So I am trying to finish a Zungeon and am looking for a checklist for all the formalities, crediting different sources, fonts, inspiration etc. as I have no experience in this.
I thought it was worth a post as this might be of interested to other upstart zinemakers.
What is the bare minimum of formalities?
What are musts? especially legally?
What is proper etiquette?
Other thoughts on what makes a zine good on the formal part?
I wish you a good May 1 tomorrow 
As a consumer:
The first two are pretty well covered by a standard copyright line. Legally thatās not required in most places any more to gain copyright (search for āmoral rightsā), but wow is it convenient if youāre ever trying to sort out who did what when, and who to contact if you want to discuss an anthology or licensing.
The revision can be as simple as a number or date. Using both gives a sense for how many changes happened when. In printed books, this info often gets stuck in alongside the cataloging info page. Thereās also the āwhich printingā line of numbers that is unlikely to apply to a zine.
Oh, and anyone looking to cite your work as a print work would like to know who printed it where. (I should look at how MLA handles PoD works these days though.)
These are good points. I just remembered something that is not a formality but at least for me a relevant point: cleaning metadata of pdfs. Some like to stay anonymous-ish and sometimes programs add things you do not want in there.
this is a personal take butā¦ fwiw:
bare minimum of formalities? 0. its a zine. zines are so informal they donāt even bother with the maga- part of the name. if its all art and poetry and no contact information, that is a good zine. if it is official-looking with contact info for everyone and legal info, that is also fine, but honestly, kinda moving out of the spirit of the zine.
musts? legal musts? 0. its a zine. its informal. zines, when the term was coined most often were printed on stolen paper, stolen ink, stolen copier time, with stolen staples, and contained stolen art that was transformative enough in an artistic sense that they were ethically cool, but probably wouldnāt pass muster in any court if anyone bothered with suing someone losing money on a 50 copy print run.
proper etiquette? eeeeeh. some rules here. you probably donāt want to piss off your readers, so ādonāt be a dickā is a good rule of thumb. but maybe you DO want to piss off your readers? there are no table manners with zines, just express yourself as you want. for other contributors, make sure they share your vision, and know what they are signing up for. make it a cheap as possible or free for the audience.
makes a zine good on the formal part? again, I take issue with the framing. there is no formal part.
Yeah formal might have been to strong a wording. Personally I donāt care much for legalities. But obviously I do not want to annoy or hurt people whose content I like. And when publishing online it seems reasonable to try avoid legal pitfalls.
I would love an analog scene where I could share zines. But as there isnāt really any where I am.
so maybe itās wrong to call these mini modules/rules/rpg products zines? 
agreed! but that is just a personal pet peeve of mine. its a common enough term that it now means āa smaller, less ambitious productā (but only sometimes) in the ttrpg world.
and separate point you made: the OSR, and especially the NSR, is such a micro-mirco-mirco niche within a niche within a niche that printed physical products are hard to distribute anywhere but directly to readers. i live in a place with a fairly robust āsceneā and even here there are maybe like 2 places that would connect a product with the right reader.
conventions make sense though! and you could travel to a convention to distribute.
what exactly are you working on content wise?
There is a vernacularā¦ many people believe that for a pamphlet to be a āzineā that it must be produced with lo-fi production methods like a photocopier and made by using physical methods such as markers, collage and drawing. In recent years it seems that people also tend to include production methods like Riso which seem to fit the original punk ethos of the zine scene.
Personally, I think thatās a āno true scotsmanā type of argument, and instead think anything in a small form factor produced in an efficient and inexpensive manner should count. To each their own.
Unfortunately, I am in a little mountainous country in the middle of Europe. The scene seems even smaller here. People into N/OSR would probably all fit into one room. 
I am not working on much. just tried my hand at my first zungeon. (actually linked to it above)
But I will try to create more just for the sake of it. itās a way for me to get better at starting and finishing writing projects.
I am all for DIY. If I had a scanner/photocopier I would do everything with it and make some dirty looking punk dungeonsā¦
speaking again to personal taste, I consider POD softcover perfect bound black and white with color cover to be the true heir to āzineā. its absolutely insane how cheap it is to make those. you can deliver something for $7 or so USD including shipping to most places in the world. about the cost of 1/2 a sandwich, or a fancy cup of coffee for a lot of the world.
however, the current market for osr/nsr seems to prefer PDFs and fancy expensive books.
PDFs I get, and the margins on those are really good. $4.99 is a common price point for a PDF, and hell, free or $1 is pretty easy to pull off.
sounds to me like you should just start an itch or drive thru publishing page, and start putting little free or $1 up to build momentum.
