Wizard Zines Takes Its First Step Into Print

Julia Evans’ Wizard Zines is making the leap from home printing to a real print run. For the first time, the zine series is offering a physical edition: 400 copies of Help! I have a manager!, printed in full colour at a Montreal print shop and shipped directly from Evans' home. Orders close September 6, with the batch going out around September 7–8, 2020. Shipping is free worldwide wherever Canada Post delivers.

The decision to handle fulfillment in-house is deliberate. Evans explored outsourcing to a fulfillment company but chose a more manual approach for this initial run, citing the "flintstoning" philosophy of starting simple. Shipping a single zine by letter mail from Canada to the US costs roughly $3, making free shipping viable. This isn't the first time she's handled distribution personally—a 2016 Indiegogo campaign involved shipping 100 zines, complete with hand-written addresses, which she does not plan to repeat at this scale.

The higher cost of the chosen print shop, Photosynthèse, was justified by noticeably better print quality than cheaper alternatives tested during experimentation. Doing the shipping herself also allows for custom touches with the envelopes and a laser printer that a fulfillment service likely wouldn't accommodate.

What You Get and What It Costs

  • A print copy of Help! I have a manager! on high-quality, full-colour paper
  • A PDF copy of the same zine (normally priced at $10 on its own)

The print edition is priced at $16. If you've already purchased the digital version, email [email protected] for a discount code toward the print copy.

Shipping Details and Limitations

All zines ship via first-class letter mail from Canada without tracking numbers—an approach Evans compares to UDP: if something goes wrong, recipients can email her and she'll send a replacement. Delivery to the US should take about a week; overseas shipments take longer.

Orders are limited to one copy per transaction to keep the manual process manageable. Teams can order individually for each member, and arrangements can be made for bulk orders of 50 or more copies to a single address by contacting [email protected].

If the run sells out by the deadline, the plan is to reprint in the future. A successful first print run would likely lead to a more scalable fulfillment process beyond the current "400 zines from my house" model. The zine remains available as a PDF at wizardzines.com for those who miss the print window.