The Merryish and Mysti thread: profit in fandom

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Title:	The Merryish and Mysti thread: profit in fandom
Creator:	yonmei
Date(s):	September 3, 2003
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	fiction and profit
External Links:	The Merryish and Myst thread: profit in fandom
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The Merryish and Mysti thread: profit in fandom is a 2003 post by yonmei.

It was written in response to Dear Disreputable Zine Dealer an open letter which addressed Agent With Style's business practices regarding fiction and profit, and other things.

The Post

merryish did an open letter as an LJ entry in response to a letter she'd had from a major mediafan zine agent/publisher, Mysti Frank. Mysti has had a semi-bad reputation in media fandom for years as someone who sells poor zines at an exorbitant markup. (There are many other complaints against her on the merryish thread, but the only things that I can speak to of my own knowledge are the aforesaid semi-bad reputation, plus the fact that she requires at least four pages from a contributor before they get their free copy (which is why I've never contributed to any of her zines, simply because I prefer editors who follow the fannish tradition of sending a free copy to all contributors), plus the fact that, as I discovered the first time I picked up a copy of one of her own zines, they tend to be glossy trash: on average poor-quality fiction (sure sign of a not-good editor) with vast amounts of page wasted on white space.)

One of the complaints on the thread was from lanning, about the scale of Mysti's profits from zine agenting and publishing - enough to underwrite the mortgage on what sounds like a pretty nice house. Mysti responded here (she didn't get the hang of the reply-to function for quite a while) to say that her partner worked full-time, she didn't make that much money from zine agenting, she had a lot of expenses, she worked damn hard, she did not (as another poster said) exploit free fannish labour.

The issue of profit in fandom has always been a thorny one, and it's one I've been kind of reluctant to talk about, since I have myself made profit out of fandom. Not much, I admit. But some. For starters, anyone who publishes a zine makes a small profit if they have any sense - and I've published zines a fair bit. You charge enough to cover your copy costs, sundries like staples and so on, and if you do it a lot, add in a bit for wear-and-tear, and add on enough to make sure that there's enough in the kitty to pay for the copy costs of the next zine. Sometimes this gets awkward: a fannish acquaintance who was agenting one zine for me had a major cashflow problem and couldn't pay me what she owed me for several months. This kind of small profiting is generally considered acceptable, and though most fannish publishers make a point of specifying that they are non-profit, anyone who wants to keep publishing will keep making sure that they charge enough to have enough over to do the next one.

I'm a writer. I've written over a hundred stories, and while some of them were published the not-for-profit way (sent out on the circuit, posted on a mailing list) many of them were published in zines.

I expect to get a free copy of any zine I get published in: my tribber's copy. I don't care how short the story was, it's just as likely I'll do a long one next time, and I don't get more than one free copy even if mine is the longest story in the zine. This kind of profit is also deemed acceptable.

I've been bribed to write a story. (The editor of a zine, to which I had already sent one short frivolous story, had a fiver left over from a UK trip, and sent me it with a card saying "We loved your story but from you we expected more angst... how about it?" and I was utterly charmed, simply because it was so unexpected and the note was so nice and hey, I can always do angst...)

I got a free holiday once because of my stories. (The trip to Escapade in 1995, paid for by a collective of fans who (even eight years later, I can hardly believe it) wanted to meet me enough to give me money for a plane ticket to California: and I'm assuming that the only reason was my writing...)

And once when a zine was agented by fannish publishers who were sent a master copy, xeroxed and bound it and charged their standard price, they took their percentage and gave me the rest. The publishers are out of business now and the zine is out of print, but I got over 200 dollars, magic money which I spent when on holiday in Boston a few years ago. (Boston has many bookshops. I had an international disaster of a visit: bought so many books they had to be sent home sea-mail.)

So I've profited out of fandom. And the reason I am detailing this now is because, though I can see some good reasons to criticise Agent With Style, the blanket "She makes a profit! She shouldn't DO that!" isn't one of them. Mysti Frank runs a small business, working from home. It appears to be a fairly profitable one, judging merely by her sales at the cons which she has been at which I have also attended, and also by her evident success at postal sales. Any small business, run over a number of years, is going to acquire a number of dissatisfied customers. I have no idea who's right and who's wrong in the various disputes outlines on the merryish thread. I don't deny that the zines she publishes herself are poor-quality glossies, but that's not a crime, or if it was, too many zine editors could be charged with it.

Mysti Frank sounds very shifty when she writes about her profits as a zine agent. She's been attacked for sounding shifty. But I don't blame her for being shifty: I have myself before this always been extremely cautious about admitting to the various ways I have profited financially out of fandom, small though they are. I'm being open about this now partly because I'd like to discuss this, the issue of profits and fandom, running a fannish business, making money out of what you produce.

I don't like the way Mysti Frank runs Agent With Style. But I've bought from her at cons, because she has so many zines on her tables that I wanted to buy. (None of them were her own zines, for the aforementioned problems of white space, etc.) I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with someone making a profit out of doing business in fandom - whether that business is agenting zines or publishing them: and as a writer, I've self-published quite a few times. Running a business badly is not good: running a business dishonestly is really not good (and both charges are alleged against Mysti in the merryish thread, I do not know how accurately) but running a business to make a profit is, in a capitalist society such as the one we live in, simply what people do. Criticise capitalism as a system, absolutely. Shun people who bring the system into our noncapitalist world of fandom? But the system is there: we pretend to keep it out only by an elaborate system of defences similar to that basket full of money by the exit in Valentine's home in Stranger in a strange land. Mysti's a capitalist. She runs a business. Criticise her for doing it badly, but not for showing a profit as she does so.