Hey Barb, a fandom history question. How did Buffy fanzines work? How did they circulate and what killed them? Thanks.
I’m not sure that there ever were any Buffy fanzines, outside of maybe a few one-shots. I seem to recall somenone selling print copies of their fanfic on Ebay or something? It caused a big kerfuffle because Buffy fandom was full of newbies who had no idea print zines were even a thing. Fan fiction started moving to the internet in the 90s. When I got into online BtVS fandom in 2001, fanfic was just moving from being published on email mailing lists to being published on Livejournal and various web archives. Before that, it had been mainly found on Usenet. Web archives were generally either an archive for a specific mailing list, or the personal site of a particular author. There were also some curated sites, like All About Spike, Better Buffy Fics, Shrift’s Buffy Fiction Archive, and so on. They might be devoted to a particular character or pairing, or just general fiction. (And then there were huge multifandom archives like FF.net.)
The zines I was involved in were for a different fandom, (Elfquest) and by the time I clocked out of the zine game around 2003ish, my writing group was about the only one in that fandom still putting out a paper zine. All the other groups had gone virtual years before. In the heyday of EQ fandom back in the 80s and early 90s, there was an official fan club magazine that came out… quarterly, I think? It was advertised in the comic, and then all the various local fan clubs would advertise their fanzines in the official zine. So you’d peruse the list of fan clubs and the descriptions of their zines, and if one looked interesting you’d write them and send your ten bucks or whatever, and they’d mail you the zine. Most clubs had yearly subscriptions which would entitle you to four zines and the right to create one or more characters in the club setting. I believe this was actually a fairly unusual setup in that the creators of the comic were actively promoting fan fiction.
Other pre-internet fandoms I got zines for, like Doctor Who and Star Trek, if you put together a zine you could take boxes of them around to SF conventions and sell them in the dealer’s room, or you could advertise them in APAs (amateur press associations) devoted specifically to zines – basically, every month all the members of the APA would mail the coordinator of the APA like, thirty copies of their list o’ zines. The coordinator would collate all the contributions for the month, and then mail them out to all the members, with maybe an editorial or something attached.
You can see why the advent of the internet killed print zines – although the final product is very nice, producing one is an expensive pain in the ass. Most zine editors were lucky to break even.
I think there were around 40 Buffy fanzines . You can read about them on Fanlore https://fanlore.org/wiki/List_of_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_Fanzines
Fanzine production continued well into the mid 2000s and they are still being produced in small quantities. You can read about the history here. .https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanzines