Inside Publishing

Seizing the Zines of Production with Tee Hodges of Typewronger

• The Society of Young Publishers

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In this episode, Annika talks to Tee Hodges, the founder of Typewronger, which is an independent bookshop, typewriter repair shop, and small press in Edinburgh. They discuss the ins and outs of independent publishing, first steps into small press work, and the importance of relationship building and community in every aspect of the literary world.


Typewronger

Website: www.typewronger.com

Instagram: @typewronger

What's On at Typewronger: www.typewronger.com/home/events


Mentioned in this episode

Edinburgh Zine Fair: sites.google.com/a/typewronger.com/edinubrghzinefair

Glasgow Zine Fest: www.glasgowzinelibrary.com/glasgow-zine-fest

St. Margaret's House: www.stmargaretshouse.org.uk


Episode transcript

Transcript: thesyp.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SYP-Typewronger-Interview.pdf


Hosted and edited by Annika 'Niki' Cleland-Hura (SYP Scotland Podcast Officer)

Twitter: @SYP_UK

Website: https://thesyp.org.uk 


If you have any questions about this episode or wish to partake in the show, drop us a line at podcast.syp@gmail.com

SYP Committees:

Welcome to this episode of Inside Publishing, the series where we interview industry experts on everything publishing.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me. I'm Annika, your host for this episode today. I'm talking to Tee Hodges of Typewronger, which is a bookshop, small press and typewriter repair shop here in Edinburgh. We're talking about all things independent publishing, zines, grass roots community building, and running away to Paris to pursue your literary dreams. Thank you very much for joining me today, Tee. Just to get us started, can you just talk a little bit about how you got into books selling and kind of what your career has been like so far?

Tee Hodges:

Well, I began in 2012. I ran away to Paris. So I had been, until that point, working in the whisky industry. Great job, lots of free whisky, but I missed the reading and the writing and the creative stuff that I had done previously when I was at university and when I was younger, and I was longing for something – there was some part of my soul that was crying out for that kind of interaction again. So I took various trains and busses and hitchhiked and ended up arriving on the first of November 2012 at the front door of Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, which was shut. Closed for public holiday. I managed, with a few quid that I had still kicking around, to get a hotel room for the night. I went back the next day, and I was asking them if I could sleep in the bookshop, because that's this famous thing about that shop, is that they have this tumbleweeding programme, they call it, where, potentially, if there's room, you might get a place to sleep in the bookshop. Well, there wasn't room, and Sylvia, the owner, wasn't there, and there were various different reasons why I couldn't stay in the bookshop for the first few days. But eventually, Sylvia let me stay, and I slept in the bookshop, and I read a book a day, and I worked two hours a day in the shop, and I helped open and close the shop, and I had to write my biography on one sheet of paper. And it's the generosity of Sylvia letting me do that and stay for free in the bookshop in Paris and become part of this amazing artistic and creative community. That generosity, that help, that she gave me, was what made me think, right, there's really something about bookshops. There's something about this kind of space. There's something about this atmosphere. I think it's that it's accessible, like Sylvia didn't know me from Adam, and she won't let people – you can't book it. It's not a hotel, if you – if anyone wants to try doing this, probably it won't work. Almost certainly it won't work. I ended up becoming full-time staff at the bookshop eventually, and I've turned away hundreds of tumbleweeds in my time because it's just, well, we're full, or it's not a good time, or for whatever reason, it can't be done, but I managed it back in the day, and it was pretty excellent. Anyway, I worked as a bookseller for Shakespeare and Company. There was actually a little hiatus. I was a tumbleweed, and then I was an au pair, and then I moved to London, and I spent a year working for a bookshop called Heywood Hill, which is a very different place. It's in the heart of Mayfair. It's where Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh used to hang out, very, you know, sort of high class kind of establishment, and totally right in with the heart of the London literary world. So we would be doing all these kind of external events, where we'd be doing book launches and things. And you know, you really did get to see and meet everyone. It was an amazing time. I did that for about a year, and then I'd been emailing with Sylvia, who owned Shakespeare and Company, and she needed another member of staff to do work in the bookshop, but also a bit of work receiving books into stock, and some work maybe with second hand book buying and all this kind of thing. So I ended up moving back to Paris, and I spent about three more years there, selling books at Shakespeare and Company, driving cars off into the countryside to buy – you know, it was always a French widow, and it would be her Anglophone husband would have passed away, and she'd want rid of these books. This is a pattern, like I did this at least three times, and then you load up the car, and you drive it back into Paris, and you hope that you don't get stopped by the police, because it's quite low in its suspension. At this point, you're thinking, am I maybe taking the mick a little bit here with how much I've loaded this vehicle up. I mean, perfectly safe. Perfectly safe, of course. But this was the kind of stuff that I did. And of course, then the natural progression is wanting to start your own bookshop. And I only really intended on staying at Shakespeare and Company about a year to pick up more experience, but it turned into, like, two and a half, three years kind of thing, because I was having a really good time, funnily enough. But I then realised, I did realise that I wanted to come back to Edinburgh to start my shop. I thought would be a good place to start one, first UNESCO city of literature. Already quite a few bookshops here, so I thought it could probably support one more. And since Typewronger opened, another seven bookshops have opened. So it couldn't just support one more bookshop. It could support eight. At least, in fact, maybe more will open soon, we will see. It acts as a draw. The city is a magnet for the book lover, bringing them in because they know we've got this kind of critical mass of really cool bookshops, and they all specialize in different things. I was at Booklovers just the other day, which is the new romance bookshop on the Meadows, which is a genre that I'm not particularly great at selling. We have a little section at the back of the shop called Hot and Bothered the Elsa curates, but I must confess, I don't know much about it myself, so it's great to see someone supplement that in the Edinburgh community. But anyway, I decided I had to move back to Edinburgh. But before that, my friends Terry and Charlotte, who used to work with me in Shakespeare and Company, they had previously, you know, a few years before, left Shakespeare and Company to go and run a bookshop in Madrid called Desperate Literature. Now, Shakespeare and Company is big. Desperate Literature is small. And I thought, that's much more like the sort of shop I'm going to be able to start. You know, I'm not going to just go in there as Shakespeare and Company. I don't think, I'm not going to be at that level at the beginning. And so I was like, well, let's go to Madrid, Terry and Charlotte needed someone to look after the shop for a month. Basically, they were going to be having holidays, doing various different things. There would always be one or the other of them around to kind of help me and guide me and, you know, teach me what to do. But they needed that extra bit of cover. So I spent a month sleeping in their bookshop, and I learned so much from talking to them about the trade, about what it's like