Customer Reviews

Start Your Own Zine: A Jet Lambert Gumption Guide

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This is a pretty thin how-to book for zinesters, from that bastion of self-publishing, Disney/ Hyperion. There's no evidence that the author has ever published a zine herself -- and it really shows. In every regard, "Start Your Own Zine" suffers by comparison to "Make A Zine!," the self-published how-to guide by zinester Bill Brent - "Start Your Own Zine" has a lot fewer pages, a lot fewer illustrations, a lot fewer good ideas, and it's double-spaced, so there's dramatically less text. Kalmar uses "zine" and "fanzine" as synonyms, and when she devotes several pages to helpful tips for zines seeking corporate sponsorships [?!?], you have to wonder if she even knows what a zine is. This book has a minuscule store & distro list, which includes several addresses that are years out of date, a few that are flat-out incorrect, and Kalmar has apparently never heard of such huge, famous zine stores as Atomic Books, BlackOut, Bound Together, Epicenter Zone, Mind Over Matter, or even Quimby's! "Start Your Own Zine" is simply not a credible effort. -Doug Holland, Zine World

This tedious wide-eyed look at zines presents a nominal how-to course, but there's nothing in this book that you couldn't pick up in a half-hour conversation with anyone who does a zine, or just from sending for a copy of a good zine. Utterly lame. Am I allowed to say that this book really blows?

This book is great for those who want to create the next _Rolling Stone_ or _Factsheet Five_, but for those who have smaller ambitions (Or smaller budgets) the tips in here tend to aim a bit high. However, most of the information is revelant to anyone wishing to create a zine.