Call for Contributors: A New Zine in the Works!

When you make zines, it is something you can never just quit forever. I’ve been feeling the itch again since Apopheniac Communiques, which I put together with help from friends last spring. Since that was created entirely with a public call for content put out on the internet and it worked out marvelously, I think I’ll do a similar thing again.

Contribute!

Here’s where you come in. Please send to me your poetry, your prose, your fiction and non-fiction, your research, your collated documents, your notes, your drawings, your paintings, your collages, your sound art, your music, and your video. If you send it to me, I will figure out how to use it.

The only qualifications are:

- It is awesome

- It is your original work (define “original” how you like, but let’s say it must at least qualify as fair-use under US definitions)

- That you’re willing to give me one-time publication rights to include it in a Creative Commons-Attribution-Share-Alike work (which will be assumed if you submit it).

- That you understand that if you submit your 80K novel draft or something equally long, I will most likely include it with some remixing of my own in order to make the zine physically possible. :)

That’s it. Please email submissions to adam@poszu.com.

This is the greatest part for me. I love being able to say to friends, acquaintances, and strangers: “I know you do awesome things. I would love for you to share some of them with me, so that I can share them with more people.” If it wasn’t for your submissions, there would be no zine. But because of your submissions, I get to make a zine. It’s a beautiful thing.

Format

I put together Apopheniac Communiques in classic zine-style, pasting it all together with print-outs and photocopies, but with this new zine it will probably be more electronic. The format will depend on the submissions that I receive, but I’m starting with the goal of making an electronic version to go along with the printed version.

This is why I included non-printable things on the list above, like sound recordings and video. Part of the challenge for me will be figuring out how to include diverse media. There will definitely be a black-and-white, ink (or toner) on paper version of this zine. I will have to figure out how to translate music and color images to this form. Will there be QR codes? Will a DVD come with it? Will there be a small circuit that plays lo-fi sound? WILL THERE BE HOLOGRAMS?!?! There will probably be an electronic version that will give me some options, but at this point, I have no idea how it will all work. But it will be awesome to figure it out. So send me whatever.

Other Details You May Care About

I don’t sell the copies of the finished zine for profit. If I collect money, it is only cover printing costs. Otherwise, I give them away free (last time, I gave them all away free, and just paid for the printing myself).

I tell you this to explain why I can’t pay your for your submissions, even though I feel that is an important goal for publishers to have. I will, however, provide you with copies of the zine. Additionally, I will provide you with print-ready files of the entire zine, which you may use yourself to reproduce it and sell it if you like, according to the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share-Alike license. The reason I like making zines is to make them. If I wanted to sell zines, I would do that, but I don’t, and so I won’t.

Other questions? Email me. And do spread this call around, if you wouldn’t mind. We got the perfect number of submissions last time, but secretly, I would like to see what I will do if I get a hundred submissions. Give me a challenge of amazing proportions!