Queer Zest Zine Fest

In the summer of 2024, shortly after I began making comics seriously, I was on the hunt for comic and zine events in central Ohio and online. I dug up a listing for the Queer Zest Zine Fest from an old event listing site and went to check it out. The site was out of date, but the social media and the discord server were still active, and I found posts suggesting they had at least tried to run events recently, whether or not that had actually happened. So I reached out and offered to help them update their website. From there the rest is history.

Into the Flames

I joined the QZZF team just to update the website at first, but my role at the fest quickly snowballed. I had worked in live events previously, and had some virtual event experience from working at a church in 2020, but it was my first time really working in a decision-making capacity for an event. The majority of the original team of organizers had abandoned the project for one reason or another since the inaugural QZZF in 2021, and now the core team is just me and one person from the original team. I'm now responsible for the website, newsletters, schedule, and moderating/recording live events.

I made a lot of mistakes that first year. Because it was just Laura and I most of the time making decisions, I severely overestimated my capacity. The original event had been just a few days. But I figured since we weren't paying money for a space, that the event could be as long as we wanted. We hosted a full week of live events on Zoom, and I moderated almost all of them - some even while I was working! It was an exhausting undertaking. We ran into plenty of problems, some of our own making and others just incidental to running an event and coordinating so many people at once. But we learned a lot, and when it came time to plan the 2025 zine fest we had a lot of notes on how to improve.

Lesson Learned

Plan like you have no help

From my background of organizing corporate events, I assumed money was the biggest limitation of event organizing, and I underestimated how much I needed to worry about labor. I ended up signing myself up for way more work than I could really handle and exhausting myself, because the help I thought we'd be able to get never materialized (and when there was help, the volunteers often cancelled at the last minute).

Don't rely on technology you don't understand

In the first year I was involved in the fest, I signed us up for two email services: Substack and Brevo. I used Substack to send out general newsletters and Brevo to communicate with vendors and workshop hosts. We've since dropped Substack for ethical reasons, but Brevo we left because I could not get the service to work like I expected. At one point, the email I had scheduled to go to rejected applicants also sent to the financial aid segment, leading to unnecessary confusion for our accepted applicants. After the fest I moved to a different service, EmailOctopus, which I now use for all email communications, and I haven't had the same problems since. In the feedback from the first year, an attendee suggested we use Gather.Town, a service for proximity-based voice chat designed for conventions and corporate events in the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. I set up a trial account and that went fine so I promoted it with the applications, but in the end it turned out I had misunderstood the payment tiers and we weren't able to use the service after all. It was a nice idea, but even if we had been able to afford it, training all the vendors and attendees on the software would have been more trouble than it was worth.

Ask for Help

While I think it's best to plan the core functions of the event like only the core team can work on it (in a situation where there's not much of an established community supporting it), I also think it's good to ask for help, especially with the periphery stuff. With zine stuff especially, a lot of the people in our communities don't have a lot of money, but they can offer things like time, expertise, and resources. In our second year, we were able to partner with an organization to print and distribute a community zine with contributions from the vendors at the fest, and they've agreed to do the same for us this year. The zine is a great souvinier for participants, and we have it listed as Free/Pay What You Want on our ko-fi to help cover the festival costs in the future.

Up Next...

We're still learning and growing, but the fest is starting to stabilize. We're repeating a lot of things from last year, like the community zine and the month-long format, with events only on the weekends. I think in the coming years we'll have to restrict the number of spots available for live vendor events - they make up the majority of our events at this point, and with so few volunteers it really strains our resources to let anyone have an hour long slot. I'd also like to connect/reconnect with other virtual event organizers - it's something we talked about and sort of did in the first year, but we weren't able to maintain those relationships over time. If our funds look really good at the end of this year, I'd also love for us to do a mini-grant of some kind? It's tough out here for a lot of people and I want us to be able to give back.

Are you thinking that event organizing could be for you? Please join our team at Queer Zest Zine Fest and take some weight off my back, but if you don't want to do that, start your own event! There was a boom of virtual zine fests in 2020/2021 for obvious reasons that has died down a bit now, but they offer some incredible opportunities that irl events can't: global community, no physical costs or commitments for organizers or attendees, no health risks for disabled participants, and more. QZZF isn't necessarily a huge money-maker for our vendors, but it's a wonderful community building event, and I'd love to see more events like ours (or even completely different!) pop up on the scene. And let me know if you start an event so I can check it out!