Having Fun with Fanzines

News Media Commentary
Title:	Having Fun with Fanzines
Commentator:	Roberta Rogow in "Writer's Digest"
Date(s):	December 1992
Venue:	print
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Having Fun with Fanzines is a short article by Roberta Rogow in the December 1992 issue of "Writer's Digest." It was written under the topic/section "Markets in Close-Up."

The article is accompanied by an uncredited cartoon of Spock very earnestly using a typewriter.

The article itself is a fairly standard promotional piece explaining fanworks to the wider public. What makes it interesting are three things.

One is the very early date of the article's publication.

Another is that it is written to address fans as potential fanfic writers.

Thirdly, this article was referenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley in some of her later troubles.

Excerpts from Rogow's Article

Your story on Captain Kirk's childhood has been rejected by yet another SF magazine. You enjoy writing stories that involve your favorite movie and TV characters, but editors don't want to buy them.

Don't despair! There are hundreds of noncommercial magazines that may find your manuscripts to be just what they are looking for. These privately printed publications are called fanzines, (a combination of fan and magazine) and they welcome such stories.

A fanzine can be anything from an eight-page newsletter that sells for $1.50 to a lavishly illustrated, perfectbound anthology of fiction, poetry and art that costs $30. Publication is often sporadic. Initial printings number between 100 and 1000 copies, with printing costs financed by sales. Rarely do fanzines turn a profit. Some are published by clubs, and include reviews and commentary on science fiction/fantasy books and films, as well as stories and information about club members.

Curiously, while the borrowing of characters from films and television series is accepted, using characters from literary works is not. Sometimes an author will invite fans to "play in my garden," as Marion Zimmer Bradley has done. Others prefer to keep their fictional world closed. Before you write a story involving characters or incidents from a previously published work, you must get written permission from the original author.

You'll probably begin writing fanzine fiction because you have fallen in love with a universe -- a TV series or film whose characters and setting have gripped your fancy. Perhaps your favorite show has been canceled, or a cherished film has no sequel. You might feel the urge to provide more adventures for the characters, to present "missing scenes" which explain key points in plots of specific episodes of a series, or to delve into the past or future of the characters. Fanzine fiction allows you to continue to explore the life of a favorite character. It's a form of entertainment -- for you and your readers.

Referenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley

In February 1993, Rogow thanked a fan for her praise:

Thanks for the kind words about my article on fanzine writing in Writers' Digest, December 1992. I tried to give a reasonable and reasoned explanation of how to write for fanzines. Most of the people I talked to who read the article liked it. I have heard that a few people were afraid that I had opened a can of copyright worms no one wanted to open. So far, no lawsuits.

The lawsuits, at least the threat of one, was already peculating, as Rogow's article was something Marion Zimmer Bradley specifically referred to it in her March 1993 letter to "Writer's Digest" as part of her explanation regarding the Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy.

In March 1993, six months after her letter to Darkover Newsletter, Bradley wrote a letter to Writer's Digest.

Writer's Digest titled the letter in bold, "KEEP OUT OF MY YARD.":

Roberta Rogow's "Having Fun with Fanzines" (Dec.) is inaccurate in its reference to me. While in the past I have allowed fans to 'play in my yard,' I was forced to stop that practice last summer when one of the fans wrote a story, using my world and my characters, that overlapped the setting I was using for my next Darkover novel. Since she had sent me a copy of her fanzine, and I had read it, my publisher will not publish my novel set during that time period, and I am now out several years' work, as well as the cost of inconvenience of having a lawyer deal with this matter.

Because this occurred just as I was starting to read for this year's Darkover anthology, that project was held up for more than a month while the lawyer drafted a release to accompany any submissions and a new contract, incorporating the release. I do not know at present if I shall be doing any more Darkover anthologies.

Let this be a warning to other authors who might be tempted to be similarly generous with their universes, I know now why Arthur Conan Doyle refused to allow anyone to write about Sherlock Holmes. I wanted to be more accommodating, but I don't like where it has gotten me. It's enough to make anyone into a misanthrope.

Fan Comments

Roberta Rogow has an article the December issue of Writer's Digest. It's called "Fun With Fanzines." In it she mentions many people who've contributed to this publication -- even me! If you ever wanted to introduce a mundane friend to the world of fandom, Roberta's article is a good way to do so!

The December, 1992 issue of Writer's Digest contained an article by fandom's Roberta Rogow entitled "Having Fun with Fanzines." In this article, Roberta mentioned my zines (Above & Below and Rerun), among others, as places to send Beauty and the Beast and Quantum Leap fiction. I was pleased, since I'd received precious little in the way of submissions to Rerun 11, and my deadline was nearing. More than that, I was hoping to tap into the WD audience of B&B fans who might be interested in reading Above & Below. (I have about 150 copies of a reprint of the first issue which was bootlegged extensively back in 1990 and I've since found almost impossible to sell...but that's another story. I think I only ended up getting three orders out of the perhaps 25 inquiries I received.)

Within a week of the article's publication, I began to receive requests for my submission guidelines. I (naively) thought that with all those neatly typed letters of inquiry I might just get some good material. And I did. I received a poem and a short story that were included in Rerun 11 (published in May of this year). Two others had potential, but by that time my deadline was past - and something that needed extensive rewrites just wasn't going to make it within my limited time frame. Unfortunately, the vast majority of submissions were proof that the "authors" still had a LONG way to go before they attained any kind of"professional" stature.

Most who sent in submissions were virtually neophytes to the writing game. What initially fooled me were those letters of inquiry. Perfect in every way...as though they had been copied - copied from Writer's Digest? Some of the manuscripts were also set-up to professional standards, as though copied from a book/article as well. But when it came down to sifting through the original work of each author it was evident that talent and experience were things Writer's Digest just could not impart.

Example: one author didn't know the difference between a script and prose, and knew virtually nothing about setting up dialogue and proper punctuation. (Alas, he was also the only person to write back and thank me for the time I'd spent editing his story and giving him a few pointers.) Or the author with the inflated ego who said, "Here's my story. I know you will enjoy it and publish it." No, I didn't! He'd written a story with Sam and Al - but he knew virtually nothing about Quantum Leap.