Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

I read the instructions and saw that zines were not allowed but on further reading saw that fan fiction was allowed. So, I entered all the fan fiction zines I was reading. After a year, someone removed all the zines from my shelf and deleted them from my challenge. I was disturbed and posted a rant. Someone pointed out the rules and I realized that there are two definitions of the title zine. Originally, zines were hand printed, almost home made comic type things started by sci fi nerds in the 20s. Over time they covered every obsession known to man, people wrote articles, fantasies, rants, discussed favourite comics, movies, science advances. You could find zines on any subject. They were usually on cheap paper, small page count, stapled together, handed out to friends. Over time and with better equipment they got a bit more fancy but not much and had a limited audience. Then in the last sixties, with Star Trek, along came fan fiction and fan fiction zines. Produced by women, not male nerds, these were works of art. Desktop publishing and Kinkos allowed novel length stories or anthology zines filled with stories to be produced with almost professional quality. The paper, the binding, the artwork that accompanied the stories was equal to anything produced by professional publishers. The quality of the writing was also equal to much that passes for fiction as published by the big publishing houses in their Harlequin Romances and cosy mystery fiction churned out by women all over the world almost like a factory. The cost of a zine can be 30.00 plus postage from wherever the publisher lives...that is more than some hard cover books these days so you know a collector has to judge them worthwhile. As a reader who owns a personal library of 10,000 books, whose four year old Kindle has 700 books on it, I feel qualified to judge quality in what I read and fan fiction holds up on par with at least 50% of everything published these days. The only draw back to fan fiction zines is accessibility. It used to be that a zine would have an original print run of 200 and if that sold out another print run would be made. These days zines are printed on demand. A smaller print run would start at a convention and advertised on flyers and websites and when they are sold, future zines were printed as requested. Older zines can be purchased on ebay and on some sale websites. Fan fiction zine publishing is a huge presence in the world. Several libraries in the USA and Canada are collected zines and archiving them as a valuable cultural phenomenon. These days much fan fiction is free online and fewer zines are being produced but they are still being produced. This is not a small thing. Mostly produced by women fan fiction has been written about in Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women..two books about the phenomenon of women the world over writing fiction and sharing it. The fan fiction zines I entered were in a single fandom and I own 700 of them. The word count in any one of those zines equals a harlequin romance novel in size and many far more. Multiply that by hundreds of television shows and movies that have zines written about their characters and the practice is seen in its entirety as enormous and ground-breaking. To many who have never seen a zine and are ignorant of their existence or value..my ire at having them dismissed as less than a graphic novel cannot be understood. Online alone there are a hundred thousand stories in a thousand fandoms, fan fiction zines deserve to be acknowledge as the books they are. Limited editions but books nonetheless.

I love zines. I own many of them.

But they are not considered books on Goodreads.

I found that out the hard way and I should go back and troll through the librarian's manual to find the section that said fan fiction was okay. Since fan fiction is only found online for free or in zines at cost....I do not understand how it could be listed as okay. Heck, maybe I imagined seeing the words...unlikely but possible...not as young as I once was.

Here:

"These items are books:
(...)
* book-length fanfiction which is complete (no WIPs, please), and self-published. Note that we do remove fanfiction at the author's request." (https://www.goodreads.com/help/show/1...)

I find fanfiction published online and freely available very different from fanfiction published in a zine, just as a short story published in an anthology or collection is very different from a short story published in a magazine.

Thank you for finding it and reassuring me that all my marbles are intact. It appears Goodreads has conflicting ideas on fan fiction zines. An anthology of complete short stories is not okay but a novel is okay??? but removed anyway because it is a zine and zines are not allowed. Perhaps the instruction manual needs to be updated and clarified. There is just so much dreck online because it gets posted so quickly without an editor and the age of writers can range from ten years old to ninety. A publisher of a zine either is or has an editor and some judgement for quality (not always a guarantee...you can find dreck in a bookstore and not all zines are worth reading either). You can buy zines as ebooks these days and just download them but as a book person I love holding paper. Very few zines have WIPs...each story must be of standalone quality...which is not to say that it cannot be a series of stories that, if bound, would not form a novel. Zines are full of sequel stories but you don't have to read both to enjoy each...it is just that it is nicer.