Creating Carnival and Mixup at the Mixam

Now the dust has settled on my first zine, Carnival, I wanted to share the fun and fulfilling process behind making it, and the lessons learned along the way.

‘Carnival’ Zine

How did it come about?

I’m a strong believer of shooting projects, especially as a time-constrained street photographer. I’m working on a few projects at the moment, but one which I have made the most progress on is “Events of London” . Over Christmas, I reviewed my work and realised that I had quite a few images I liked from Notting Hill Carnival. It felt like the perfect opportunity for a zine, a smaller “spin off” that could test the waters of printing.

I often think about what the end goal of my work is. Is it to die in an Instagram shaped Void? Will it just be on my website to be harvested by AI bots? One thing I’ve always believed in is the power of print. Think about how much more enjoyable seeing images in a zine, book or in a gallery is in comparison to on a backlit screen. My broader plan is to have a bigger publication of my events work but here was a good way to start small.

In my mind a zine should be in the region of 30 images, plus or minus, and I felt that I had a pool from which I could land on that number. I sat at this point for some time, until having a chat with fellow street photographer and friend Josh Windsor about creating a zine that I thought “the time is now”.

It’s as the proverb goes; “the best time to do something was yesterday, the second best time is when you have a half day off”

Editing

approx. 80 printed images

Editing here mean selecting your images rather than post-processing. This is a challenge in street photography, it’s easy to be attacehd to a shot just because of the story behind it, but the viewer won’t see what could have been, they only see what it is. With that in mind, I needed to get some second opinions.

I had an initial pool of around 240 photos from Notting Hill Carnival taken over the three years of 2022-2024, and as I am a chronic “deleter” of images I don’t like, the actual number taken was probably 4x that number. From there I made an edit down to around 80 of my “potentials” and printed them all out as 6x4.

I narrowed that down to about 40 but I also sought the opinion of some good friends at the pub after a bit of shooting. Here Josh , who was also working on his zine at the same time so we went through each other’s “potentials” and highlighted our favourites. Also a big help was Nipon who has some exciting exhibition news himself!

Peer feedback like this is invaluable and if you happen to like them and it’s in a pub, even better. In addition to this, I also booked a one-on-one session to discuss the photos with Polly Ruysn. I’ve known Polly for a while, having been on a couple of her workshops, and I thought she would be a great person to speak to on Notting Hill Carnival as her work is always very colourful and vibrant, a good match for the subject matter. I sent over the 80 images and while I awaited the session, I started to mock up a zine using Microsoft PowerPoint (more on that later).

The session was really helpful and confirmed the fact that as much as you try to be objective about your work, you can’t fully be. I can’t remember the numbers exactly but of the approx. 40 Polly picked, only half overlapped with the 40 “potentials” I had picked. Lots of valuable fuel for thought! We also went through my PowerPoint mock up and played around with different sequencing and pairings.

This was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the sequencing process, which turned out to be one of my favourite parts of this whole zine creation process. Polly’s input definitely helped challenge some pairings I made, gave me food for thought (e.g. have the stronger picture on the right) but there was one pairing that Polly suggested that I had not occurred to me that I really liked and it has made it into the final zine. It was even featuring an image that I didn’t have in my “potential” pile so a big thanks to Polly for that one!

I previously had these two images the other way around, such that the two bald guys were looking at each other but Polly suggested (correctly) that it works better with them back-to-back

This was the pairing that Polly had suggested that I really like and it kind of feels a bit obvious now. The image on the left was not part of my original cut either

Sequencing

My overarching flow was to start with quieter “early in the day” Carnival images, have the more lively toward the middle and to finish on the more sketchy / golden hour (ish) end of day shots. I mentioned earlier I mocked something up in PowePoint but initially I started with sticking the “final 40” 6x4 printed images into a note book with blue tack, which allowed me to play around with the sequencing (thanks for that tip Gauthier). It worked at first but after a while I found that the blue tack was ripping the pages and the notebook just felt weird so like any other Geriatric Millennial with a work laptop, I turned to PowerPoint. Some big advantages here; you can easily drag and drop images into slides (an A4 landscape slide is effectively 2 pages of a zine) and play around with them very easily, which I did for many hours.

