i feel like lots of zines don't actually pay attention to the quality of the work first and foremost. instead they look at work, but then weigh that against how popular the person is because that will drive sales and preorders. and whenever smaller creators say something like "it's hard and motivation crushing because of xyz" more popular people are like "hey it's not that bad!!! just try!! i didn't try to be popular! it just happened!! but if you keep trying it will happen to you!"
I mean, a lot of the people who get chosen are incredibly talented people. I don’t dispute that at all!! I do recognize pretty much every creator I ever see accepted into zines, and 99% of the time I already follow them for the quality of their content!
It’s just tough out here for writers because writing takes up so much more space than art, so there’s usually fewer writers featured to start with. So while you may have 50 artists, you might get 15 writers. So it makes us much more competitive with each other, which shouldn’t be what it’s about. It should be about an opportunity to make something amazing for people to experience and hold onto!
But I can’t deny it’s frustrating and disheartening. It does make fandom a little more bittersweet than I would like. But it’s kind of interesting? In the older days of fandom, zines were almost exclusively Not A Thing™ because people were too worried about copyright infringement, and all content was just free content solely for enjoyment of the fans on the internet. It was a community of sharing instead of purchased work. And while I do own a few zines myself because I like supporting the people I follow, it’s just…. things didn’t used to be like this in fandom? And it’s very odd to me to see how it’s changed. It almost feels like the disparity between “zine-worthy content” and the fandom is growing to be a wider and wider rift as time goes on, and projects like this become socially acceptable within our closed circles.
Quote:
But I can’t deny it’s frustrating and disheartening. It does make fandom a little more bittersweet than I would like. But it’s kind of interesting? In the older days of fandom, zines were almost exclusively Not A Thing™ because people were too worried about copyright infringement, and all content was just free content solely for enjoyment of the fans on the internet “
In the olden days zines were Very Much A Thing™. In fact for 30 years zines were Pretty Much The Only Thing™ because it was the only way to get fanfic. Fans worried about copyright, but that didn’t stop them from charging money for the zines.
On Fanlore we have over 8000+ pages about fanzines. We have pages and pages about Fandom and Profit. We have meta about fanfic, fanzines, feedback and…. well, take a look.