Terms of Service

ZinesForever is a place to make zines, sell them, buy them, and follow the people who create them. These terms are the agreement between you and ZinesForever LLC, a Colorado company ("ZinesForever", "we", "us"), when you use the site. We've tried to keep them short and honest. The most important parts: your zines are yours, we only take the rights we need to run the service and to sell your work when you ask us to, and we'll never sell your content to anyone else or use it to train AI.

By using ZinesForever you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. Questions? Email us at hi@zinesforever.com.

Who can use ZinesForever

You must be at least 13 years old. If you're under 18, you need a parent or guardian's permission. You must be 18 or older to sell — selling requires a Stripe account, and Stripe requires account holders to be adults. If you're under 18, a parent or guardian can sell your work from their own account.

Keep your account information accurate and your sign-in method secure. You're responsible for what happens under your account. One person per account; don't impersonate anyone or misrepresent who you are.

Your zines are yours

You keep every right you have in the zines, drawings, images, text, and anything else you create or upload to ZinesForever. We don't claim ownership of your content — publishing a zine here, or even selling it here, never transfers ownership to us.

The license you give us

To run the service, we need your permission to do things with your content that copyright law would otherwise forbid — storing it on servers, showing it to people you've shared it with, making thumbnails. So you grant ZinesForever a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, and distribute your content, but only as needed to operate and provide ZinesForever. That covers things like:

• Showing your zines to people according to the visibility you choose — public, unlisted, private, or draft.
• Making technical copies: thumbnails, previews, page renders, cached files, and backups.
• Showing your public zines in browse pages, search results, category pages, and features like the front page.

This license ends when you delete your content or your account, except as described in "Deleting your content" below — mainly, buyers keep what they bought, and copies may linger briefly in backups.

Selling on ZinesForever

When you list a zine for sale, you grant us the additional rights we need to actually sell it on your behalf:

• To market the listing: show its cover, title, description, and preview pages in the marketplace, in search, in emails to people who follow you, and in promotion of the platform (like a "featured zines" section).
• To deliver it: transmit the digital files to people who buy it, and let them keep accessing their purchase through their library.
• To process the transaction: handle payment, sales tax, refunds, and your payout through Stripe.

Payments and fees. Payouts run through Stripe Connect, and you must complete Stripe onboarding to sell. Stripe's own terms apply to your Stripe account. We charge a 9% platform fee on each sale of a digital copy or a print copy you ship yourself. On print orders we fulfill for you, a per-sale printing-and-shipping rate (based on the zine's format and page count) replaces that percentage — you never pay both. Stripe's payment processing fee is also deducted from each sale. Your pricing page shows all of these before you publish; the Stripe fee is an estimate there, since the actual fee is set by Stripe when each payment processes (it varies with the buyer's card). We'll notify you before any of this changes. Sales tax on marketplace orders is calculated and collected by Stripe at checkout.

You promise you have the rights. When you sell (or publish) a zine, you're promising us and your buyers that you own or have licensed everything in it — art, photos, text, fonts — and that selling it doesn't violate anyone else's rights or any agreement you've made.

Print fulfillment

Zines can be sold in print two ways, and the rights you give us differ:

You ship it yourself. You print and mail copies to buyers. We share the buyer's shipping address with you for that order, and you may only use it to fulfill the order. You're responsible for shipping the zine the buyer paid for, in reasonable time and condition. Your shipping rates must reflect what postage and packaging actually cost you — listing a zine cheap and making it up with inflated shipping isn't allowed, and we may delist listings that do it.

Fulfilled by ZinesForever. If you turn this on, you grant ZinesForever and our printing and shipping partners the right to reproduce, print, bind, package, and ship physical copies of your zine to buyers on your behalf. We will only print copies to fulfill actual orders (plus reprints to replace damaged or lost copies) — never to build our own inventory or sell outside your listing. This permission ends when you turn the option off or unlist the zine, except for orders already placed, which we'll still fulfill.

What we will never do with your content

The licenses above are the whole list. To be explicit, we will not:

• Sell or license your content to anyone, beyond the marketplace sales you've chosen to make.
• Use your zines in advertising or on merchandise without your permission. (Showing public or for-sale zines in features like the front page or a category strip is part of running the marketplace, and isn't this.)
• Use your content to train AI or machine-learning models, or let anyone else, without your explicit consent.
• Claim ownership of anything you make.

What buyers get

Buying a zine gets you a personal, non-transferable license to read and keep it — it doesn't transfer the copyright. You may not redistribute, resell, or republish the digital files, share your library access, or use a purchased zine commercially without the creator's permission. A printed zine is yours as a physical object — keep it, lend it, give it away, sell it at a zine fair — but the same rule applies to making copies of it.

