Who killed Zines?

So who really killed the zine revolution?

This has been weighing on me for more than a decade. Who killed zines, and brought about the end of the independent bookstore? Point to the internet, the television, ebooks, a restless group of youth who can’t be bothered to read and, of course the most hated of all, the big chain store that fell off the back of a truck, Barnes & Noble.

All of the above? A mixture of bits and pieces? And why couldn’t the cool chain, Borders, fix it?

Because they were the main problem.

I worked in publishing for 16 years. I started right after college in a small Bay Area publishing company as a proofreader. I admit, I was a lousy proofreader and couldn’t be bothered to take a $5.50/hour job seriously. When print runs slowed because the company couldn’t afford to pick up more titles, I was put into accounting and had to learn my way through it. From there, I moved to corporate sales with a much larger company. A prestigious name company printing literary quality titles. Most won literary prizes, including Pulitzers, Book of the Year and the such. They were an easy sell. Money rolled in. I grew to hate my commute, and then my job itself. There were no challenges, no room for advancement unless your last name happened to be the same as the company, and constant office politics. I moved to ground zero in the publishing game and took a low paying job at one of the best known, largest Indy (independent) booksellers in the country. It wasn’t much, but for a while I enjoyed just being around people who actually liked to read.

Then I got an offer to join a distributor. This was new. It took me halfway across the country and into a side of publishing I’d never really thought about. Just how do books get to stores?

If you’re a bookstore employee, you know this part. Publishers incur large costs upfront to publish books. In the early 1990s there were major chains with over 4000 combined stores across the country. An additional 2500 individual stores(not all selling just books) carried an assortment of books and magazines. Supermarket chains accounted for a very small percentage of sales for most publishers, but consider just 10 of the largest grocery chains each having 300–5000 stores and you quickly get to nearly 30,000 places in the country to purchase something to read. This isn’t even accounting for used and resale chains.

The nineties were huge for booksellers. The conventions were held in huge convention halls, and in cities such as Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, London and Berlin. It was a never ending road of travel with all expenses paid and gambling money to burn. Lots of fun was had by many, including me and a bunch of my friends. There was a lot of worry about the downward trend of newspapers in particular, but zines ruled the day. Anyone could make one. Just slap together your thoughts and photos, take it to Kinkos and your literary efforts went on display and were sold at real stores all around the world.

The internet and personal websites were still new, still untested ground. Besides, the thrill of having a Facebook page can never replace the feeling of BEING PUBLISHED! If you’re a writer, you may enjoy getting paid to blog, but in the back of your mind, you’re still waiting to have a book published. Admit it, that’s why we write.

The rules are pretty simple. As a publisher, you can’t afford to send your books 1 to 1000 copies at a time to 10,000 — 500,000 stores around the world. Publishing profits are razor thin unless you can sell like J.K. Rowling. Selling 25,000 copies of a single title is a big deal. A million is a dream, so those gorillas on the charts (million copy sales) like Grisham or Rowling are hard to find.

Publishing and sales survive on returns. If a book or magazine doesn’t sell all of the copies on a single store’s shelve, the seller returns the unsold copies for full credit. Those unsold copies end up in resale stores or on the bargain racks of your bookseller. Most hard-cover books are returned whole while paperbacks, magazines and zines are “stripped.” The cover is ripped from the publication and the rest of the book/magazine is recycled, thrown away or put into a box for employees to take for free. The bookseller sends the stripped covers to the distributor, who then credits the seller and totals the number of strips for the publisher, getting credit themselves. This is extremely important because the profit margin on any title is tiny.

To make the math easy, you publish your own zine. It has a retail price of $1. You contract with a distributor for a discount of usually 50 percent (actually more like 55% but I want the math to be easy as possible.) The distributor must use that 50 cents to promote your zine, add it to their catalogue, contact individual stores and chain sellers to try to get them to sell your zine, and incur huge shipping costs to get your little zine and thousands like it to stores around the world. The sellers are then given a discount on their purchases, varying upon their sales volume. Barnes & Noble might order 1000 copies of your zine, so they get a 40 percent discount. Smaller Indy stores that order 10 copies may only get a 30 percent discount. Essentially, every copy of your zine that sells gives the distributor 10 to 15 cents. Much like the old Saturday Night Live skit, how do we do it? Volume. Now this is all a very simplistic overview but back in the 1990s, this was the standard model.

By the end of the nineties, there was just a tiny handful of distributors left, and even a smaller number of Indy booksellers. The costs simply never added up and Ingram, by far the largest distributor, had joined forces with Time Warner, effectively shutting out nearly all competition. No, websites and Facebook were not yet the primary forces behind the failures of the distribution/Indy bookseller markets. They either were too new or didn’t exist at the time. Ebooks were still a new idea and unaffordable for many.