when you're a small bookshop, all the different things you have to do. And I mean, there were various other things I did. I interviewed – there's a guy called Craig who runs a book shop on the island of Santorini. Beautiful bookshop. Craig's a lovely, lovely guy, grumpy, very grumpy man, but, a good egg at heart, and I had a long chat with him as well, and he was very helpful in sort of giving ideas. So the point is, from the start, I was talking to other people. You can't do anything alone. And this is a theme that I want to come back to quite a lot. This is something I always hammer home, is that books are not made by authors on their own. You know, there's a whole team that goes into into book production, and part of that team is in bookselling. And there's so much that happens. And this notion that you can just write something, stick it on Amazon, and it will go into the world, and you will be an author, and people will bow down and accept your content and consume it and thank you and praise you. That will never happen. That's not how books are made. It's actually a much better thing than that, because it's made in a team environment. You know this as young publishers. It's about collaboration, it's about editors, it's about designers, it's about marketing, it's about production, it's about all these different things. So anyway, I moved back to Edinburgh after my month with Terry and Charlotte, and I didn't have any money. Well, I did. I had about five hundred pounds. Sometimes people ask me how, I would like to start a small press, but I don't have any money. I'm like, well, you say you don't have any money. How much money could you get your hands on? Because you might be able to get a few hundred pounds together. You know, like working any kind of normal job, you might be able to scrimp and save or get a loan off a mate or something. So I started with five hundred quid, and I set up Typewronger trading out of the Leith Walk police box, which is a wonderful pop up venue. So Monty, who owns it, is amazing. She did a deal with me where I was going to be renting it every Sunday, and gave me a tariff that was very reasonably priced. And, you know, I could manage with my little five hundred quid start up fund. The reason I knew about the Leith police box is I'd actually done some voluntary work at St Margaret's House, which is where I am now, this is the Typewronger studio that I'm recording from. And I did this doors open day, and I was talking to Cecile at the Edinburgh Tool Library, who was also working at St. Mags' at the time, Oh, I'm looking for a place to, you know, to do a pop up, maybe like a police box. And she said, Oh, the tool library rent the Leith Walk police box every Saturday. Maybe you could rent it on, I think the Sunday is free. And she gave me Monty's details. So, you know, just turning up is, you know, an important part, getting involved, trying things out, talking to people, and the way that I got to that little bookshop was by doing that. I'd also been in touch with Derek and Anna, who owned McNaughtan's antiquarian book shop, and I was working one day a week for them, but they didn't have a huge amount of work for me at that time. I was working the other five days a week at a call center for Ipsos MORI. Yes, that's me. I was on the end of the line phoning you up, asking you how you were going to vote, asking you what your favorite toothpaste was, asking, you know. Be nice to these people. It's not an easy job, I promise you. And if you're doing it, it's because you really need the cash so, you know, be kind. And then they won't call you back. If you're nice to them, they'll leave you alone. It's true. So I was doing that. I was working in McNaughtan's, and McNaughtan's had a little gallery section on the right hand side, which actually had originally been a completely separate shop, and it had its own access door. And Derek and Anna said, Well, we know you're looking to set up a bookshop. Do you want to rent the gallery space? Try it out for a year and maybe with the option of extending to two years, and see how that works. It's like a little pop up. Six years later,we're still there. It's been a great space for us. Obviously, it's been very difficult in the last few years because we had a global pandemic. Not a great time to be running a small business. Most of the new bookshops that have started up since us started up after the pandemic. That's clever, that's smart. That's – if I'd known that it was coming, I would have waited until after it as well, but I didn't. So we were running for about a year before all of this broke, or two years before all of this broke loose. But we got there, you know, and in 2022 I was very pleased to be able to rent this studio that I'm in right now and purchase our risograph machine. And as of 2023 we've been doing risograph prints. We've been publishing booklets. I mean, we've been publishing booklets before and having them printed externally, but we print our own stuff. Now, we have seized the zines of production, and we do workshops. I teach Introduction to Risograph workshops, monotype workshops, image narrative day courses, and an advanced risography class, a lot of these different classes that I'm now teaching, and it's a great way for people to find out about how they can make interesting bits of ephemera themselves and that's kind of it. The main development, the most recent development is that Typewronger became a CIC this year. So our 2024 news is that Iam no longer in control. So there's a board of directors. There's three of us, and so the other two can out vote me, and I don't own the business anymore. It's got an asset lock, so if, for whatever reason, Typewronger gets wound up, then the assets go to a literacy charity. So our mission is very much about doing stuff that is useful for the creative community in Edinburgh, doing a lot of mentoring with would-be publishers, and if you are listening, and you have projects and things, and you want to ask questions by any of this stuff, then – I mean, hopefully I'll answer some of them today. But you can also just come into the shop when I'm working, which is Sunday to Tuesday, or drop me an email to the info@typewronger.com account, and we can arrange a meeting for you to come in and have a chat. There, I was doing little plug. Do you like how I just advertised on the podcast? Is that good?

