Before I list my replies, I just want to assure everyone that I am not trying to piss on anyone's parade. I'm just saying that a fanzine does not need the kind of organization that a professional publication does because it is a very different beast.
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Originally Posted by ArmySGT.
Failure to plan is a plan to fail.
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I wasn't suggesting that no plans at all be made but in the case of a fanzine, all the corporate speak and ra-ra girls in the world do not work because you have a collective of people contributing what they are interested in, not a heirachy that dictates what is wanted.
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Originally Posted by ArmySGT.
What I am suggesting is not a hard and fast rule. It does make the job of editing and producing something possible in the short period of 30 days, even if it is on the scale of a 4-6 page fanzine. On this scale that is two full page articles and 4 half page articles. Six writers a Quarter.
If you have worked on a project then you know how important deadlines are. Usually you have more than the required number of writers and artists as people for any number of reasons don't turn in their work on time.
Telling the writers what you want up front goes a long way toward good relationships. Stops that "He said, He said" finger pointing.
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Certainly and this is certainly true for projects done by organizations of most sorts. However, a fanzine is not organized in the traditional sense, it's more a collective making a collaborative effort.
Writers contribute what they are interested in at any time of the publishing cycle, the editor/s sometimes have more articles than they can fit into a current issue and when they don't they can use those articles submitted for previous issues to bulkout the current issue.
Fan writers don't work to a deadline in the traditional sense, they write because they want to not because they are required to
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Originally Posted by ArmySGT.
Let's face it if you have a writer that turns in good work, but only on their schedule and only when they want to, that just does not work out in the long wrong. If all your writers are like that then your fanzine is not going to be around long
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Fanzines work differently to mainstream and professional publications, they often do work exactly as described by ArmySGT above and many of them have been very successful with it.
The two fanzines I quoted before were mentioned because they are entirely fan made, others such as the Unspeakable Oath - as much as I enjoy it - aren't suitable models because they are backed by a well established publishing house no matter how many fan contributions are published by them.
Both Demonground and Protodimension have worked on nothing more than a small group of fans working to put the articles in order and publishing them as a pdf issue. They exist soley on article contributions from fans and those fans submit articles based on what interests them.
Demonground ran from 1999 to 2002 with five issues in 1999 then they moved to a quarterly format. That's nearly four years and the issues grew gradually larger so it was not unusual to have anywhere from 40 to 80 pages per issue.
Protodimension has been running since 2009 and the latest issue (Number 12) was about 90 pages from what I recall.