Help:Zines
This help page provides details on how to develop and organize Fanlore's large collection of articles documenting individual fanzines. See Help:Fanworks for general information about how to create a Fanlore article on an individual fanwork.
How do I name a zine article?
Like other fanwork pages, the title of a zine page should be the same as the title of the zine.
Disambiguating zine articles
However, some titles, such as Between Friends or Captain's Log, are used for more than one zine. To differentiate between these pages, include a parenthetical phrase when you name the page. Depending on how many pages share the same name, you may need to be more or less specific:
- Title (Fandom zine)
- Title (Fandom gen anthology)
- Title (Fandom gen anthology by So-and-so)
- Title (Fandom newsletter)
- Beyond Antares (Australian Star Trek: TOS zine)
Which template should a zine page get?
Every zine page should have an infobox template.
If the zine is a collection of fiction (or sometimes a mix of fiction and poetry or fiction and non-fiction, etc.):
If the zine consists of one fannish novel (or novella, novelette, or short story, depending on the zine's page count):
If the zine is a collection of mainly poetry (or poetry and art):
If the zine mainly consists of art (coloring book, comic, art portfolio, etc.):
If the zine is a letterzine, print newsletter, APAzine, or club zine (except for club zine fiction anthologies):
If the zine is a fandom or canon resource (concordance, compendium, episode guide, adzine, credit zine, reviewzine, index zine, etc.):
If the zine is another type of non-fiction (meta essays, fan scholarship, puzzles, cookbooks, etc.) or is otherwise labeled non-fiction, but not clearly a newsletter, canon resource, etc.:
If the zine doesn't fall into any of the above categories:
Which categories should a zine page be assigned?
If you use a zine template on the page, it will be automatically included in one of the Zine subcategories listed below, depending on the template:
- Anthology Zines
- Art Zines
- Newsletters & Letterzines
- Non-fiction Zines
- Novel Zines
- Poetry Zines
- Resource Zines
If you use the generic zine template, it will be included in the main Zines category.
For zines that contain more than one type of content, you may also manually add other categories. For example, a clubzine anthology that contains fiction and poetry should get the Anthology Zine template, but can be manually assigned the Poetry Zines and Club Zines categories.
Miscellaneous categories to add manually
- If possible, you should always add either a fandom category, a multimedia zine category, and/or an actor zine category. For example, a zine about actor Mark Hamill should get Star Wars Zines and Actor Zines.
- Since club zines, con zines, and tape zines, don't have their own templates, these categories will always need to be added manually.
- If the term gen, het, or slash can easily be applied to the zine (i.e. if it's a media fanzine), please add one of these categories or a fandom-specific subcategory (e.g. Category:The Professionals Gen Zines)
Zine category structure
- Anthology Zines
- Club Zines
- Novel Zines
- Poetry Zines
- Non-fiction Zines
- Newsletters & Letterzines
- Resource Zines
- Actor Zines
- Multimedia Zines
- Multimedia Gen and Het Zines
- Multimedia Slash Zines
- zines by individual fandom (cross-categorized under the fandom)
- Zine Publishers (cross-categorized under Organizations & Corporations)
What content should I add to a zine page?
- publication details like publisher, author, editor, date and place of publication, illustrators, size/format, distributors, etc.
- contents of the zine: contributors, stories, articles, art, etc.
- images of zine covers or sample illustrations
- whether the zine or any of its contents were popular/influential/infamous
- whether the contents were republished elsewhere
- controversies or amusing anecdotes about the zine's publication or reception
- how the zine compared to other zines published in the same fandom or at the same time, whether it was part of a trend, etc.
- quotes of reviews or links to commentary on the zine
- anything else relevant
Notes on zine images
Fanzine covers, tables of contents, sample art, and other zine-related images can be uploaded to the wiki for purposes of illustration and example. Zine covers especially provide a lot of valuable information about the zine itself, as well as trends in the making of zines: title, date, editor/contributors, font, binding method, cover art styles, details about the life cycle of the physical copy, etc.
Images on the wiki should follow our image policy and copyright policy.
Categories for images
Because all images on the wiki should have a category if possible, you should assign the appropriate fandom category to zine images. In general, images that can be identified as relating to a specific fandom should be given the fandom's category (or most specific subcategory) and a date, if known. See also Help:Categorising Guidelines. Zine covers for multifandom zines can be assigned Category:Multimedia Zines or one of its subcategories.
Examples:
- Image:Fireandice1.jpg gets Category:Blake's 7 Slash Zines
- If a fandom does not have a specific zine subcategory... you upload a scan of a Due South newsletter, but Due South does not have a newsletter or a letterzine subcategory; you assign the image to the main DS zine cateory, Category:Due_South_Zines.
- If a fandom does not have any zine subcategories... you upload a scan of a Magnum PI slash fanzine, but Magnum PI does not have any zine subcategories; you use the main fandom category, Category: Magnum, P.I.
Check out the Uncategorized Files page to see images that need a category.
Related help and policy pages
- Help:Starting a new page
- Help:Fanworks
- Help:Categories
- Help:Templates
- Fanlore:Identity Protection
- All Fanlore policies
- Fanlore:Sitemap explains Fanlore's category structure