Annika Cleland-Hura:

That was beautifully done. You've done my job for me, just about.

Tee Hodges:

I'm very slick. I'm very slick. I just keep talking. I know you've hardly had a chance to say anything. I wouldn't let you get a word in edgeways.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Well, it's perfect, because you've answered quite a few of my early questions. So now we can get into the more interesting stuff. So I really do want to get into a lot of the questions I have around community, which you talked about a bit earlier, but just before I get into that, we tend to talk on this podcast to a lot of people who are involved with much more traditional publishing. What do you think the differences are between traditional publishing and small press publishing? And what would you say to anyone who really wants to get into the more independent and small press side of the publishing world?

Tee Hodges:

First of all, I'm going to contradict your question by talking about the similarities, because actually, what a lot of the time people don't understand is that you really need to think about yourself, if you're going to do small press, as a publisher. And you should be every bit on it as your Penguins and your Simon and Schusters. Okay? You need to understand the importance of being businesslike and effective. You need to understand who's getting paid and why and how much, and you need to be fair. So a lot of the time, you'll see people will be like, Oh, I'm just doing this thing because I want to get out into the world. I don't care if it makes any money or not. Oh, I'm just, you know, doing this as a little experiment. Oh, I don't know how much I would charge for that. Maybe I'll price it at this or at that, and all this kind of thing. And I'm afraid that if you come into a book shop with that kind of attitude, we're not going to take your work. And the reason we're not going to take your work is, this is what keeps us alive, and you can't monkey around with it. So it very much has to be the case, if you're thinking of starting a small press, that you do good business, businesslike, proper invoices, percentage discount, all this kind of thing, from the get go. The difference, I suppose, with a small press is the kind of control you can have. So if you're working as part of a huge team, then you're a cog in the machine, right? And what people always talk to about when they say they want to work in publishing, they all want to work in editorial. They all want to be commissioning works. They want to be up at the top and saying, right, this is going to be published. That's going to be published. I'm going to change how this has been done. I'm going to, you know, and all this kind of thing. You won't get in there from the start in a big publisher, you won't have much control over what's going on at all, you know. I had one friend of mine who was a bookseller who went off into publishing, to get a job in rights for a publisher. Wasn't her thing at all. Came back to bookselling, and it's because you get this idea of the kind of level of control that you can have, which in a big publisher, no, you can't, because they're huge, there's a lot of money riding on this. But in small press, you can have complete control. So if you've got a very specific idea of what you want to do, you can call the shots, you know, if you want to publish. I mean, for instance, this little print job right next to me here. This has not yet been cropped along the top, you'll see it's still folded, but this is the All Red Line, which is a literary magazine that was set up by former students at the University of Edinburgh, who'd done similar projects when they were undergrads. And it's now going as a proper little literary magazine. They can decide what their editorial line is. They can decide who's going to be doing the artwork. They work together really well, and then we print it for them. And that kind of level of control is the main difference. And I suppose the other thing, and this is where it's tricky, is the finances. So you might not make your full time wage from your small press. In fact, many people who run small presses, they have other jobs, so they run the small press on the side, in a businesslike way, and in a way that supplements their income. They might not be working full time, they maybe just be working a couple of days on another job, and that's enough when it's added into their small press work. So it can be difficult too because obviously you're much smaller. When you're approaching bookshops and everything, you have to have a personal relationship with every shop. A large publisher sends out brand reps. So I chat to brand reps all the time. You know, Terry will come over from Hachette, I think he's at now, or David from Bloomsbury and John from Faber. And you know, they all come around, and they know me and I know them. They know my shop. They know which of their books will fly. They know which books there's absolutely no point in showing me, because they're not our kind of thing, and that personal relationship means that I'm happy to buy from them. But if you're a small press, you can't afford to employ a rep. You have to do your own repping, and I don't know you, and I don't have a pre-existing relationship with you, so you have to build that. Now at Typewronger I'm always happy to chat to people, but most bookshops, it's difficult because they don't want to have too many individual small presses to pay. I mean, at the end of the month, we have a system called Batch, which you may have heard of, but it's how bookshops pay the big publishers. It's run by the Booksellers Association, and this system allows us to see all of our invoices on the internet. We authorize them, we don't authorize them. We query, we look for the credit notes and all of the admin stuff, and then at the end of the month, we have an agreed sum that is going to leave the bank account. And all goes off in one go. All the invoices paid just like that, whereas with the small presses I sit down and for every single invoice I have to go into our bank account and make a transfer, make a transfer, make a transfer to different bank accounts all the time. The admin is enormous, and most bookshops will not do it because they don't have time. So you really have to convince them that it's a good idea if you want to make life easier for yourself or life easier for the bookshop, and therefore make it easier for you to get into the bookshop. You might want to consider with your small press whether you want to get yourself distributed through, say, Gardners. Gardners is the the main wholesaler. I don't know if this is teaching your granny to suck eggs or anything, but some of you may already be aware that Gardners is the main wholesaler for books in the UK, and if your book is stocked with Gardners, most bookshops will have an account with them, and it will be very easy for them to order it, and that will just go in with their Gardners invoices. Gardners will pay you. They take a percentage, of course, but that's a good way of getting in there, if you say to them, oh, we're on Gardners, they can say, Oh, we can order this off Gardners. Easy, no problem. You know, you have to make sure that you're offering a good enough percentage discount for that to be worthwhile. So a lot of the time you'll see a book that someone's put on Gardners, they'll say, like, 18% discount on retail price. Well, I'm sorry, no bookshop will take a book for stock that is anything below 30%. Otherwise they're just not doing good business. So you want to make sure that the discount – not the discount you're giving Gardners, you'll have to give an even bigger discount, but the discount being offered by Gardners needs to be, you know, 40% or something. And then they're like, oh, yeah, that's a solid book to buy. It's good for our business. It's a cool thing. So that's one thing to bear in mind. If you wanted to get yourself a rep, then you might want to join some kind of consortium. So there are publishers, there are reps, rather, who rep a bunch of different tiny, small presses. The one that is probably best known is, you've got things like the Independent Alliance, with various different sort of small presses that work together, that sort of thing might be useful to you. But be aware that, you know, these kind of groups can have a lot of different publishers in them, and you might not stand out. So getting Gardners is probably more important, and then building the personal relationships. It's a combination of getting books into shops, talking to bookshops, talking to booksellers, offering them a good deal. We love a deal.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

