🍑 We love a round number

Train Songz currently has 932 annual subscribers for a quarterly print zine, 585 years after the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and 26 years after Al Gore invented the internet.

Do you want to be 933, 934, 935…? Subscribe. Train Songz is almost entirely reader-funded, and we wouldn’t exist without your support.
$11 per issue is like 66% of the cost of a beer at a Billy Strings show! Add in the cost of two niche and esoteric stickers catered to our shared special interest, and you might be looking at a full domestic tall boy in a major arena…

If and when we cross 1,000, I’m going to make exclusive hats, shirts, and stickers with a special “Train Songz 1,000” logo for that group, sold at cost, as a thank you for hopping on board this print media train and allowing me to assemble an amazing group of zine contributors and live out my print media dream. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done. We are having fun. Thank you again.

look at how much this fella loves round numbers

We will not celebrate every round number. If we’re lucky enough to get to 2,000 one day, I’m not gonna do a gimmicky merchandise drop for that. But 1,000 is a fun one, and I will be gimmicking it up accordingly.

Note: When you subscribe at any point in 2025, you get all four zines from 2025 as soon as they come out. If you’ve already ordered a single issue of the first two zines of this year, that means you’ll get a duplicate upon subscribing, and I encourage you to share that with a friend, or hand it to a stranger at a show. It’s minor inefficiencies like this that make Train Songz what it is. Don’t fight it. Don’t question it. Wabi-sabi.

💸 If I subscribe, where does my money go?

Subscribing to get all four zines in 2025 costs anywhere from $33 to $99, and I recommend at least $44, the true cost of breaking even.

Let’s break it down: We’ve spent a little over $11,000 making the first two zines of this year, with the largest costs split fifty-fifty between contributor fees and printing + postage + stickers.

Say we have 1,000 subscribers paying $45 each. That’s $45,000 of revenue for the year.
We produce four zines per year, so that’s a budget of $11,250 per zine provided by subscribers. (Divisionheads, check me on that one?)
By spending $11,769.91 on the fifth issue and $11,275.68 on the sixth issue, we’re putting every last subscription dollar and then some back into the zine, in hopes of making the best possible finished product we can for y’all.
Additional money made from sponsors, individual zine sales, and merchandise sales is cushion that allows us to pay for basic business expenses, BMFSDB web fees, some basic marketing like passing out free zines at shows, and mailing out one free zine to those who need it for every 10 sold.

A peak into my twisted mind…

Yes, I could be a more shrewd businessperson and actually spend a few thousand dollars less on the zine to make something that I’m still pretty happy with and pocket some money. However, that would mean less contributors and less pages, the absence of which would both negatively impact the final product and, I think, your willingness to stick with us zine after zine, year after year.

I’m not trying to be a nonmaterialistic saint by foregoing making a few bucks on the zine as it exists right now. I believe — as does the other unpaid fella I started the zine with, Promontory Paul — that skipping out on short-term gains in favor of making something built to last is a good decision to set us up for the long run. (And a decision we’re privileged to make because of existing day jobs that pay the bills, our not having major responsibilities outside of ourselves, etc.)

📬 Zine delivery timelines

Now for some delivery updates and estimations:

If you ordered a zine before April 15, it went in the mail on Monday, April 21, and should be delivered in the coming days. If you believe your zine is lost, please reach out to conductor@trainsongz.net on May 5, which is two weeks from mailing, and we’ll check your address and send a new one.
If you ordered a zine between April 15 and April 24, it will go in the mail today.
If you applied for a free zine, we’ll be sending one out for every 10 we sell starting next Friday. (We’ve gotten 124 applications for this issue so far.)
If you order today and after, we’ll mail it as soon as we can. We mail in batches every Friday, or sooner if we have the time.

Zine story reshare szn

ain’t no one tapping through all that, chief…

If you’re on Instagram, you may have noticed a surge of train_songz Instagram Stories of folks getting their copies of “Doin’ My Zine.”

I’d like to thank everyone who reshares on their story, because not only is it fun for me to see that you got your zine, it’s a helpful way for new people outside of the train_songz bubble to discover the zine.

I should mention that I can only see Instagram Story tags from public accounts. So if you tag @train_songz in your story when you get a zine and want to be reshared on my story, check your account’s privacy settings and set them to public for the day.

🛍️ Train Shop

Lastly, as I said, the merchandise store for this zine will open on May 9. That will be separate from any hypothetical “Train Songz 1,000” stuff. I will email you when the store is open, if you are a subscriber or got an individual copy of the sixth issue.

That’s all I got today.

Be wary of dirty rounders,

The Conductor

Smokestack

🚂 We're gonna need a bigger train...