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amalthiaThe article The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction by by Elizabeth Minkel on fansplaining.com covered one of the topics I plan to moderate at Escapade this year. The lack of reader engagement with the authors. She did a great job expressing my growing disquiet as I see more authors bring this up as an issue. T
I consider reader engagement with the author one of the fundamental differences between "published" for profit fiction and fan fiction. No one expects if they write to Stephen King that they might make a life long friend, but I've made so many friends writing to authors, artists, vidders, and other fellow readers in fandom. Basically, if the author hasn't disabled comments on their Ao3 posted story I assume they want to know if people read and liked their fic, or at least a thank you for sharing what they wrote.
She also brought up other information that I didn't know was happening in a broader fandom sense.
I consider reader engagement with the author one of the fundamental differences between "published" for profit fiction and fan fiction. No one expects if they write to Stephen King that they might make a life long friend, but I've made so many friends writing to authors, artists, vidders, and other fellow readers in fandom. Basically, if the author hasn't disabled comments on their Ao3 posted story I assume they want to know if people read and liked their fic, or at least a thank you for sharing what they wrote.
She also brought up other information that I didn't know was happening in a broader fandom sense.
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Date: 2025-01-04 01:05 pm (UTC)When I was cleaning up ao3 recently, and going over some old fics, I saw the credits on my Dirty Dancing story. I had audiencers, betas, fanmixers, artists. Something like SIX people helped me create that story, and it's my best. That would never happen now. I was nearly alone writing my newest story, with one beta. I realized the story could have been so much better with more support, and it made me really sad.
Any you know about the other stuff--we've talked about it. Sigh. At any rate, I do think my time in fandom is coming to an end. I don't think I can sustain it for much longer in the current environment.
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Date: 2025-01-04 08:33 pm (UTC)I followed a lot of people from Star Trek and it seems like the 3rd movie went out with a whimper and didn't really engage fandom the way movie 1 and 2 did. After the 3rd movie people kind of just stopped writing reboot. I never really liked Star Trek Discovery so never read fic for it. I hear Strange New Worlds is good, haven't watched it yet, but I think that's where Trek fandom is right now with a few outliers still writing DS9, at least from the author's I'm following.
If I remember an earlier post from you it sounds like you'd had a break from fandom for a few years and when you came back a lot had changed. There is still the fandom interaction you're talking about, however it's now appears to be happening on Discord servers, or some other social media service I'm not aware of at this time.
I think the real challenge for new and returning fans is finding the gatekeeper of these discord servers. But once you're in there are people there willing to talk about fics, beta read, and talk about the shows.
Well at least that's what I'm seeing in the discords I'm on, however I'm not sure if the Star Trek people are as active as the "Heaven Official's Blessing" fandom people on discord. Or if the hard core Star Trek fans even created a Discord server. I'm wondering if there is an age gap in fandom, like I joined as a teenager in 1996 and I was doing okay keeping up with everything until the last 4 years.
I think it helps that I have a fandom friend 10 years younger than me that lives in the same town and she's keeping me in the loop as to where things are happening and telling me which fandoms are active. At this point if you're into Chinese/Korean dramas there is a huge fanbase of active people there, but I don't know if they are the collaborating kind of fans?
This was brought up at Escapade too, someone asked what is up with all the Chinese books and TV shows showing up on the fandom panel lists and we came back with that's what the attendees voted on. Star Trek used to have more panels at Escapade but most years there is 1 panel for all Star Trek, Strange New Worlds helped a lot with drawing more people back to Star Trek but compared to when the first Star Trek reboot came out there's definitely less engagement in this particular fandom. Even at in person conventions.
I think LJ made it easier for coordinating and finding like minded people and when that cratered fandom wasn't quite the same afterwards. Also you didn't need a new piece of software to install on your computer to access the communities. Plus LJ made it easier to find older posts and follow conversation.
I know last time I wrote a story for the SPN big bang I was able to find a beta reader easily. I'm not sure I could say the same today unless I was in a Discord community of people.
Having said all that I'd like to say try to give it more time, read fan fiction, write to the author's posting fics you like and see what comes of it. In this situation you may have to be more proactive to re-create some of what you loved in fandom. Or take a break, writing a 40k story is no small thing.
Not sure if this will make you feel better, but I'm now re-reading "Still Life." :) I'd forgotten how good it was. I've been looking forward to reading the sequel for over a week now and now that I'm home I can sit down and read it in piece and quiet.
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Date: 2025-01-04 08:43 pm (UTC)The k/s Discord is pretty active, and I'm trying to give it a chance. I'm chatting, reccing, and participating in Spring Fever (prompts and fills). Sadly, I am VERY reboot. I don't like SNW. So I'm just going to be in a smaller area.
