Project: A Bandcamp for Zines
So a while back I wrote a post about zines. In that post I talked about how I felt that making a marketplace for zines would be too difficult to monetize. And by monetize I don't mean make me money but generate enough money to pay for its own hosting and upkeep costs.
But to have like, some sort of online zine hosting website that was user friendly and auto created a PDF for readers to download. It would be impossible to monetize and therefore fail but the idea is fun to mull around. Maybe just a site for zine creators to index their zine and link to a place to buy or find one. I dunno. There is no way to find all these authors or convince them or potential readers to use it.
Then I got a few emails from yall out there in the bearblog world asking "Well, why wouldn't it work?" So I set out to prove everyone wrong by crunching the numbers and finding out how expensive it would be to do this. Because logically the reason fees are high on places like Patreon, Ko-fi, Gumroad, and Etsy are because of high payment processing fees. So I was going to figure out what those were then come back here and write a post explaining how expensive it would be while providing proof.
So my first step was looking up credit card fees. I recently set up Shopify POS to sell cards in person at a local festival. I had made a few repacks of bulk Pokemon cards for kids and priced them at a dollar. Before adding them to the store I did a test purchase to make sure it wasn't going to try and make people pay shipping on an IRL purchase. Lo and behold the amount I received was 87 cents. This is because of the fees that go to the payment processor to handle the transaction. A totally valid thing to happen to keep their servers running and credit card data secure.
But this wasn't going to be a Shopify site where I post other people's content. I would need to set up a custom site and use Stripe for payment processing. Stripe is secure and well documented and trustworthy for the majority of people. They also deduct fees from a payment. According to their site Stripe takes 2.9% + 30¢ which means for every $1 sale I would net 41¢.
Alright so at the lowest possible payment floor (1 dollar) the take home is 41 cents. Now since I'm setting up a marketplace for other people to host their zines and not my own, I need as much of that 41 cents to go to the creators of that zine as possible. So how much do I take off that 41 cents and when? When people send me tips during Y2K Quarterly submissions I get send the money instantly from Stripe minus the card fee.
So I took a deep dive into what fees and payouts and accounts and all that would really entail. The result was not as bad as I expected. I could still set up my zine site as a marketplace using one of Stripes services that lets me split the revenue when a transaction is made. So let's say a reader purchases a physical zine for say, ten bucks. That Ten bucks has 2.9% + 30 cents removed. In this case thats 59 cents that stripe takes for their part in the process. If I take a 6% fee that's 60 cents. The creator of the zine now gets $8.81 before shipping.
So worst case scenario: Everyone only pays the minimum $1 for digital downloads all month. I would need 19 sales per day to hit $30 a month which would cover the basic hosting costs. That sales number gets lower when people sell physical copies or set their digital zine base price higher or use a "pay what you want - min $1" format.
Basically this would be a Bandcamp type store but for zines and other self published printed material. I wouldn't want people trying to sell traditionally published big books here. Mainly because the scope of this site is to be a marketplace for zines. There are already marketplaces for self published novels and larger format literature.
Just like Bandcamp I would have to require the user to do separate transactions per store. If you've never used it, when you buy a tape or cd or digital music from Bandcamp it puts it in a little cart just like any other site. But, due to the fact that each band is a different seller with different shipping and all that, you have to check out of each bands cart separately. I often will fill up a cart from one label but have to pay per artist because one is located in Germany and the other is located in Canada. This would work exactly the same as this. Stripe is just my middle man for the transaction process.
Bandcamp takes 15% of digital sales and 10% on physical. Then on Bandcamp Fridays they wave all their fees to help the artists keep their extra money. But because I want to make this a small scope venture I don't need to take that big of a % as it's just me and the webhost I have to account for. If I had the employees and overhead that BC does I'd have to bump up the % as well no doubt.
But what I really want to shoot for is having a platform that people who create the zines can use for free to showcase and sell their work. Readers can sign up and pay for digital downloads of PDF files or order a physical copy. At that point it would be up to the artists to handle production and shipping. That shouldn't be an issue for a craft that is literally self published physical work. The digital download is there to increase accessibility.
Just today I had to ship some Magic cards and just 1 card in a top loader and slice of cardboard in a bubble mailer was $6 to ship ground advantage. You can't ship zines as a regular letter, and trying to put a shitload of stamps on one half page manilla envelope will get you flagged by the Feds. Don't do that.
So yeah, instead of trying to prove everyone else wrong, I'm going to prove myself wrong:
After doing all these numbers I spooled up a little Angular + Supabase project to see if I could get something structurally resembling Bandcamp. As of right now I can create an account, upload new zines, and read them in a browser based PDF reader. I haven't set up the Stripe integrations yet and honestly waiting for the end to do that.
One of the big snarls here is content moderation. Stripe, and all the other payment processors have a bunch of rules about what you can and can't sell online. You might have heard about folks on Etsy/Patreon etc having their accounts turned off because they were selling stuff that was within the TOS of the platform but Stripe and the banks behind them deemed it too risky. Typically this is about adult content. Platforms are demonetizing it left and right because of the strict aspects of the payment processors.
But OnlyFans uses Stripe! Yes and OnlyFans has the money and infrastructure to moderate the content and ensure Stripe that they will swiftly deal with anyone who veers outside the TOS. Me being by myself means I can't actively moderate every new person who feels like joining up and I can't stop them all from uploading illegal content on my platform.
THAT is the real hurdle here and what can kill the site - content moderation. If the creators can't make money from their content I can't afford to host it. So once I have a live version up, I will be doing an invite only system for a creator account. This is to ensure my own sanity and not have to worry so much about content moderation when I know the people joining won't be assholes. Anyone will be able to sign up to buy and read zines, you just won't have access to the creator portion of the site on day one.
Currently when you create a zine you can toggle wether or not you want to offer it in a digital or physical format. Of those two options you can set different prices for each, and on the digital one you can opt for a Pay What You Want option with a 1 dollar minimum. Currently there is no option for free read for the PDF's but I might make that an option for accounts with a non profit email so places like public schools and libraries can set up accounts to showcase work from their members or events. That's way later tho.
I'm keeping things as simple as possible for now. I can always add stuff to it as I go or the need for something else arises. I bought the URL and should have the working site ready for viewers in the next week or two.
Oh and another note on scope/goals for the site. I don't want to have a feed of "most popular zines" or "highest downloaded" type lists or anything on the site. Mostly because like here on bearblog - those numbers are often skewed by creators who are already popular. I want folks to discover new things instead so there is no top/best ranks. No ratings, no reviews. You can search by category and tags that the creators attach to the zines.
Something that really is frustrating from a creators point of view is the grind mindset of having to create new stuff non stop to keep eyes on your work. To stay on the featured/top lists you have to maintain those views which means spamming fans with emails or social media posts. That's not what this site is about. Just as well I don't want creators to feel forced to make content for the sake of the readers.
On Substack/Patreon you can set up subscriptions where the readers have to pay monthly to read and support you. Now you as the creator have this overwhelming feeling that you need to give these readers something new every month to validate the concept of them paying you so often. With this site you can create as often or little as you want because there are no subscriptions. This will ease the burden of creators and keep them from burning out.
And no I don't want to do a point/coin system to let readers spend on reading anything they want. That eats into both the creators profits and mine. That type of thing works if ALL the content on the site is something I own the rights to and can distribute as I wish. (Which I won't.) Again, the goal is to get a few coins in the creators pockets without subjecting them to algorithms and dancing in reaction videos.