Hello! I’m Sarah Plant and I work on a little zine called Ferment. The chaps at Newspaper Club have asked me to talk a bit about how we solved some problems with selling our zine.
The idea behind Ferment is that for every issue we choose a theme that we hope will be as widely interpreted as possible, thus inspiring an extensive range of responses from our invited contributors. Initially writers respond to the theme, then illustrators respond to those writers’ poems or short stories. We then publish the paired-up results as a 12 page black and white newspaper. I design each issue, along with James Weiner, and our editor, Paul Askew.
Without Newspaper Club, Ferment probably wouldn’t exist. All of us were finding something lacking in our day jobs, wanted to do something creative together, that we had control over, and that was fun to do. We don’t intend to ever make any money from Ferment, but it does need to pay for itself. To do this, we sell it from our website, but we also sell it into shops around Oxford, where we are based.
Whilst online sales are reasonably healthy, the feedback we were getting from our stockists was that whilst customers were interested, it was hard to shift issues as Ferment could be mistaken for free music or illustrated magazines. This was obviously an issue that needed to be overcome. So how are we solving it?
We are attacking the problem in two ways for our next issue; a neat little bit of packaging design, and some simple changes to our masthead (the bit at the top of our front cover with our logo, pricing, etc).
Things like shrink-wrap and cellophane didn’t really tickle our fancy as people wouldn’t be able to get a feel for the paper, which is important to how Ferment is experienced, plus it can seem a bit tacky. Instead, we decided to roll up each issue and wrap it in a black belly band – perhaps evoking the quality of a morning paper thrown onto a lawn in an 80s John Hughes movie. The band is then ‘sealed’ with a small matt vinyl sticker that we got printed cheaply, featuring our logo and website address.
The other piece of the puzzle was to reinforce the value of Ferment, and to increase the desire for it. We came up with the idea of clearly individually numbering each copy of each issue, much like limited edition prints or records. The edition number will be positioned prominently next to our logo and price in the masthead, and can be seen even when the zine is rolled up.
So that’s it – feel free to rip off our ideas – although we probably won’t know how effective they’ve been until a few weeks after our next issue goes on sale in early February. The theme is ‘Cities’, and if you live in Oxford, you’ll be able to see the fruits of our (and our esteemed contributors’) labour in Comma, the Old Fire Station, and Blackwell’s book store or you can get it from fermentzine.com.