This image was a last min addition to the zine

A second advantage of PowerPoint is the ability to export as a PDF. This allowed me to share it in a WhatsApp chat with Josh and Nipon to get feedback on the sequencing. Josh was also at the same stage, so we had many, many iterations (+beers) of our zines between us, suggesting new sequencing and even switching some images in/out right down to the last minute. In fact, two images in the zine that ended up as double pagers didn’t make it into my initial 40 cut. One final consideration that caused some frustration was to keep the zine’s (if stapling) number of pages to a multiple of 4. Sounds pretty simple but it does force you to make some decision when it comes to how things are sequencing to fit on double-page spreads or facing pages.

So after this stage, I now had a zine in PowerPoint that I was very happy with; 30 carefully sequenced and paired images. Now comes the part I found the most painful.

Publishing

There are many publishers out there that offer zine printing. The main ones I found in the UK were Blurb, Ex Why Zed and Mixam, and it was the latter that I went with for three key reasons:

1. They offer an online publishing tool that you can use to create your zine. Most other publishers require you to upload a PDF from something like Adobe InDesign (insanely expensive for non-professionals) and I’m not sure I would trust the quality of a PowerPoint PDF output

2. A lot of other people I know who have recently published zines have used Mixam with good feedback (thank you Gauthier & Kenny!)

3. They are reasonably priced

So Mixam it was! I signed up to their website, logged in, selected “zine” and went about replicating the zine I had created in PowerPoint. It was a bit fiddly; I didn’t find the “snap to grid” worked great and you can’t be super precise with positioning very easily (would be great if you could type in the position like in PowerPoint) but I got there in the end. It was also while working on the cover page that I watched the whole of the “how to make a zine” series by Ed Thompson. This was an invaluable resource that Ed has generously shared on YouTube, and I would 100% recommend watching through them earlier in the process.

Cover Page

The image I had earmarked to be the cover page image

Getting the images in as I had planned was fiddly but not too painful. The cover page however needed a bit of inspiration. I always had one image in mind for this as it lent well to a cover page; it was horizontal, it had a lady almost “peering into the zine” and on the left of the image for back cover, it had a nice image of speakers from a sound system, with repeating circles which tied into the decoration on the front cover.

Now for the actual text… this was harder. I had a few different ideas and actually posted about it on Instagram Stories to get some feedback, but it turned out most people agreed with my gut. I went for a big and bold “Carnival” title using a font built into the Mixam tool, as I felt it better suited the content of the zine, something colourful, bold and full of life. I was also able to adjust the colours to match the cover image, so it fit in more naturally. After sending this over many times to the guys, they pointed out I needed to put my name on there too (whoops!) so that made it at the bottom.

Paper/Finish

The zine was feeling quite complete on screen with the cover page and inner pages complete. Now came the next challenge; What paper finish to use (gloss, silk, uncoated), what paper thickness for both the cover and inner pages?

There is no right or wrong here, so I actually did a series of small print batches (quite expensive on a per-zine basis) to see how the different paper options looked and felt. I settled on uncoated paper as that felt more consistent with most of the zines I own (perhaps a bit more of a professional feel?) with 250gsm cover and 150gsm pages. In my series of 4 test prints, I noticed that the uncoated was a little more washed out so I went back to the images and bumped the vibrancy up a notch. When test print 4 came back, I was happy with everything, just in time for the planned joint zine launch party with Josh. So with this in mind I pushed the button…. 100 copies please Mr Mixam! Around a week later they arrived. I could hardly wait to open the box up and take a gander at my first published zine, but when I did… uh oh.

Mixup at the Mixam

One thing I wasn’t aware of is that Mixam are like a bit of middleman. They facilitate your printing by taking your order but then sending it off to a printer to be printed. Through the whole process of my test printing, they had gone to the same printing centre but when I did my final order, they went to another and the colours that came back were quite different.

Left: Issue with colours (a bit yellow cast?), Right: Final test print with the colours I wanted

I contacted Mixam, sending them the scan above but they did say that this was within their acceptable allowance of colour mismatching. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

For me that yellow cast is too much and I could never sell a zine like that, so I put in another order and asked them to send it to the same printer as all the test prints. They obliged and with one day to spare before the launch party, the new batch arrived (which I had paid for in full) with the colours exactly as I wanted.

Zine launch party in Soho’s Star & Garter

After the successful launch party, I did complain again to Mixam and got a small % refunded. Better than a kick in the teeth as they say. I will also add that they were very nice to speak to but I do find that colour inconsistency not acceptable for this kind of printing. If you’re to use Mixam in the future, I would request in the notes to use the same printing centre as any test print you may have run to avoid this issue.

Would I use them again in the future? Probably. I will spend a little more time shopping around, but I feel that the online editor is a big win in their favour.

