Survey Results about Photo-Zine

Upon designing my second personal photo-zine, I made a survey form. To learn about, whats are the community of photo-zine looking for. The survey form consists of 7 multiple choice questions. I emailed to the people I know, who loves photo-zine like me, I posted to the photo-zine/photo-book community Facebook page too. Until today, I got 22 responses.

By looking through the results in pie charts, It kinda gives me some insights of what the collectors and the publishers' thoughts. And I think the results may be beneficial to all of the photo-zine makers too, therefore I decided to create this post to share the results here, and gives some of my thoughts based on the results. Do leave comments for me if you have your thoughts to share with me.



22 responses may seem to be too low to makes any conclusion. if you haven't done this survey and you willing to help, you may continue to fill in here: https://goo.gl/forms/GcZPTP4AN8rzR9qJ3

And the results goes here...

In fact, my sampling size is too narrow to say photo-zine is collectible even majority say yes. Most of the survey candidates make zines, to us that is for sure photo-zine is collectible. But whats about the photo book's authors, designers, and publishers? Perhaps they might have different thoughts. 

I really love the zine format to deliver stories in series of photographs, but what ponders me was, does A5 size 40 pages really sufficient? 72% say Yes, 27% was not so determined.  If I was the one who takes this survey, my answers will be "Well, it depends" too. I tend to use dual zine design to deliver my story because I have more than 40 pages of stories to deliver. That triggers me to make a dual zine design.  It was a great discovery to me, as dual zine gives me lots of ideas to deliver the story differently. 

I believe quality vs content is a very difficult question to answer Yes or No, but I was surprised majority pick content over quality. But I agreed that content must be prioritized, design, and quality is to assist.

I wonder whether people will love to have a full contents preview or not, in fact, the majority thinks that few pages of the preview are sufficient. 

Questions about Pre-order, I don't know whether pre-order may help me to determine how many sets of zines I need to produce, probably not for my case. But pre-order helps me in terms of collects numbers of order and ship them as a batch. I usually hit the post office on the next day after I received the order. But it may give me troubles (even though I am still happy with it) if I have to travel to the post office every day.   

Based on the results, I realized who have trusted your works may do the pre-order. Therefore, I think one or two weeks of the pre-order period is acceptable.

To me, this is a very important question to find out, who are the surveyees. I believe the photo-zine market is niche, it forms by the community of the photo-zine.  We make zines, we distribute and we collect from others too.  Similarly, goes to photo books collectors, I love photography, I have a dream to publish one, therefore I collect them, hope that I can learn from them. But this doesn't apply to movie and music. Think about it.

I am glad I leave an optional column to ask for suggestions to improve, and I actually get the valuable comments and suggestions. There is one thing missing from my survey question, price! But I received more than one mentioned about keeping the price low because after all, it is a zine!

I would like to thank everyone again, who took the survey. It probably takes you a minute or two, but it really does helps me, and I hope this post helps too!

XOXO,

Hean Kuan