X Small Press Zine and Print Fair : 16/05

So today the day had finally arrived...the Zine fair has descended upon us. 

We arrived early in order to prep our table. We share a table with Beer Mat thus in order to make our zine stand out from their, we put a red table runner down.

As we hadn't produced many other 'extra' and only had half a table, we kept it simple. We laid out our zines together with our postcards parallel to keep it simple and compact. 

We made clear signs for the prices of the zines and postcards. We tried to keep the prices to a minimum but that does leave us at a financial disadvantage as we had spent so much on materials and printing.

 We also included an artists' statement but this was really a small explanation of why we chose the subjects we chose for our essays and therefore why these subjects were in our zine. People did ask and we just explained verbally instead of referring to our statement. I felt it was much nicer to talk to people instead and strike up a chat.

 Many people asked which course we came from and when we replied Contemporary Art History, lots of them were a little surprised we had managed to make such a visual zine.

As mentioned earlier, we were seated next to Beer Mat, also a CAH zine. So it was nice when it was quieter to chat about how we found the process of creating zines coming from a written and not practice background. This also allowed to see their work and involved swapping of zines, postcards and beer mats!

The zine fair and the setting up process also allowed us to see other people's work. I was very impressed with the body of work people had produced. There was such a variety of work and such an array of things to see. It was an really nice opportunity to see what people had been working on the last 8 weeks and to see it all together was a really nice way to end Unit X.

Vikki and Zoss' Food Zine with cocktails!

Paula stressing!

Olivia W and Amy C's zine helping freshers find their way! A personal favourite.

When evaluating the zine fair, it was a success and, not failure as such, but not a success in many way. For example, we only sold 5 our of 15 which could be seen as a failure but it's more than I anticipated. As the fair was a zine and print fair, I anticipated the audience to be illustration/image based and therefore be more interested in the print side of things rather than the really handmade element Exhibition held. We had quite a lot of lookers and lots of people fingered through the zine but not many actually converted to a sale. However, we sold quite a few postcards which were a nice, cheap little addition. With our remaining zines, we gave them away to other zine makers for free and/or swapped them for something of theirs.

Neverthesless, I would say we were successful with Exhibizine. When thinking about how we were very uncomfortable about this at the beginning and comparing that to the 15 zines we have produced and are very proud of. We never thought we'd managed to produce something like this. The fact we have has made us very happy even if we didn't sell many. It was nice to be able to showcase a zine that is a bit different to those already there and be involved in an event like this.