The 2021-2022 Zine Creation Kit:
A guide to making professionally produced fanzines for COVID-19 times

Welcome ✨

This guide began as a stop-gap to explain what may have changed in the creation of fanzines, post-COVID. However, as we kept working on it, we realised there is a lot of knowledge that has been picked up which is not really documented anywhere in an accessible manner. So here it is, our version of “common sense”, or “good zine sense”, combining experience with the formal training we are lucky to have from real life.

I guess now the question is, who are we to write this? We are zine mods and zine participants. The count is above 30 zines now over the past 4 years, split about 50/50 with modding and participation. We have been head mods, emergency mods, invited onto mod teams, worked on a project which made over 800 sales... we’ve been through some pretty crappy situations, including money theft... but we are still here. Because we think it’s important. Mostly, because zines are fun!

Zines can be large or small, simple or complicated. Overall, they are an expression of something, and there can be as many ways to make them as there are to run them. The “good zine sense” in this guide aims to impart what we think is a solid foundation in an accessible way and give you information on how to develop your own judgement.

So you have been linked to this guide, maybe you came here via search, or it could be something else. Thank you for giving us a chance, and we hope you learn something.

Main authors

Calamari-san (contact through Zine Town or Fan Events Hub Discord; DMs ok but you will get a longer answer via email)

Ray @flux_fiction (my DMs are a void they might get buried sorry!!!)

Individual modding guides marked with a 🌟 are stable.

Items marked as 🔰 are suggested start points for beginners, they contain concepts which will need time to develop.

Markings of 🧰 are suggested for more experienced as they contain info you might add to your toolkits.

A kind suggestion: As this website contains well over 20k of text by now, it might be useful to use the search bar.

Thank you for your attention!!

Closing

For further information, you should be able to find it by searching up some of the terms we have used but not sufficiently explained (e.g. “managing expectations”).

A lot of the guides that exist at the moment rehash all the same topics in slightly different ways. This is ok. Now as the zine scene gets bigger and more established, a lot of roles have become conceptualised, and they are missing stories. What purpose do so many roles have? What does an Art Mod really do? Maybe it’s time for other types of guides that don’t yet exist. We gave a them a first attempt as well.

You can agree or disagree with what is written.

You are welcome to take screenshots of this guide and post wherever you like, we have chosen to use a Creative Commons license to allow people to make adaptions while also protecting the work.

You can take a screenshot as a starting point and post it with information about your own zine-making methods around it. If you send us a link, we will add it as an extra resource in the guide. (I think we will keep hinting this. How are there so many zines yet so little documented infos for them...)

We would be the first to say that there’s still more areas that can be expanded upon. Actually, since this guide ended up as just general information for how to run collaborative passion projects, it would be nice if this guide can end up helping you teach us how you make your zines!

A thanks to everyone who’s contributed information to help shape this guide. Some of them are, in alphabetical order: 99nzhe, Asteria, Blue, Justice, lia_baldacci, Luna Chai, Marge, nini, Silvermoon, Sonder, tempural, Ruby, zxny; and others.

An incredible amount of thanks to the wonderful and patient proofreader-slash-content reviewer, birdeatfish, for their eyes on the first version of this guide (check out their free to download, original Streets Of zines! A wonderful role model for the current space of zines~).

Finally, we are so very grateful to you for your interest in reading our... 20k words guide(? Thesis? Book?) Our contact details are provided for any comments or questions.
Any errors are our own.

If we didn’t get to something... guess that means someone needs to write another guide.