Something I got distracted with while working on chapter one. It’s the boys waking up the morning after their shared dream. Jake is a heavy sleeper and loves layers. He has a feeling it was a vison and is contacting Fu to ask about it. Randy just thinks it was a wacky vivid dream induced by some questionable week-old pizza he ate last night. Danny is a light sleeper and has been awake the second the dream ended; Laying there in contemplation of his life and the dream. (To clarify Randy is not naked, he simply doesn’t wear a shirt to bed. I have no intentions to sexualize these teens and I hope I never give off that impression)
This is the second-to-last zine-related post. Every zine is at its home now, and with nothing else incoming, we figured we could ramble a little about things we learned. Because we can!
(It’s cool if you want to skip reading this, haha. Donation receipt coming soon!)
Back in late September 2017, Mod D made a throwaway comment about how cool it would be if Matt, her favourite character, had a whole zine of his own. Mod E (whose fave is also Matt) saw that comment and, said this:
And then…
…We’ve come a long way since our initial conception.
Mod D came up with wordmark concepts after Mod E coined the best Holt pun ever. \o/ The inspiration for our final choice was like… 80s vapourwave throwback, with cyberpunk/EDM influences and a reverberating O that just screams out to the masses. :D Later, we ended up including an illustration by @crowzep to our brand for funsies.
We found that both deadlines and flexibility were necessary. In a team of 30+ people, something will always come up – and we found that having monthly deadlines is important so people have milestones to look forward to, and flexibility is important if things come up.
Also, check-ins are important because it means people have started work – which means people are less likely to drop. ;) (We did have a grand total of 0 drops, not including people who denied our initial invitation.)
We’re super happy with the way we grouped the anthology – we think we got a really cool narrative out of a diverse group of creators!
Email process with two mods is hella easy. One mod writes the email, and the other mod looks it over and hits send. Our participants were all super cool people, so communications were ultimately a good time.
Layout needs to start a good month or two before preorders. Early layout makes it easier to work at a leisurely pace while slotting in complete works as they come in – without dealing with layout and preorders at the same time.
Holy shit, orders flooded in during the last weekend of preorders. It is normal for orders to increase near the end of a preorders period – it’s financially smart to hold on to your money as long as possible, and it also means less of of a wait time between payment and receipt of the zine. But - we didn’t think we were going to hit 100 orders, and it was such a pleasant surprise when we nyoomed past that milestone. :D
Ordering product is a restless endeavour (or at least, restless for people who aren’t doing this as, like, a full-time job). We started right after preorders ended and we made an effort to be stay top of communications with the vendors. (We’re pretty proud of our turnaround time.)
We did get a break while waiting for the vendors to send us product (since there was nothing we could do, we just relaxed :P). After that, we went back to the crunch time mindset of creating mailing labels and sending mail.
We ordered extra zines to replace anything that went missing, but we didn’t realise that since we were only ordering 100ish zines and not 500ish, there would statistically be fewer missing orders. So – we had extras.
Selling extras with very limited stock (on a limited storefront plan) is nerve-wracking. We sold five charms very quickly, and waiting for the sixth charm to sell was stressful because we wanted to close inventory immediately after.
Overall, we had a lot of fun creating this zine, and we’re v happy with the results! Our donation post will be up sometime this weekend. Here’s to the completion of a zine, and to more great Matt content!
