How to judge a book by its cover

A zine I made for my son’s 4th grade class

Hey y’all,

Yesterday I spoke to my son’s 4th grade class about publishing and book design. I’m a professional — I have spoken to thousands of people at a time for tons of money, and I don’t think I’ve ever sweated a gig more than this one! 😂

To try to show them that “all publishing is self-publishing” and books are just fancy zines, I spent a good portion of my Saturday making a batch of zines for them:

I started out talking about how I got interested in writing and how I’ve been a published author for twelve years. (Longer than they’ve been alive!)

I drew them a diagram similar to this one (from an old talk) of how traditional publishing used to work vs. the various ways it can work now:

Then I passed out their zines. Many of the students immediately unfolded them to see how they worked, so I took a detour and explained how to make one.

By this time I was getting a little flustered by all their questions and comments so we read the zine out loud together: