Hello! I'm Phoebe. I'm a full time grad student and I make zines in my spare time. I've been playing around with zines for nearly a decade now (my first was a small booklet of high school poetry titled Pianissimo), but recently I've had a lot of friends and peers ask where they can find or buy my zines. Usually I just show them pictures of what I've made, or I tell them to stop by my table at local zine fests, but it's gotten to a point where I think it might actually be more useful to have a dedicated site and platform for my work.
Thus, Inter.txt Press.
As I've mentioned on the "Info" page, this publishing practice is in a soft launch stage, meaning I've given myself the next year or so to explore what this project can be and what I can do with it. I stand by my belief that no good publishing practice is a predetermined, predictable thing: I want to build a space for ideas to metamorph and transform. At the end of the day, as much as I harbor a deep love and dedication to printed matter in its material forms, I am not in this to produce a discrete object or project, but to create relationships with others, with those I know and have yet to know.
Some things I want to figure out in the next few months:
1) Where can folks purchase these zines?
I don't have the capacities, currently, to pay $20/month for an online storefront, so I'm trying to figure out alternative online platforms where I can sell print copies. I like distributing my work "seasonally" (within specific months, rather than continuously throughout the year), and I don't tend to keep large quantities of stock all the time. Maybe Ko-Fi would be a good option? For now, if you're interested in a print copy of something I've made, you can email me for mail orders, and we can figure out everything else from there.
(Eventually, I'm planning to upload more of my work on itch.io as free PDFs.)
2) What's a good way to keep in touch?
I made this "Notes" page as a scratchpad for publishing reflections, a commonplace and process blog of sorts. That said, maybe it would be more useful to start a newsletter, if enough folks are interested? I'm not on social media all that much and would like to keep it that way, but I understand that decision makes it harder for people to reach out and connect...
3) How do I make this a more collaborative, collective space?
Ultimately, I don't want Inter.txt to exist solely as a portfolio for my own work. I want to collaborate with friends and publish texts of and for community. I recently went to Inga for their sixth anniversary party and they had these lovely flyers printed out—"One publishes to find comrades!"—and I think that's the exact sentiment I'm chasing after.