Selling

Quite a lot to think about here. What price do I sell at? How many copies? Where/How do I sell? Let me take you through my thoughts on these questions

• What price? I think this should be your first question. You know how much the zine costs to publish based on your paper requirements and you can look around online / at peers to see what people are charging. It seems in the UK the majority go for £10 so that seemed like a good number. If you go lower, you should be able to sell more but undercutting can cheapen your work a little. Higher might raise some eyebrows as to why you think your work is worth more than others. £10 seemed like the obvious one for a first-time zine. If you had a project shot over a short period of time (a day, maybe a week) perhaps something a bit cheaper would make more sense, something which Ed Thompson touches on in the zine tutorials (watch them!).
  
  Another consideration if you want to be risk adverse, is to consider the break-even point. If your zines cost £3 each and you print 20, that’s a total cost of £60. If you give away 5 (friends, family & yourself) then you’ll only be selling 15, and to break-even the price would have to be £4 (£60 / 15 = £4). This is a very low-ball risk adverse method. This leads into the next consideration:

• How many copies to print? I would suggest starting with how many copies you will want to give away for free. I gave some to those that put effort into helping me, a couple copies for myself and family. This came to about 10 given out for free. After that I would say the vast majority of zines I’ve sold are to people I know either in person or in online communities, so try to consider how many connections you might have.
  
  I sold around 50 in the initial wave, so including the 10 freebies, that’s 60 up front. Since then, I’ve sold almost all the rest (at time of writing there are 5 left) so my initial guess of 100 has worked out pretty well. Interestingly, at the Launch party, one London based photographer said they were surprised I had a zine on sale at the same event; it just goes to show you shouldn’t make assumptions about who actually sees your stories/posts.

• Where to sell? Here you have four main options: Directly, Website, Shops and swaps:

  • Directly is quite easy, you can promote your work on your social media channels and ask people to DM you with interest and then send over payment details or arrange to meet for cash

  • Website is an interesting one. I have a SquareSpace website but listing via SquareSpace seemed a bit of a rigmarole, so I went to BigCartel to list my zine. This worked out super easy. Their free tier allows you to only list one product with one image but that’s perfect really as the rest of the details/images are online. Through big cartel you can manage payments and keep an order tracker, so I just went with that and linked to it from my website. Shipping fees was another question but you can find out how much things cost on your relevant mail service’s website (Royal Mail for us here in the UK). There are different prices for shipping to different locations around the world, but I just kept it simple to UK, EU and Rest of World but also added tracked or non-tracked. I can confirm that not one order used tracked so perhaps save yourself the bother there.

  • Shops are one I don’t have a lot of experience with this but the only way to find out is to ask. This is what I did in The Photographer’s Gallery, and they were happy to take 5 on a consignment basis. This was one of the highlights of the whole thing for me; I’ve been visiting The Photographers Gallery for a long time, often starting a day’s shoot at the Cafe so to have my own work on sale there was a proud moment.

  • Swaps here essentially means just trading someone else for one of their zines. Quite a few people are publishing now so it can save both of you any transaction fees assuming there is interest from both parties. Or perhaps a “zines for beer” approach at the bar! The price of beer these days…

‘Carnival’ on Sale next to Josh’s debuy Zine ‘An excuse to Linger’

Bonus point: It’s always worth keeping a few Zines on you when you’re out and about as you never know who you might bump into to either make a sale in person or just to show your work (it makes a great portfolio), which I benefitted from when I bumped into Samuel Lintaro at the London Photo and Video show, as it meant it appeared in one of his YouTube videos.

Reviews: Two of the people I had sent my zine out to, either for helping with the zine itself or for keeping me entertained particuarlly through the Covid times was the Fujicast and Ed Thompson, so I was well chuffed to hear such nice words about the zine after all the effort going into it.

That’s about it! With all the money I made from the zine I bought a new house and I’m now spending the rest of my days in a jacuzzi sipping Pina Coladas and writing blogs. Joking aside, I did ask online if anyone had any questions about the process, but this post has gone on for too long now, so I’ll save them for the next post! If you have any questions you would like to add, please ask in the comments and I’ll include them.

Hopefully this long blog post offers you a bit of inspiration, some food for thought or a cure to insomnia. If you are going to create your own zine, ! I wish you the best of luck! Just take your time, enjoy the process, there is no rush.

p.s. if you want to grab one of the last 5 zines available, you can order one here: https://adamramjean.bigcartel.com/