Semiprozine

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Synonyms: semi-pro zine
See also: fanzine, prozine
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Short for "semi-professional magazine", a semiprozine is a category of publication eligible for a Hugo award. According to Fancyclopedia, semiprozines started appearing in the 1970s, and the category was added in 1984 because previously semiprozines had been snapping up all the "best fanzine" awards.[1]

Under the current Hugo rules, one of the following must be true for a publication to be eligible:

  1. The publication pays its contributors and/or staff in other than copies of the publication.
  2. The publication was generally available only for paid purchase.[2]

A fan in 1999 wrote:

So the "true" fanzine editors looked down their noses at fiction fanzines, though fiction fanzine editors often felt superior because they were aspiring to something professional. For this reason the goofy tag "semi-prozine" arose in 1973 among fiction fanzine editors -- I helped promote that embarrassing term -- meaning a fanzine with a professional wannabe personality. The term was temporarily adopted as a Hugo Category, but was misunderstood to mean a fanzine with a large distribution & mostly only Locus ever won it. The term seems finally to have died a deserved death though it remains that the fiction fanzine editors dislike the term "fanzine" & most would just call themselves small press magazines, period. [3]

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