zine frustrations

A couple days until zinefest and I think I'm ready. I won't have a table, just hanging out and trading or selling a handfull of copies of my zine I made. Before I mentioned that I had some issues working in Word instead of inDesign. The layout was a huge mess over and over and over again which was a big waste of time. I would have put four panels on one page the way I do with inDesign, but Word WOULD NOT let me have tiny margins. After that I did the cut and paste part of the layout wrong, then made a bunch of copies. That was a dissapointing waste of money, paper, and time. I thought about things like "Fail Harder" and "I'll never make that mistake again." Then I corrected the problem (or so I thought) and made just one copy to proof before printing the next five. There was still one mix up of pages somehow (not paying attention again) after reading through. So of course I corrected that problem and thought I was ready to go. I made five more copies, trimmed and coalated, wait a minute... there was a problem again. I'm still not sure how it happened because technically the numbers are correct. Somehow the text isn't lined up in two places so I will figure it out later. It really wasn't worth it to reprint a third time for that small of a problem and I'll fix it before printing next time. It just makes me feel like it's not worth it sometimes.

I love the physical representation of books and zines, especially because I love screen printed covers or handwritten notes in each one. I had an idea to do a PDF or online version for this zine though. I have done PDF zines before, but very short ones. I realize the software issue will still be a problem so it would be after finding a freeware to use. It will solve a lot of other issues though. I hate wasting paper, figuring out distribution (to friends from all over the world), and wrestling long arm staplers to hold together too many pages. This zine is the first part of what is technically a small book. It was over 50 pages in Word, 10 point, single spaced. One of many of my ideas, but maybe I will just release the whole thing in one piece, with lots of color photos, as a downloadable PDF.

What do you think? Would this even work as a passive income style ebook that I could accept donations for?

This post is dedicated to the IPRC. If I still lived in Portland, most of this would not have been an issue.