So just to get into the kind of community aspect of it, coming up soon – it will be in the past when this episode comes out, but coming up soon is the Edinburgh Zine Fair. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that community is like and how running that, kind of what that's like behind the scenes.

Tee Hodges:

Yes, well, so I mean moving completely away from Gardners and ISBNs and official kind of small press publishing and getting into the grassroots ephemera, there is a rise in zine culture in Scotland at the moment. In fact, the rise is global, but it is especially prominent in Scotland, and we're very fortunate to have a number of different zine fairs. We've just had Coin Operated Press run a Hallow Zine fair the National Library. Earlier this year, we had the Glasgow Zine Fest, and Typewronger was exhibiting there as a distro, that is, a distributor of other people's zines and also a producer of our own work. And that was amazing fun. Glasgow is the biggest one in Scotland, by the way, so if you're wondering where you want to try and get yourself in, Glasgow is big. Obviously, it costs a little bit of money, but that's because it's a, you know, it's a big fair. Dundee Zine Fest might actually be on the horizons of your listeners. Might be in the future. I don't know when you're going to be releasing this, but Dundee is in a couple of weeks' time. I think it's after the Radical Book Fair. The Edinburgh Zine Fair has been run since 2019 I think, or 2018. It was originally set up by a woman called Rosalind Gibb and we exhibited at it just as a shop. And then a year later, Rosalind ran away to live in England, you know? I mean, people do. And we were like, well, that was really fun. Can we not take over the running of the fair, you know, and keep this going? She's like, Yeah, sure. Why not? So we ran it since, and of course, we ran it in a pandemic. So we did have one year where – we were at a time when you were allowed to go out and about, but we were all wearing masks, and we were being very careful and, you know, sort of ventilation, all this kind of thing. We used to run it at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, because we were getting our stuff printed by Out of the Blue Print, which has a wonderful riso studio there. But since moving into Edinburgh Palette, into, sorry, keep saying all the wrong things, since moving into St Margaret's House, which is run by ScotArt, which used to be called Edinburgh Palette, but they just rebranded, so now it's ScotArt. So we have been running it here. And last year was the first time we were running it at Edinburgh Palette. It's a huge space that we have on the third floor, enormous, over 30 tablers, so bigger than what we used to do. We used to only do 20 tablers. Now we do over 30. And you know, why would you come to the Edinburgh Zine Fair? You'd come to see all the different zinesters and all the different people there, and you come to buy their work, potentially, but you might also come to find out about zines and zining and and how to go about setting this kind of stuff up yourself. People in this community are very chatty, and they're always willing to talk to you about how to go about doing stuff. A lot of the people that are going to be at these events also run workshops and things, and they'll tell you about that, and you can, sort of, you know, ask them when their next things are coming up. I myself will be running some workshops at the fair. So we're going to have, well, this would have been in the past now, so sad. You've all missed it. No, I'm sure many of you knew and came along anyway. But we have monotyping workshops, and we've got creation stations with typewriters and things so people can type stuff up. And prior to us recording, I was showing off our printing press, our little hand press, which will enable people to pull a little print of an Interrobang to take away with them. So that's sort of the thing. Having that kind of space is really important, but it's also important that we're not seeing the same old faces. So a lot of the time you will see people who will exhibit round the different fairs, and that's great, and it's good to have, you know, old hands who know their stuff. But what I really love is that we tend to, for whatever reason, get quite a few people who, it's their first fair, or they've not done the sort of thing before, or they want to experiment, or they want to try out, and we get a huge variety. So one of the things that's important for Typewronger is it's meant to be encouraging people into the creative community. And so having something like the fair, again, it's a way of accessing it. It's also a way of finding out about places like St Mag's, which are grassroots kind of places. A lot of people don't know about this place, because it's mostly just like artists and artists' studios, but they don't realize that you can get involved in it, and it can be, you know, a useful space for you and for the community. So it's a good way of opening it up a bit and getting more folk involved.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Just to follow up on that, you run workshops, and you also have a writer in residence, as far as I'm aware?

