Zinedom

You may be looking for The Zinedom Archive Project.

Synonyms:	Fandom
See also:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Before the internet, zinedom was shorthand for community where fans consumed and produced fiction, poetry, and art in the form of print zine.

The term was also often interchangeable with fandom.

Earliest use of the term, at least in media fandom, was in 1981.

A fan in 1995 wrote:

Post '91-er perspective. Though I didn't read zines until 1992, SW never really went away for me either. But for those of us not in zinedom, there was no way to keep in touch with other SW fans. There was no Internet, no America Online, no comic book lettercols. So, I, like a lot of other people, went around believing I was the only person who gave a Bantha's behind about SW. There was nothing to draw me or other fans together! SW fandom was so underground in the late '80s, not even folks in other fandoms knew about it, and I knew quite a few active Trek fans.

Examples of Use

1981

Star Wars, also, has inspired a plethora of fan fiction, and Battlestar: Galactica zinedom is growing - even the TV show M*A*S*H, with its compassion and pain underneath a veneer of humor, has a large following of fans with their own zines. Almost anything that people are drawn to emotionally will have stories - even if those stories are only daydreams.

More recently, many long-time sf fans, especially in zinedom, considered the rise of Trekdom to be the greatest Barbarian Invasion of them all.

We take great pleasure in introducing new writers to zinedom, in future issues we will have SHOWCASE — for the purpose of introducing those new writers. With this exposure and your feedback they will hopefully be encouraged to continue with their writing.

On the one hand, I was reacting to some statements as if saying "I like my fandom best, it's this and that and the other thing" was equivalent to saying "And the rest of you are turkeys, too." And on the other hand I felt that some of the people in the discussion (audience/panel) were really presenting that message, whether they meant to or not, in their statements of belief. (Credo in unam fandom, unam zinedom...)

There have been a great many accusations in 'zinedom recently, of one writer stealing (copying) another writer's work.

1982

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for zinedom, then A.E. Zeek should get one for her article on the Other... I don't think Leia will turn out to be the Other, if for no other reason than STAR WARS is a "boys fantasy", and girls/women' don't have much of a place in such.

We tried to catch everything we could find, and in some cases more than three pairs of eyes did the hunting, but alas, the one absolute of zinedom is, never say there are no typos in a zine.

In our eagerness to be free of male domination, though, some of us made our role models just a little too perfect in too many ways. Plot credibility began to slip as the stories became little more than showcases for Mary Sues. Then as the years passed, and everyone got a little older and less naïve, editors and readers demanded more substance from the stories they were getting. Writers were suddenly required to delve into reality, where not everything was neatly divided into compartments and not every problem could be solved on the last page. Newcomers had trouble with this, as well as criticism from their peers, no matter how constructive. More adult themes appeared, and their acceptance caused the hard-line conservatives to withdraw from active zinedom. Even fandom, it seems, has a "Moral Majority."

1983

But sing no sad songs for us or Pegasus. Jackie says that this essay, which she had originally asked me to pen as a kind of "State of Affairs and Zinedom and Life, the Universe and Everyfan" has turned into a downer of an epitaph. I like to think of it as a "transitional flow" piece... I don't really think of my life today as a downer—I don't think any of the three of us do. But we are most definitely older, we most definitely have more pressing commitments than we did ten years ago and the hours in a day get shorter every year. As the Red Queen told Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get some where else, you must run at least twice as fast that!" And not only do our feet hurt, but somebody tied our shoe laces together... But heck, I guess even hobblers can be Truefen...

1984

This proliferation of zines has necessitated a growth in the number of women writing K/S; not all of these writers have an equal amount of talent, which, considering the fact that zinedom is an amateur effort, is not only understandable but to be desired. If we were all producing professional quality stories with each effort, there would probably be no fandom since it seems that once authors begin to write for fun AND profit, the profit motive relegates fun, which is what fandom is supposed to be, to the proverbial back burner. Part of the intrinsic charm of zinedom is that not everything is perfect; in imperfection (and the amateur status) there is a great deal of freedom to explore characters and situations, to, in fact, bend, twist both plot (of course, who would want to disrupt a good K/S sex story with plot??) and characters.

1986

Being a neo-fan in zinedom and a neo-neo to the letterzine world, I feel a little like the lady who started to tiptoe across a puddle and found herself up to her ears in a pond. I have no idea what I am doing, but I'm going to try.

1989

Wow! After reading the first ARTFORUM, I suddenly get the feeling there's a lot more zinedom out there than I ever imagined. I think I'm going to learn a lot from this publication.

It was 3 months AFTER the SW comic folded that I discovered zinedom and specifically SW zinedom in late 86! I was stunned and amazed that all this was going on. I jumped in head first and have been at it ever since (I still feel neoish, it really has only been 2 1/2 years).

With illoing in SW zinedom I've been able to reactivate my sleeping skills further by treating my assignments as 'pro' assignments as much as possible. And SW zinedom has given me the 'spark' to try the pro route again now with much higher observational/technical skills to better be able to translate what I 'see' inside my mind.

1992

Congratulations on, at last, achieving zinedom! I know all that you guys went through to get this first issue out, and I think it looks great in spite of all the near-disasters you encountered along the way!

1995

I wish that the so-called dino fans can just accept the fact another generation of fandom has arrived, and we don't have to fall in with what's been the "party line." Conversely, we newcomers have to realize that these guys did keep zinedom going through the years, and for that they do deserve respect.

1999

However, my understanding of the "Courts of Honor" scandal is exactly what creeps me out about the zine world.

Actually, that was an isolated example of something that has happened very rarely even in zinedom, and the reality was quite a bit more complex than I think Mary Ellen managed to convey. I have more compassion with the participants in that scandal than I do with zineds who regularly, year after year, crank out volumes of schlock to earn a few bucks and feel like a Big Name Fan (BNF, a term that once had wide currency in print fandom, believe it or not).

2000

... zinedom exists in a shady zone under copyright law, and in a few months' time, I'm going to have to answer to the Australian Taxation Office for the business that goes through my credit card merchant account, and the stock that goes through my hands, no matter what it is. It's getting scary enough that I know I need to be careful, before a day comes when I find myself trying to explain to the government about zines, and slash.

2003

AWS has no control over The Presses' policies of what you can or can't do with your story. We only agent the zine. But I happen to know that it IS their policy that all stories revert back to the authors upon one year of publication, which is pretty standard throughout zinedom. If you want to go post your story, go post it! If you want to roll it up into a candle and light it, you can do that, too.