After the Fair Was Over
The Seattle Art Book Fair 2024 Report, some business bits, and preparing for the next maintenance tour!
Last weekend’s Seattle Art Book Fair was kind of a huge success for me and the friends I was tabling with! Based on things I learned in Be Oakley’s A Publishers Perspective on the Art Book Fair (Genderfail), I’ve gotten into the habit of publishing a “fair report” after each event, and sharing it first with my collaborators and the fair organizers (as it’s often useful info for them), and then making it generally public. Here’s some highlights from the SABF 2024 report:
We sold 139 zines, and gave away/traded another ~15, bringing in a total of $1,491.
The rough income breakdown is: $252 to artist friends for sales, another $374 for labor (tabling), $410 for the printshop (fundraising editions), $275 to me (my sales plus 20% cut of other sales minus expenses), and $180 in expenses.
This is about 75% better than we did last year at the same fair (and the best my own zines have ever done at a fair).
I’m paying a small hourly rate to everyone who helped me table, because that sort of thing is something I was never able to easily do when tabling on behalf of the studio, and it’s important to me to try for equity in labor!
The full report is available here: SABF 2024 Report
Program Highlights!
Quick shout out to some of the other cool experiences that happened this weekend!
The “Own the Means of Production and Share It” panel was so good and rejuvenating. Always exciting to hear what other people have been doing, how they operate, what they’ve learned. And the mood of the room was that these spaces both make us and are made by us—that we have the ability to create and maintain these beautiful little art spaces together. There was a recording of the session and some of the panelists have been talking about making a little transcription zine—so more on that anon.
Two other panels I attended: (1) Current Editions (of Organizing Power volumes 1 + 2) ran a panel on arts working unionizing—and it was a deep dive into what arts unions look like in larger institutions and the struggles they go through both in forming and in bargaining for a contract. It had me and Jess thinking about what a contract or organizing might look like in the less structured art spaces we are frequently working in. (2) Zach Clark (National Monument Press) put together a chat on photo printing on the riso, which was incredibly endearing mostly in how all of the artists present (Amelia Greenhall of Anemone, Erica Wilk of Moniker Press, and Carlos Gabaldon of Risolana) take wildly different and contradictory approaches to photographic printing and all share a mutual love and respect for risograph as a means of making their images. (Also does anyone else want to go on a solidarity journey with me and Cielle Charron to tackle our fear halftones?)
It was the first time I was able to see the Knust documentary—it it was so cool and such a different thing than I was expecting. It was largely about providing a parallel between the “misuse” of this strange new tool (the risograph) for art making and the “misuse” of abandoned buildings by the squatter artists of this collective. Particularly cool was just seeing the sort of haphazard reverence with which all the equipment in their shop was both a tool and a being of temperment—that so many older machines were still in use as people learned to work around and with their quirks. I now want a lot more of the pre-riso history of art making with mimeos and hectographs and other office copiers (new friends recommended Cheap Copies!: The Obsolete Press Guide to DIY Hectography, Mimeography and Spirit Duplication).
The community space conversation continued at the riso brunch at Zine Hug’s place on Monday and sort of culminated in a number of conversations held on the floor of the kitchen, about queerness and lineage and sharing our homes and tools with each other. They had me thinking more about how my gear might live on after I leave the city, and put some new pins in the map of “what does it mean to operate non-institutionally?” They also had me realizing that in these upcoming travels I very much want to be publishing topically, using the tools and contexts of the spaces I am visiting.
Table Labor Musings
This time around with the fair, I am paying all my tablers an hourly rate for helping out. We didn’t plan on this ahead of time, but I really wanted to give it a go. This both ensures that the people who were running the table (without whom I wouldn’t have been able to get much of anything done) were paid for their time, and in the future that anyone whose work wasn’t selling very well can still make some income from the fair. But this was far from a perfect system.
I was only able to make the margins work at Seattle’s minimum wage of $16.28, and not the living wage of $30.08 (numbers from the MIT Living Wage Calculator). This is better than the plan I was trying to implement previously with the studio (a $50 stipend per chair per day, split among the tablers), and I did absorb all the fees on my own, but is still not incredible.
This has me thinking about how I price my own zines—I know that traditionally I undervalue the things I make (everything on my table was $5–15 sliding scale), I like making things very accessible (perhaps foolishly so), but usually I’m the only one that swallows that loss. Now that I am the one paying others I’m realizing that my ability to pay for labor is dependent on being able to make an income from my own sales too. As it is, about 56% of my income this fair would be be going to labor in this model, except that …
… A few of the artists I tabled with asked not to be paid for labor, or to be paid in zines or future support. I see a lot of and am a part of a lot of this “generous exchange” in the small press and indie arts world. At this point when people offer this sort of kindness I am not in a position where I can say no, which feels some type of way (capitalism shame?). So! I say yes, and we find new ways to share with each other down the road.
I definitely want to talk to other publishers about what they do in terms of table labor—and will probably give another read through of that Genderfail book.
More to figure out and experiment with in future fairs.
Coming Up Next
That’s a lot already for one post—so cutting it here. But there’s a few things I didn’t get to and will maybe put into a follow-up:
I’m writing a lease for leaving my equipment in the previous space (and evaluating how best to maintain it as a resource). That includes a breakdown of the gear I have in there, which might be a fun insight.
I can share a rough curriculum for an “Intermediate Riso Operation” workshop that I am presently piloting with the studio members that run that printshop now (and that I’ll also be running at Studio Two Three later this month).
I gotta share the haul of cool books I got at the fair! So much lovely stuff.
Current Happenings
My next repair trip is coming so soon! On the 24th I’ll head down to Portland and do some repairs at Outlet PDX, Secret Room, and the IPRC. After that it’s a flight to Richmond VA to do repairs and workshops at Studio Two Three (and visiting some as-yet-unknown presses there). Then stopping by Philly to say hello to Soapbox before heading to the midwest. That branch of the trip will include (in no particular order) Zine Not Dead (June 15) in Chicago, warehouse repair sessions with Issue Press in Grand Rapids, repairs for Rachel Delmotte in Detroit, and visits to many friends along the way!
Before I leave I’m hoping to get some copies of Kelly Bjork’s Sketches zine—I’ve been working on separations for that project for about 30 hours now. Generally this next week and a half is the get-as-much-of-the-stuff-that-was-put-off-for-the-fair-done-before-you-have-to-put-them-off-again time.
(My grandfather used to sing a silly parody song called “After the Ball Was Over” about an old woman taking off her wig and various other accoutrements at the end of the night—it felt very true to the experience of disassembling one’s self after the book fair and just sort of quietly falling apart. And what was left of poor Florence, went to bed, after the ball.)
Thank you for sharing.