To be blunt, the distributor I worked for did not do the industry any favors. Some of our founders left to work for our competitor Ingram. Constant computer updates and packing mechanics cost millions. Most of our staff was quite young and we didn’t understand business basics such as the incredible lack of start up capital necessary for such an endeavor. Some of that youth worked in our favor. While companies like Ingram had money and business professionals, we were crazy and understood the mindset of the zine buyer. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to keep a company running. Our shipping costs alone were millions of dollars every year and while our sales were a respectable $10–15 million a year, you can’t run a business with a hundred employees on 10 cent profits. There were other blows to the company as well that, long before we shut our doors, should have signaled our impending death.While I won’t go into them here for fear of being sued, sometimes a not too brilliant fox can rip through a hen house without fear of being caught by the less than vigilant farmer.

So the internet loomed. A recession made magazines and zines a luxury. Ebooks were on the horizon. Companies were mismanaged by myself and others. Monopolies were taking over. But what really pulled the plug? One word: Borders.

I know, Borders was the cool chain. They were a chain but didn’t act like a chain. Their employees didn’t have to wear a uniform (which drove me nuts because I could never identify who actually worked there when I had a question.) Most importantly, they weren’t Barnes & Nobel.

The evil Barnes & Nobel. The Wal-Mart of booksellers. A company large enough to be able to sell best selling books at their cost. They took their 40 percent off and passed it right to the customer, effectively killing the Indy competition who could not afford to match such deep discounts.

But they paid their bills. They paid their bills on time and once they had audited your returns processing, never haggled over anything.

Borders did not pay their bills. As Controller of the distributor, I had plenty of conversations with their staff that always sounded the same.

Me: Your total due this month is $42 thousand, with half of that over 90 days due.

Borders: We will pay $15 thousand. You write off the rest.

Me: But you owe $42 thousand.

Borders: We will send out a check for $15 thousand. Write off the rest or we will drop you as a distributor.

Being dropped by Borders, in retrospect, would have saved the zine community. Unfortunately, our publishers wanted, needed, begged to be in Borders. We tried everything but telling the truth. Borders made it very clear that telling anyone about their payment ‘arrangements’ would result in being dropped immediately as well as a variety of hefty lawsuits we couldn’t begin to afford. So we bit the bullet and cut jobs. Then we cut more jobs. I had the horrific distinction of laying off my friends, one of them twice. Hired, let go, rehired as quickly as possible and then again laid off. We started working to change publisher terms, which was as successful as stuffing an elephant into a pillow case. We stopped paying publishers and dropped great zines because they didn’t make enough money. But what else can you do when the company that accounts for a third of your business refuses to pay for what they buy?

Eventually we tried to sell the business, at least to get enough money to pay our publishers, but the industry had already shrunk so drastically, there were no takers who would agree to pay the publishers what they were due. I self destructed with stress, being the daily target of rightfully angry publishers. I received death threats. One day I went to my car in the parking lot and found a briefcase under my car. I didn’t get in until the police confirmed it was just a forgotten briefcase. I didn’t answer my home phone because the answering machine was always full of threats. I was forced to resign, which at the time felt like betrayal but now I know was best. I could no longer function.

Borders, meanwhile, continued their glory days of big publisher parties, expensive booths and A list publishing celebrity parties at conventions. Our company declared bankruptcy and shut the doors. By that time, 80 employees lost their jobs. Hundreds of zines went out of publication. The market collapsed. Luckily for some, they were able to find a home on the internet. I still miss my favorites, though. Hothead Paisan. Mach 1. I miss Fact Sheet Five, even with all the crap they said about me.

Everyone in the publishing community knew Borders was in trouble in the early 90's, but it took them years to officially die. The company I worked for was by no means the only victim of the Borders attack. They put plenty of companies out of business. As their parties and publisher gifts grew smaller (no more free tvs, free computers, gold records from famous bands) the pundits picked up on their business troubles. Last I heard, the cause of Borders failure was their lack of a timely ebook. That wasn’t it. Borders died because someone had the guts to tell them to pay their bills.

I’m sorry to all of the wonderful zine publishers who went out of business prematurely because of our bankruptcy. I still carry the grief and shame of knowing I played a part in your demise. Everyone I worked with truly believed in you and your publication. We were passionate about getting your original literary and artistic works out to the world. We did what we thought was right at the time, but it wasn’t enough. I will always wish I had the guts to stand up to Borders and tell them just to pay their stupid bills in full for once.

RIP Borders and may your executives never forget how many people they ruined with their greed.

Disclaimer: Most names and companies are not used for the simple fact that I would rather not be sued. This article explains only my experiences although it does reference many conversations I had with other people. Also, I have $27 to my name and no other assets so suing me might not be in anyone’s best interests.

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