The FAAn (Fanzine Activity Achievement) award winners were announced March 20. The complete voting statistics have been published here.
GENZINE
- Portable Storage, edited by William Breiding
PERZINE
- This Here…, edited by Nic Farey
SPECIAL PUBLICATION
- Daangerous Visions, edited by Sandra Bond, Rob Jackson and Pat Virzi
FANWRITER
- Mark Plummer
FANARTIST
- Ulrika O’Brien
LETTERHACK (HARRY WARNER, JR. MEMORIAL AWARD)
- Jerry Kaufman
COVER
- Littlebrook #11, cover by Ulrika O’Brien
NUMBER ONE FAN FACE
- Nic Farey
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All well-deserved, though I confess to having a sweet spot in the Special Publication category for Rob Hansen’s excellent and well-edited BIXELSTRASSE, though perhaps that’s due in part to having found fandom when living in Los Angeles. Once upon a time very long ago, I cruised those blocks of Bixel Street and had fantasy flashbacks of fannishness.
Bixelstrasse meant a lot to me because I could finally read the accounts of LASFS histories and fusses that had been passed down second and third hand by oldtimers I knew in the club, but usually with all the passion of that moment drained out of them.
Like you, I also took a run up Bixel Street years ago to see if I might pick up some of the ancient vibrations.
Bixelstrasse struck me as one of the best yet of Rob Hansen’s delvings into fan history — so much so that I actually created a trade paperback version. I’ve done this privately for a very few of the TAFF Library selections (mostly so that Rob himself could have nice chunky print copies for the egoboo shelf) but am wondering about making the Bixelstrasse paperback more widely available. What does the panel think?
I think that once you’ve gone to the effort of formatting for print, that making print copies available on POD, either through Amazon or another service, is just sensible. You don’t know who will want it. And I know at least one person who, having started this so that they could personally have a physical copy of a passion project, has sold many thousands of books (mostly Kindle books) on Amazon and discovered an entire second career.
David Langford: If you need to take the temperature of the market you could launch a Kickstarter where all contributors of the minimum get a paper copy. Or you could go direct to what Alison suggests. The investment of time to set it up is probably your main obstacle.
Seconding what Alison says. If it’s formatted anyway, you might as well offer a POD version via Amazon, Lulu, Ingram Spark or another provider, just in case someone wants a physical copy.
@David Langford: I would gladly purchase a printed copy.
Thanks, everyone. The work on Bixelstrasse is indeed done. I’ve been suffering from a maybe irrational reluctance to move from the TAFF Little Free Ebook Library approach to POD sales, where to benefit TAFF I’d need to build in a profit margin, keep records of sales and pass proceeds to the fund — a longer-term investment of time. I’ll discuss all this with Rob Hansen (it is after all his book) and report back soon.
I’d buy a copy of Bixelstrasse. I don’t like reading long things on a screen.
I’d buy a copy off BIXELSTRASSE if you put it on Lulu.
Reporting as promised: Rob Hansen is entirely happy to have the POD paperback offered for sale with all proceeds going to TAFF. We’re now discussing a few small tweaks — e.g. Rob has text corrections which I also need to insert in the ebook — after which the printed Bixelstrasse will soon become available from Lulu.com.
Early LASFS fandom is one of my favorite rabbit holes to fall into — ever since discovering it through references in Zombies of the Gene Pool. I would love to buy this.
The tweaks to the Bixelstrasse trade paperback are complete, there’s now a map on the back cover, and it’s available from Lulu.com. With, as previously noted, all proceeds going to TAFF.
@ David Langford
Like a Dell Mapback mystery!