Joining zines can be a lot of fun. You can meet a lot of new people, contribute to a fandom project with great end results, and either raise enough money for charity or even get a little extra pocket money for yourself. So I don't want to discourage anyone from joining a zine at all, or giving it a try.
But in a lot of zine experiences, who moderates your zine plays a huge role in how your experience is. If the mods are disorganized, you'll end up having to manage them instead, or wait around for long stretches of time. If the mods are rude, you can end up feeling disheartened about your work, or worse, feel unnecessary pressured to meet unreasonable expectations. If the mods are not trustworthy, you can end up putting in a lot of effort only to have nothing to show for it.
There's good news! Often, you'll be able to find out early enough whether or not a mod is someone you should work with. Withdrawing from a zine is always an option. If you're worried about missing out, think of it this way: you can always post a piece earlier than you would have had to! (And if you're worried about being "blacklisted", do you really want to work with mods like that again, anyway?)
Zine work will always be more stressful, so if an experience stops being enjoyable and starts adding extra strain on you, please know you can always step away.
Never forget that evaluating a project for suitability is an ongoing process. Some of the items below may not be apparent until later, so pay attention. When you join a zine, mods are using your reach to sell a product. So it also kind of falls on you to know what projects you're attaching your name to, because in most cases, you probably have more people who want to support you than some random mod.
Notice I don't say "zine experience" here. That's a tough metric for me, because some of my favorite zines have been by people who have never modded a zine before, and some of the worst mods I've seen had an unfortunate habit of collecting ongoing zines as a way to legitimize themselves at the start of any project.
Zine experience can help, but when you're looking at a list of past zines, try to understand what role these mods played, first, and then secondly, what happened upon completion. (You might be interested to find, in many of these cases, that those zines have not in fact been completed just yet.) A few ways to do this:
Check out their zine socials. When you go to Twitter or Tumblr, do you have a good sense of how their zines wrapped up/where their project is at? Has it been closed entirely, did they post a receipt to the charity they said they were donating to, did they get to leftover sales, etc?
Find contributors who have worked with them. Often, a lot of contributors will not "call out" a zine for bad experiences, which is fair! But if you check out the contributor lists and find someone you know, don't be afraid to ask. They may not want to speak publicly about their experiences but would be open about how their zines turned out. Some zines seem to perform quite well from the outside looking in, but may have had issues behind closed doors (no financial transparency, unexplained sales to profit numbers, disrespectful treatment of contributors).
Outside of regular zine experience, though, people may have skill sets that they can use in running zines. These will usually out itself in a number of ways.
Do you feel comfortable with the way they communicate? Are the messages sent in a tone that you feel relays enough professionalism without crossing the border into brusqueness? How diligently do they communicate updates/changes to the contributors and to their audience at large? Are they available to answer questions and do they answer them to your satisfaction? How often do they need to be asked by contributors/buyers first before they provide updates? (This one is very important -- communication should be more proactive than reactive.)
We all have different standards of course, and only you know what you're comfortable with. But it's important to keep an eye out on this especially as zines are just starting out. You can evaluate these from the way they answer asks, explain what they're doing on their website, and communicate when you are a contributor.
You work hard on your craft, and you deserve to be compensated properly for it. Unless it was a digital-only zine, I would never apply for a zine that promises only free PDFs and "a split of the profits, if any". It is a lot less stress to create for that theme, and a lot more immediate online validation to post it when you are done.
Contributors getting a free copy of the zine is the bare minimum, even for charity zines*. Ideally, shipping and the full merch bundle should be included here as well. But you as a contributor should not pay for a zine that is getting commission-level work from you.
Let me repeat this, for emphasis: contributors should not be asked to spend money to receive products on a project that is receiving commission-level work from them.
So I consider "free PDF" a red flag because it tells me:
The mods don't respect your time and skill as creatives. This is just. The biggest issue here. A lot of fandom can be free, but considering money changes hands in zine projects then zines do not fall under this "free" umbrella. You cannot capitalize on free labor and contributors should not let themselves be used this way.