Tee Hodges:

So we got the studio, okay, the studio is in St Margaret's House. It is a horrible, ugly building, with the word art stamped on the side. And I bloody love it. It's great. It's our horrible, ugly building, thank you very much. No one's tearing it down. We're staying. But the building itself has a delightfully antiquated heating system, antiquated, but on this side of the building, effective. Sucks to be on that side of the building, but on this side of the building, delightful. And we don't pay any extra for the heating. We pay a flat rate for this place. So I'm only here two or three days a week, doing print jobs, teaching workshops and whatnot. And I was thinking to myself, four or five days a week, there's no one in here, and I thought, Ah, I could keep a poet in there. And just when I realized I could do it, I thought, well, I probably should. So we advertised for a writer in residence, we had over one hundred applicants, and we settled on Iona Lee, who's a wonderfully talented poet and illustrator. And Iona was our writer in residence for several months. In that time, she had access to a warm space with a desk and internet and free coffee. And these are all very useful things when you're a writer and you don't want to freeze to death in your flat, you don't want to pay for coffee in a busy cafe, and you want to have your own alone time and space to get on with your work. Sometimes, with writers' residencies, people do it because they want it on their CV kind of thing. That's not the sort of writer we're looking for. We're looking for a proper working writer who needs a space to get some stuff done. And Iona really fit the bill. This time, we have already been – we've closed applications, by the way, for the current writer's residency, we have been reviewing them, and in fact, we have narrowed it down to five applicants, and we will be getting in contact with one of the five probably tomorrow, or the day after actually. But once this is aired, it will have already happened, and we'll probably have announced to our new writer in residence by that stage, maybe sometime after the fair. I don't know. We've got lots of things going on at once right now. I mean, we always have lots of things going on at once. So, yeah, that's the idea of the residency. Iona did also collaborate with us on a zine, and this is an option for for the writer in residence, if they want to, because she's a talented illustrator who worked with risograph stuff before. You know, basically she came up with a couple of designs, and then one day we just, the two of us, just went in the studio and geeked out with all the different riso settings, making sure that it was exactly as we wanted it to be. I'm a massive fusspot with the sort of technical aspect of all this stuff, but most artists want their printer to be a technical fusspot with all this kind of stuff. So we were able to put together something that that we were both happy with. It was a gorgeous wee thing. Of course, you know, we're a Community Interest Company. We are applying for funding. We would like to be able to pay our writer in residence a fee. We would like to do more of this kind of thing. The state of funding right now is not great, but we can keep going as as a commercial operation for now and just have that option. So if anyone out there is thinking of funding anything, you know, get in touch. Did you like how I'm just hijacking your podcast to advertise everything about the shop? Blatant, absolutely blatant, shocking behavior. That's what happens. You know, if you want someone to be, you know, softly spoken and well behaved, you go to Penguin Random House.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Well, it's been the easiest interview of my life, so I can't complain. So I'm just wondering if you have any final words of advice for anyone who wants to work in publishing but isn't so interested in the traditional side of things. Any final bits of wisdom that you can give to our listeners?

Tee Hodges:

Get out there, get involved. And you can do a whole publishing job in miniature on a simple cut and fold eight page zine. If you don't know what that is, Google it. Make that. Do that. And you can put together something like that, even on a photocopier or something, for a very small amount of money. We're talking, you know, ten or twenty quid, as your startup cost. Sell it professionally, and then save the money that you've got from it, don't just fritter away down the pub, and reinvest it in making a little booklet. And then when you've made a little booklet, make more little booklets, then make bigger booklets. And then maybe you can think about commissioning a big print job from a proper printer, and you can build it up and build it up and build it up very much in the same way that I built up Typewronger from standing on the street in front of a police telephone box selling my own second hand books. You just have to get involved and go for it. And you probably won't make huge amounts of money that way, but you might make some, and it could end up being a viable career, and it will be fun regardless.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with the upcoming zine fair.

Tee Hodges:

It's a pleasure. Yeah, I think it's gonna be fun. It was last year. I think it will be this year too.

Annika Cleland-Hura:

Thank you for listening to Inside Publishing. I've been your host, Annika. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps us reach more people. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on social media, or send suggestions our way at podcast.syp@gmail.com.