Unfortunately this is a repercussion of the current fulfillment systems on DriveThruRPG. I wish they could POD some simple saddle-stitched zines. I have had to resort to crowd-funding them and making them in a batch because as a part-time endeavor fulfilling orders on zines is just a major pain.
Letās be real, perfect bound books suck when you are at the table. Not being able to force them open on the table makes them way worse than just doing a cheap home print. Lots of people feel this way, so they would rather increase the size of the product and make a book with a sewn binding which is just way more enjoyable to use. Not to mention the higher ticket price having more flexibility in terms of profit margin. Larger books also have a higher tendency to feel āworth itā to buyers, a $8 -$12 zine just feels like less than a 120 page+ book for $30 or $40 bucks, and looks more substantial.
I mean I guess you have to push a little bit? Have these people complaining about perfect bound books opening up actually tried?
I would say itās definitely easier with a US letter paper bound book, but that also coincidentally is the cheapest one to print in terms of page space per money spent.
That looks to be a letter-size book with at least ~80 pages of lighter weight paper. At smaller sizes and page counts you are required to use heavier paper to make sure there is enough glueable area so the pages donāt fall out. This make the pages stiffer and harder to keep open. Also given time, the glue will start to give if you push your books open wide, and pages will fall out. The distaste for the binding method are valid. Iāve spent 20 years in design, and have designed at least 200 books personally, Iāve got the experience to know.
Either way, you are talking about higher page counts, which means more content and more cost. Your typical digest sized zine is a nice little tight format that can be produced cheaply, itās a shame that POD services popular with TTRPG fans arenāt printing them, but Iām assuming the margin just isnāt there for them to be reasonable. You can print them POD with Mixam, but no one is going to find them unless you are really good with self promotion.
in terms of cost, after all the big price jumps in printing, that 60 page A5 book one post up costs $3.25 to print. 60 page us letter is $4.89. its just so over the top cheap. staple bound thru mixam runs about 30% more. not a HUGE deal. but not nothinā. even with blank pages in there to make the book āworkā, perfect bound is going to be cheaper.
apples to apples, both these books below are 60 pages long. one staple, one perfect. both had to be bent backwards to lay flat on the table. slight edge to staple in terms of laying flat.
I agree with the consensus that staple has an edge for durability.
BUT also there is a limit to how many pages you want in those staple books. they get unwieldy at a certain page count. that 60 page book above feels weird. it doesnāt really ever ācloseā.
also, one factor not mentioned so far, is that you canāt print on the spine of stapled books. STRONG edge to perfect bound on that point (in fact, that might be the most important one. the staple zone of my bookshelf is a PITA). however, below a certain page count, you canāt print on the spine, the 18 page one for example has no spine print.
staple books also have the problem of the pages falling out from the middleā¦ of course, you can restaple. and you canāt reglueā¦
anyway, add this all up, and I would say, 30% cheaper plus spine printing? is perfect bount really that bad?
Yeah 60 pages is really pushing the bounds of saddle-stitching. Truthfully in a corporate setting I try not to do anything over 24. At that point I would suggest a perfect bound booklet so it lays closed. In the TTRPG space the use is a little different where people are handling these things far more and the audience seems to prefer saddle-stitch.
Personally, I really love a double wire-o bind on smaller (24-60) page docs that you want to lay flat. I donāt know why they seem to be even more hated in this space than any of the other options. Back in the day TSR even had some pretty cool adventures for Dark Sun that used wire to really play with the format at present graphics to the players while showing the key to the judge. I donāt know why they arenāt really liked, maybe because they donāt line up great on a shelf?
OH YES. great format.
I think most people make vibes based decisions, and wire/spiral bound just feels like, corporate instruction manual or something? I think that is why it is avoided even though its a good format. even shitty spiral bounding is pretty good. my copy of chainmail is still holding up (but also that reflects how little I used it!).
accounting for the spiral vibes, there are a lot of genres where it would be cool. anything modern, even a lot of modern horror. certainly cyberpunk.
what is also nice about spiral binding is that a lot of local print shops have that capability.
Another thought that just came to my mind: Make zines A5/A4 or whatever adheres to ISO 216 standards!
When I buy or get a digital zine or pamphlet it is really annoying that I canāt print it properly. Letter size documents even mess up my work printer at uni.
I know this might be controversial for USians and Canadians. But come on your basically the only ones not using these measurements. 
To be clear: I donāt care if its a physical product. Only when it is print at home.
I AM GUILTY OF THAT OFFENSE.
(adding more language here because discourse doesnāt let me do short replies)
