About a year and a half ago, No Starch Press got in touch with me about publishing a print box set of my zines. I have two kinds of zines right now:

• 6 free zines (which are the first ones I wrote)
• 6 zines that cost $10-$12 each (the newer ones)

This set is basically a really lovely box set of all of the free zines, plus Bite Size Linux :). Here’s what’s in the box:

• Spying on your programs with strace
• So you want to be a wizard
• Networking! ACK!
• Let’s learn tcpdump!
• Profiling and tracing with perf
• Linux debugging tools you’ll love
• Bite Size Linux

I’m really happy to get these zines into print, and that I can still give away all of the zines in the box away for free on my website – I asked them to write it into my publishing contract that I could still give them away, and they did :)

what it looks like

Here are the front covers of the zines in the box. We got colour covers illustrated for all of them, done by Vladimir Kašiković.

We had the idea to make the back covers a rainbow and I’m delighted about it:

There’s this fun “this toolbox belongs to:” detail on the bottom:

where to get it

It’s in a bunch of physical bookstores, and online! Here are a bunch of links to places you could get it:

Directly from me:

• the Wizard Zines store

North America:

• No Starch Press’s website (you can use code WIZARD for 25% off)
• Amazon: USA, Canada, Mexico
• Powell’s
• Barnes & Noble
• Chapters (Canada)
• Alibris

Europe:

• Amazon: UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, etc
• Waterstones

Asia/Pacific:

• Fishpond (Australia)
• Angus & Robertson (Australia)
• Amazon: India

More:

• Wordery (free worldwide shipping)
• Book Depository (free worldwide shipping)

why I’m doing this: to learn about print!

I don’t necessarily expect to make a lot of money from this box set (I get 10% or less of each sale, vs 97% for sales of my other zines online) but that’s not my priority with this project – I did it because I love the free zines I wrote, I wanted to make a really nice print version of them, and I wanted to learn about how print works and how traditional publishing works! I’ve already learned a lot about how publishing works and it’s been super interesting.

People have been very excited about this print project so far which has been really nice to see! Next I want to make it possible for people to order print copies of my newer zines, and I’m trying to figure out how to do that now. (if you have a print company that you’ve really loved using, let me know!)

I’m super happy about the print quality and if you get the box set I really hope you like it!