The mods aren't committed to the project enough to see it through. They aren't thinking of having to work to sell the zine, they aren't considering the cost of putting it together. They didn't account for how much it would cost to produce and send out zines to everyone that is contributing to the zine and have no plan for covering costs if the sales don't meet their breakeven projects. Probably because they don't even know what their breakeven costs are. (And if they don't, there are a lot more issues to worry about!)
At production, zines don't cost that much. If they're planned for properly, a full bundle at production cost tops off at $20 per contributor. The most expensive shipping rate (at least last time I was doing shipping) would've been at $25 for international contributors, maybe $7.50 for domestic (assuming US-based shipping). If you think about it this way, $45 at most isn't even commission-pricing. So please consider what your skills are worth as a creator and don't let anyone undermine that!
A note on zines for charity:
It's nice when fandom can come together to raise money for a good cause, but this still shouldn't come at the expense of taking advantage of contributors. Planning for charity zines should still include compensation for contributors so at least they have the option to skip out on a copy if they want it to go to charity or not.
I've run them too, so this isn't a diss on charity zines. But when we have had physical products for them, we still made sure contributors were able to get copies. And the digital zine I've modded for charity was set up in such a way that the charity received all the donations directly, no mod was an intermediary for it. (Based on my experience with charity zines, receiving the money and then donating it to charity meant I got taxed on the money made, so the charity did not get the full amount as I had to keep some of it for taxes too.)
Most zines rarely stay on schedule. That's fine, stuff happens. But it's important to understand what causes these delays -- there's a difference between mods giving creators more time to work or suppliers being caught up in a busy season, versus mods not understanding their own workloads and planning poorly overall.
How long the delays in between is also important, as well as whether or not mods keep their promises for updates after the fact. I understand that a lot of this is unfamiliarity with the process -- if this is your first zine, how would you know what "standard" is when there are going to be lulls between phases?
Here's what I think is reasonable:
Application results should go out within 2 weeks of applications closing.
Between final submission and POs, there should be no more than 3 weeks' delay. A strong team can have a shop ready in 1 week, maybe less.
You should never wait more than 3 weeks for production updates once you get into the production period. There are times that you are just waiting for suppliers, yes, but there should still be regular updates. (I like to post updates once a week, even if there are none to spare, just to keep people aware we are still working.)
A mod team should start production within 1 week after POs close.
Ideally, your mod team should already have at least a PDF proof ready by the time the POs close.
3 months between POs closing and anything shipping out is too long to wait. The shortest production time I've worked on was 2 weeks (we were very ambitious and ordered merch and zines before the POs closed) and the longest took 2 months, delayed by having to do 3 proofs before we could go to print. It can take longer if suppliers run into trouble and some things are out of the mods' control, but that's when the way they communicate (and how often they do) matters a great deal. Are they still in control of these delays or are they starting to get overwhelmed?
Problems will come up, no matter how well-planned a zine. That's fine. But how does a mod team handle these curveballs? Do they have to consult the public at large, all contributors, and seek validation because they are uncertain; or can they find a solution as a team and reasonably defend why and how they got there? Do their gut instincts lead them to extreme solutions or are they able to work around obstacles carefully? Are they easily swayed by conflicting opinions or do they have a firm (but not stubborn) approach? Do they take constructive comments well or do they get overly defensive when questioned?
It might be hard to tell -- for most mod teams the problems happen and get resolved in a mod-only channel/email thread where you can't see it, but that's a good sign that they're handling things as they should.
Otherwise, though, pay attention to how they answer questions on their socials, or in your Discord server.
A mod can be a rock star at running a project, but efficient does not always mean they are pleasant to work with. Again, look at their communication styles and how they answer questions, but most importantly, examine how they make you feel. It is not worth staying on a project with mods that go on a power trip, gaslight contributors, make fun of their work, or otherwise treat you like dirt.
Here's a great litmus test for this: if you don't feel like you can ask them honest questions about the zine without having to feel like you're getting ready to battle, you're better off without them.