resources meant the zine was in excellent hands, as was I. She brought in Zoé Maghamés Peters whose fun illo style would give the zine the vintage community cookbook feel I wanted.

Hiring recipe testers really made things into a collaboration. I loved it. Probably my favorite part of the entire process—a truly collaborative effort to make sure the recipes were successful as I wrote them. Confirmation that you wrote your work down in a way that earns its success, from a trusted baker who would know. Payment for the testers, for their work was a no-brainer. What a joy to be able to compensate $100 per recipe tester + ingredient reimbursement, out of pocket and within 24 hours of recipe notes being sent, for a role that usually goes without financial reward in the traditional cookbook-making process.

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What kept a cookbook zine firmly in a “to-do someday” file in my brain since 2017 though was, of course, money. What could I actually do with a small bakery owner’s limited funds? Talking to artist friends and their creative projects, I knew money would be a hinderance. A baker friend expressed relief to me that her online laminated dough class just paid out. A fashion writer and internet buddy told me she’s considering reaching out to brands to get the funding she’ll need for her forthcoming zine. A musician friend said she regrets doing streaming only for her recent album release but that it was cheaper than making a physical piece of media like cassettes, which require upfront investment.

As for me, I would have loved to write a larger book with 50-60 recipes but publishing a zine is cheaper than a traditional cookbook, although not exactly inexpensive for a small bakery owner. I’m reminded of Stephen Duncombe’s Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and zine’s inherent anti-consumerism, producing a zine would not be a money-making endeavor and instead one of pure creativity. Creatives know the reality, though: creation for creation’s sake still costs money.

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Writing about food zines earlier this year lit me up. Talking directly to people doing the thing I wanted to do was a turning point. The words of my friend, the Singaporean, York-based recipe writer and vegan baker, Gan Chin Lin in my notes for that essay followed me around for a while like my own shadow: “We need zines, and it is revolutionary to realise that if you want something to exist, you can just… make it exist. Once you open that door, it remains unlocked.” I was inspired, but still didn’t know how I was going to open that door.

There’s an Everything Cookbooks episode with Nick Fauchald I listened to around this time that was equally illuminating. Fauchald, the creator and publisher of the aforementioned single-subject cookbooks, Short Stack, (initially funded through a very successful Kickstarter fundraiser) was frank about the financial limitations of self-publishing. People interested in self-publishing reach out to Fauchald frequently for advice on how to get started. “99 out of 100 times, I talk them out of it,” he says. Distribution and sales is the biggest point of contention for self-publishers, a barrier in the process where Fauchald says most people have to pack up their idea.

It was the success of Short Stack’s Kickstarter that gave me the idea to let the preorders determine the print number. What I knew for sure: I couldn’t front the printing costs myself, despite initially thinking I could; and: At least a few hundred people would be excited to preorder a cookbook zine even from a relatively unknown recipe writer.

What made me feel confident that I could sell at least 300 zines was the jump in paid subscriptions once I announced the complimentary copy. From September to late November when I put Panadería up for preorder, this newsletter went from 77 paid subs to 125, a 33% jump according to the stats. Time will tell if that number will remain; I don’t know if people will unsubscribe once they receive their zine in the mail. I certainly hope not, and if the number of paid subs who still purchased zines for friends and family (or just to have an additional copy!) is any indication, the people who pay for this newsletter are the main reason Panadería exists.

People get excited about print, about an object they can hold and then put on their bookshelves, just like I do. And that is exactly what happened. All printing + shipping costs were covered by preorder sales—the majority of which came directly from subscribers to this newsletter within the first 24 hours the preorder link was shared—making Panadería a reader-funded cookbook zine.

Finally, some zine production numbers: 5 recipes; 3 recipe testers; $300 in total to ensure the recipes were solid. 20 pages. 375 copies printed; 323 copies preordered. $2,313.23 to the printer; the remaining $2,532 goes to shipping and towards Elizabeth’s payment, including $600 to Zoé for illustrations.

She’s here!

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Last week I wrote that I had no goals for my newsletter in the new year but upon thinking about it a bit more, that’s not entirely true. Never one to be without a goal or something to strive for, for very long, I do plan on keeping up this newsletter in a way that let’s me continue to publish cookbook zines. Additionally and going forward, a new paid subscriber benefit is the opportunity to be hired as a paid zine recipe tester, but more on this in the new year.

It’s gratifying to know that this zine gets to exist in the world today because of you, readers of this newsletter. I didn’t know when I switched from sharing recipes on Patreon to writing here on Substack how things would shake out, if I could keep it up, what if anything would come of it all. I did know I wanted to take a step back from the incessant recipe sharing that served nothing in my life but recipe relevance.

Working on the cookbook zine was a wildly different experience from publishing recipes online in as frequent a pace as possible—nearly nine months of working on the same project was the antithesis of posting quickly to the timeline with instant gratification. I wanted to step away from sharing recipes, and instead found a better, more satisfying method for doing so through zines. Not quite a magazine, but my teen self and I learned at last some of the decisions that go into print production, and now we’re both in it for the long haul.