Amateur Press Association

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An Amateur Press Association (APA) is a group of non-professional writers who collectively bring out a fanzine , which is then referred to as an apazine or just an apa ( plural apae ). The individual contributions are sent to an editor, the Official Editor (OE) , by a specified date . The OE unites the contributions of the individual authors ( egozines ) by stapling or binding them together, adding an envelope, a table of contents and possibly an editorial , the Official Organ (OO), and then redistributing the collected work to the participants. The whereabouts of the participants in the APA often depends on a minimum number of submitted pages. This Minac (short for minimal activity "minimum activity ") is generally valid for each issue of the apazines or for each year.

Apas are often seen as the forerunners of internet forums . In fact, many Apas fulfill the function of discussion forums and were a very effective method for exchanging ideas in supraregional groups until the Internet came about. Analogous to Internet forums, there were and are apas on a wide variety of topics. The apas experienced their heyday between 1960 and 1990. After that, their number steadily declined due to competition with the Internet forums.

A long-lived, German-language Apa is the Futurian Amateur News (FAN), an APA focusing on the discussion of science fiction , which has been active intermittently since the 1960s. The participants named Apanauts already included several (today) well-known German authors, such as Hans Joachim Alpers .

APAs as associations of amateur journalists and hobby printers emerged in the United States from the 1870s. One of the oldest is the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) founded on February 19, 1876 by Evan Reed Riale and nine colleagues in Philadelphia , a little later the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) founded in 1895 . These associations are to be distinguished from Apas in the sense described above, since they were rather associations of hobby printers and authors, whereby contributions to the association magazine were welcomed and encouraged, but not expected.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Occasionally also Official Collator , Central Mailer or Distribution Manager .
  2. ^ National Amateur Press Association: The First 100 Years: In the Beginning ... (accessed May 11, 2018).