Orders, refunds, and shipping

Prices are shown at checkout along with any sales tax. Digital purchases are delivered to your library immediately. Print orders are shipped by the seller or by us, depending on the listing.

If something goes wrong with an order — a file won't open, a print never arrives or shows up damaged — contact us at hi@zinesforever.com and we'll make it right, which may mean a replacement or a refund. Because digital files can't be returned, digital purchases aren't refundable just for a change of heart, but we're reasonable people — write to us.

Content rules

ZinesForever is open to everyone 13 and up, and what's published here has to fit that. Don't publish or sell content that:

• You don't have the rights to — no infringing other people's copyrights, trademarks, or publicity rights.
• Is illegal, or that sexualizes minors in any form.
• Is pornographic or sexually explicit.
• Depicts graphic violence or gore.
• Harasses, threatens, or incites violence against people, or attacks people based on who they are — race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability.
• Deceives buyers — misleading listings, undisclosed reposts of someone else's work, spam.

Don't abuse the service itself: no scraping the site or other people's zines, no circumventing purchase or visibility controls, no interfering with the service or other people's use of it.

Moderation. We decide what's acceptable on ZinesForever, and we may remove any zine — including unpublishing one that's for sale — at our discretion. Accounts that publish content breaking these rules may be suspended or permanently deleted, immediately and without notice for serious or repeated violations. Where it's reasonable to do so, we'll tell you why. Buyers keep access to zines they bought before a takedown, unless the content was illegal or infringing.

Comments

Creators can turn on comments for their zines. Comments are off unless the creator opts in, and a creator can turn them off again at any time.

Who can comment. To keep comments human, commenting is limited to people in the community: publish a zine that's been approved, buy a zine, or ask us for access. We may grant or revoke commenting access at our discretion, and posting is rate-limited. New comments may pass through automated screening, which can block spam or abusive content before it posts.

The rules. Everything in the content rules above applies to comments too. Be civil, you may critique the work, but don't attack people; no spam or advertising; and don't manipulate votes with multiple accounts or coordinated voting.

Moderation. Creators can remove any comment on their own zines, and we can remove any comment on the platform. You can edit or delete your own comments; deleting a comment that has replies leaves a "removed" placeholder so the conversation under it still makes sense.

Copyright complaints

We respond to copyright infringement notices under the DMCA. If you believe a zine on ZinesForever infringes your copyright, email hi@zinesforever.com with: a description and link to the infringing material, a description of the work it infringes, your contact information, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorized, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you're the rights holder or authorized to act for them, with your physical or electronic signature. We'll remove infringing material and terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you can send a counter-notice to the same address.

Deleting your content

You can unpublish or delete your zines, or delete your whole account, at any time. When you do:

• Your content comes down from every public page and is no longer for sale.
• People who already bought a zine keep access to it — that's part of what they paid for, and the delivery license you granted survives for completed purchases.
• Print orders placed before you deleted will still be fulfilled.
• Comments you've posted are anonymized, not erased — your name comes off them, but the conversations they're part of stay intact. Delete individual comments first if you want them gone (see "Comments" above).
• Copies may persist in backups for a short time before being purged.
• We keep records of sales because tax law requires it — see the privacy policy for details.

Our content

ZinesForever itself — the site, the editor, our logos and design — belongs to us, and these terms don't give you rights to it beyond using the service. Everything you make with the editor is yours; the editor itself isn't.

Disclaimers

ZinesForever is provided "as is." We work hard to keep it fast, safe, and available, but we can't promise it will always be free of errors or interruptions, and we don't review or endorse the zines people publish. Zines are creative work by their creators, and creators are responsible for what they make and sell.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, ZinesForever won't be liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages — like lost profits or lost data — arising from your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim is capped at the greater of $100 or the amounts you paid us (or we paid you) in the twelve months before the claim. Some places don't allow these limits, so they may not fully apply to you.

Ending things

You can stop using ZinesForever or delete your account whenever you like. We can suspend or delete accounts — and remove the zines they've published — when they violate these terms, break the content rules, or put the platform or its users at risk. If we terminate a seller's account, we'll still pay out balances legitimately owed, and buyers keep their purchases.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

Changes to these terms

If we make meaningful changes — especially anything that affects your rights in your content or what sellers are paid — we'll update this page, change the date at the top, and email you before the changes take effect. Continuing to use ZinesForever after that means you accept the new terms.

Contact

ZinesForever LLC · hi@zinesforever.com