How to Make a Fanzine

4 hard questions to ask yourself before starting your fanzine

Making a modern, high-quality fanzine is hard work. It requires managing 10-40 people over at least 6 months, making and sticking to a budget, tracking communications, resolving conflicts, working within constraints, and delivering a quality product to paying customers.

Not everyone is cut out to do this. Them’s just the facts. Here are some difficult questions to ask yourself before you embark on your fanzine-making journey.

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, you should think hard about whether you’re capable of making a fanzine. You can, of course, ignore this advice, and still make a fabulous product. I will happily applaud you.

1. Do I have (at least) $500 to burn?

As with any business venture, making a fanzine means you should be prepared to invest and lose money. There are many costs you need to cover upfront, i.e., before you have received any payment for the fanzine.

2. Am I ready to tell myself and others no?

A successful fanzine leader must know when to say no, how to say no, and to say no. Running a fanzine requires you to be honest with yourself and others about what you can take on, what you think they can take on, whether you think they will deliver, whether an idea is possible or worth executing, etc.

Consider: Making a fanzine means managing 20-40 people for 6+ months. It means building a budget, a timeline, applications, and more. It means making judgement calls about exceptions, changes, alterations, what information to share, how to share it, whether someone has broken the rules….

If you cannot say no when it counts (i.e., if you prefer to be a people pleaser), you will most likely end up with a @!$#ing disaster on your hands (angry participants and customers, low quality content, unshipped products, etc.).

3. Do people want to buy my fanzine?

Running a successful fanzine means running a fanzine that people want to buy. Making sure there’s a market for your fanzine will also save you from losing money and winding up with 200 boxes of fanzines and merch overwhelming your living room with no one to buy them.

4. Is my fanzine idea unique, or does it have a unique value add?

When you come up with a fanzine idea, always consider: Why should people buy your zine if there are similar zines available? Depending on your fandom, there could be 1 or 100 other fanzines going on at the same time as yours. There is a very real possibility that one of those already-in-production fanzines is the exact same as your idea.

Do your research. Make sure you’re not replicating a product (yes, a fanzine is a product), and if you are, figure out what your unique value add can/will be.

Another way to increase the uniqueness or appeal of a fanzine is to see if any popular artists and writers are willing to commit to participating upfront. These are often called "feature contributors."

Guide: 4 hard questions to ask yourself
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Planning your fanzine

Before you run an interest check, it's good to outline the key points of your fanzine. This will help people determine if they want to buy and whether they can participate in the fanzine! This includes naming your fanzine, building a budget, and creating an initial project timeline.

Questions to ask yourself at this stage of the process include:

Folder: Planning your fanzine
Guide: Planning your fanzine
Spreadsheet: Master planning spreadsheet
Spreadsheet: Cost calculator spreadsheet
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Gauging interest in your fanzine

Interest checks are polls or surveys that help you gauge whether there are enough people interested in buying and/or contributing to your zine that it’s worth making!

You should run an interest check before committing to making a fanzine. In combination with a cost projection based on the results, your interest check will help you determine whether you can produce a fanzine without losing money.

This means you should also have a rough (but not necessarily final) idea of how much it would cost to produce your ideal fanzine, including merchandise. This will help you determine whether the level of interest in your zine (and willingness to buy your zine at a certain price) will cover production costs.

Remember: It's okay to walk away from an idea! It might not be the right time, or it might be too niche. In the former case, perhaps you can do the project at a different scale or decide to do it not for profit.

Guide: Interest checks
Sample Twitter poll language: Purchaser/participant interest check
Google form template: Purchaser/participant interest check
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Selecting your contributors

Contributors are the most important part of your fanzine. Without contributors, you have nothing to put in your fanzine and nothing to sell!

First, you need to choose your contributors. This usually means opening your fanzine up to applicants:

Folder: Applications and evaluations
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Selling your fanzine

These documents provide resources that will help you figure out how best to sell your zine.

Folder: Selling your fanzine
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Shipping your fanzine

Last but definitely not least, these documents will help you get the actual products you will mail people and then avoid a shipping nightmare.

Folder: Shipping your fanzine
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So you want to know the asshole behind this colorful, fun-loving, not at all tedious, scary, or spreadsheet-heavy resource?

I am Meta, aka metaandpotatoes, a sentient potato who likes to smash words together until they break. I also really like spreadsheets. And creating things that people are happy and proud to own.

I have headed 2 fanzines, and received multiple remarks from contributors that each was the smoothest/easiest fanzine experience they have had:

Onigiri Miya: The Unofficial Cookbook

Onigiri Miya: The Unofficial Cookbook is a 76-page Haikyuu!! fanzine featuring art, recipes, and writing by 12 collaborators. Among the contributors was a social media moderator, who managed the Instagram, Tumblr, and copyediting process.

851 units were sold. The project grossed roughly 43,000 USD and netted roughly 15,000 USD, with 45% of the profits split among contributors.

Profits could have been increased by offering a group order discount for international customers and/or charging slightly more ($12, instead of $10) for U.S. shipping. The latter would have helped offset the losses suffered by keeping shipping affordable for individual international buyers.

Rebirth Dilemma

Rebirth Dilemma is a 126-page Neon Genesis Evangelion fanzine featuring 36 collaborators (7 writers, 28 artists, and 1 musical artist). While the fanzine was initially managed with one other person, I took over the project entirely after contributors were chosen.

189 units were sold. The project grossed roughly 7,000 USD, with 500 USD donated to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Profits were limited in large part due to a rookie move: Charging too little for shipping.