A few incoherent thoughts about fandom zines.
I finished my last fandom zine piece about a month ago. It was for the Hetalia World Stars 10th Anniversary Zine, which is a lovely idea in practice, but I have far too many words to say about the organization of the zine community by the mods. Of course, I knew going into the zine that there would be bumps on the road: every zine has its problems, and every first-time zine mod has to start somewhere. However, I have many reasons why I will not be participating in any more Hetalia zines unless I go insane and try to run one myself.
So that got me thinking about the state of fandom zines at this time. The time of this writing is fall 2023, after Twitter rebranded to X, after Mastodon and the fediverse started garnering more attention as an alternate form of social media, and after a whole lot of other things that happened in 2023 that I won't mention. Zines are in a tough spot right now, in my opinion. Twitter was the main social media where they'd spread the word about themselves, find their creators and customers, and so on, but now that Twitter has rebranded to X and a whole lot of bullshit is going on, doing the things that they wanted to do for their zines is a lot harder now. And as far as I can see, Mastodon still doesn't have a large enough audience to really replace X as The Zine Site.
But that doesn't even scratch the surface of the problems inherent to zines themselves. Things like the anti-writer bias in favor of artists, finance mods turned scammers stealing zine profits, shipping mods who don't ship their products for years on end. I'm a writer, and I've been both lucky and wise enough to mostly avoid the people who don't actually do their jobs, but I'm tired of zines. Finishing my last zine (for the foreseeable future, anyway) with the Hetalia zine isn't exactly a great note to end on either.
There's only really two things that I would actually want to write at length about in the zine scene. Sure, scammers and people who don't do their jobs are still out there, but there's enough said about those that I don't need to talk about it. What impacts me the most as a writer who's been doing zines for three years straight now is the anti-writer bias and just plain old burnout.
So let's begin with the anti-writer bias. This is most apparent in zines that evaluate applications to choose who to participate in the zines. Most Genshin zines say they'll pick 20 to 30 artists. That's great. Plenty of artists for a zine. But then when you as a writer scroll down to see how many writers they'll accept, the number is more like 5, 7 if you're lucky. 10 may as well not even be a zine anymore. What gives?
I understand that writers take up more space in a zine, and in physical zines, pages matter. Artists only need one page, maybe two, but writers with a word limit of just two thousand can span 10. I get that it can get expensive, but if you're adding 10 more artists when you could add one more writer, then I have to ask, why? Why not add another writer? Not to mention that now you're taking on the costs of compensating 10 more artists as opposed to just 1 more writer. Not to mention that zines are increasingly becoming art-focused instead of writing-focused like how they originally began (and still do continue to be, just not in fandom zines).
Maybe I'm just upset because I'm a writer. But if you think about it, the predominant forms of fan creations are fanart and fanfiction. I'd reckon there's about the same number of fanartists and fanfiction writers in a fandom. Allowing more fanartists to participate in a zine at the expense of fanfiction writers just doesn't seem fair to me. Sure, you might have 100 something artists competing for 25 artist slot, but then you also have 100 something writers competing for 5 writer slots. It hardly seems fair, but that's the case with fandom zines these days.
I'm not going to talk about the problem of fanfiction writers being undervalued in fandoms because let's be honest: all creators are undervalued in fandoms. But I've had enough with talking about how zines are unfair to writers, even if it's not the most coherent argument. It's not supposed to be an argument. It's just a complaint.
I'm sort of losing steam as I'm writing this, but I think I can discuss the second reason fairly quickly before I get tired of writing too much about complaining.
The second problem with the current zine scene is just burnout. Sure, it might just be because people don't manage their time well enough and take on too many responsibilities, but if you keep tabs on zines, you'll see that it's always the same handful of artists in every zine, the same handful of writers in every zine. I'm lucky to be able to count myself as a writer in so many zines across so little time, but the thing is that you get tired of participating in zines so much. Your hands start to hurt, your mind can't come up with new ideas, and the zine themes get less and less interesting. That's me right now: hands that hurt, no ideas, and none of the currently running zines are that interesting to me. Zines have oversaturated themselves to the point that the people they are waiting for can no longer participate.
I've quit zines for now because of burnout. I don't know if or when I'll start applying for and participating in them again. Honestly, with all I've seen from the zines I've participated and the zine scandals that go out on Twitter, I don't know if I want to participate in a zine that I'm not running myself. Maybe I'll just go back to how zines were originally: just a place for a group of likeminded individuals to put together a nice little book.