renegadepublishing | Renegade Publishing Manifesto (Reply)

WE ARE RENEGADE PUBLISHING.

We are a not-for-profit guild of fanbinders — publishing in extremely limited edition fannish works, including fanfiction, meta, original fic, zines, and other works. We are a transformative community connected by shared values, shared goals, shared work, and shared stories. We value fanfiction and fanwork in all its forms, and our fannish culture’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

We bind fanfic and other underground writings into physical books. Members work self-directed, selecting works to bind individually, and may or may not offer commissions for binding services. We build a physical archive book by book, zine by zine, pamphlet by pamphlet, collected on our shelves, gifted to the author, exchanged as gifts among each other or given to friends.

We consider publishing to be a political act of resistance and self-determination that makes an unequivocal statement about the value we see in these endangered, underground works.

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We bind for the following reasons:

◊ To make a demonstrative statement on the validity of “fic” in general (and fanfic within that specifically) as a newborn genre of literature that has really only come into its own in the last 15 - 20 years.

◊ As an act of anti-capitalist resistance, participating in the traditional gift economy of fandom. This creates a movement of decentralized, anarchistic, hardcopy fic distribution.

◊ To preserve fandom history and works for future generations. These books won’t blip out of existence by politically-motivated, puritanical updates to a corporate terms of service.

◊ To disrupt preconceptions about what is valuable and worthy of being memorialized in print, much less published in a fine edition.

◊ To stand against censorship in any of its forms. Most of the books contain subject matter some
people may find objectionable on various grounds. Some binders deliberately seek out works that authors and artists were persecuted online for creating.

“If we are serious about being connected,
if we would like to have each other as a modern-day ‘found family’ in the queer tradition,
rather than a bunch of randoms unified only by commercially unsavory thirst-consumerism,
then we have to do the work to stay connected
in an environment where nobody but us gives a fuck about our community,
and none of the monetized structures we exist within online
are going to go out of their way to support or enable that.”

ArmoredSuperHeavy (2020)

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Renegade Publishing is an open and mutually supportive community - we share resources, tutorials, tips, mentorship, and good fun. We encourage questions, process notes, and pictures; we are here to crowdsource solutions if we can, hold each other’s hands, express our sympathies, cheer each other up, and be proud of each other and ourselves.

You too can be a fanbinder! Join our community and experience and enjoy the resources of the guild.

Find a text you value, bind it, share it!

This manifesto is built from ArmoredSuperHeavy’s “I am a Guerrilla Publisher.” Tumblr. May 22, 2020. Other sources include:

1. ArmoredSuperHeavy. “How to Make a Book.” Google Docs.
2. Roddenberry, Gene. IDIC from “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”
Star Trek (TOS). 1968. Documented in Memory Alpha.
3. Organization for Transformative Works. “What We Believe.”