When I was last in fandom, I totally had a group. We egged each other on, etc. I miss Danahid, who made writing pacts with me. Almost everyone I knew is gone. I need a younger fandom friend!
I'm Asian, and the Asian fandoms just don't appeal. I feel weirdly fetishized. Even though I know the source material is created by Asians. I can't explain. When I found Trek, I found my home. It's the fandom that most resonates with me.
Glad you're enjoying Still Life. The sequel is VERY different, and I hope you like it. I'm about to work on a crack fic for spring fever, and then I do want to do a longer story about Kirk and Spock later in life. I'm trying to have lower expectations about engagement. The audience has just drastically changed.
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Date: 2025-01-04 09:36 pm (UTC)I'm Hispanic and I'm now thinking maybe I should be glad there aren't any major fandoms coming out of Spanish/Mexican produced media. I haven't felt fetishized by my ethnicity in fandom, however I don't think anyone has ever fetishized Spanish/Mexican people the way they do for Asian people. Not that it's a contest.
Anyways, I hear you and there is no need to explain, when you find your fandom you know it. :) I like the Spock/Kirk dynamic a lot and I try to find other media where the main pairing has similar traits. Like the made genius leader character paired with the stoic genius. It's just hard finding that dynamic in other sci-fi shows which is why I think I keep coming back to Star Trek.
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Date: 2025-01-04 09:39 pm (UTC)There's a reason Trek has been going for almost 60 years...
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Date: 2025-01-04 01:17 pm (UTC)Also I had never heard of "Manacled" so that was interesting too. I never thought to search to see what the top ten "most hits" stories were/are on AO3.
I am in such a backwater that I miss a lot of greater fandom news. And while I read a lot on File 770, that hub of Old School SFF Fandom pretty much ignores our fanfic fandom for sure, although I know there is a lot of overlap of readers.
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Date: 2025-01-04 07:57 pm (UTC)I also tend to miss a lot of fannish happenings, unless I run across it on Tumblr or Dreamwidth. But at a Escapade convention a few years ago the topic had come up about social media and fandom scattering and we tried to guess the downward impact but it hadn't occurred to me that non fannish people would be visiting Ao3...I mean I think it takes a certain kind of person to really enjoy fan fiction, vids, and art.
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Date: 2025-01-04 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 09:56 pm (UTC)Also, thanks for offering Manacled. I like Draco/Hermione in general but I don't usually like HP AUs, plus the plot as described in the summaries would not be something I would want to read about Hermione personally.
But apparently it has a huge audience and everyone loves it! Which is great!
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Date: 2025-01-04 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-04 10:51 pm (UTC)I think the monetization of everything now also contributes to a lack of engagement. It's not just the techbros trying to make money off of other people's work. The pervasive monetization, even if it's a subconscious awareness that yes, your big social media site is tracking you and selling your data, makes casual or newer consumers of fanfic see AO3 as just another site. Even though AO3 isn't charging money for subscriptions or showing ads. I think this is why every so often there are reminders to authors not to link to their KoFi on AO3 and not to end a WIP chapter with "to read more, send money here." And why every so often someone asks about AO3's "algorithm."
I don't think I've ever had conversations via fic comments, but I definitely met fannish friends through their fanfic.
Sobering. :(
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Date: 2025-01-06 02:34 am (UTC)I know for myself I leave feedback but it sometimes takes me a while to find and read the fic and except for leaving feedback I myself don't engage with authors beyond that with rare exceptions, like they keep writing back to me. :) I joined the Untamed fandom a few years after it started and I'm still finding great fic that was written in 2020...Not sure all that many authors have the patience to wait years for that one person who leaves feedback on every fic they finished to show up.
I think it's tough if the author doesn't have a DW account to follow them and build a fannish relationship. I've also struggled to meet other fans that aren't writers, I don't tend to comment on other people's comments so that avenue is gone. Discord is still a struggle, it reminds me too much of IRC, so I'm probably preaching the choir when I bring up this topic on DW.
The people on DW are fannish enough to have accounts here, but if the readers who aren't "fannish" are somewhere else how to get the message to them that if they are reading fic and enjoying it they need to let the author know? That's something I'm giving thought to more lately and I'm hoping to brainstorm solutions with people at Escapade this year.
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Date: 2025-01-06 05:14 pm (UTC)I'm one of those readers. I read Blake's 7 fanfiction before AO3 was created because creators shared picspams and an introduction about the fandom (it was iirc very hard to even watch the source material even before my time). I was interested in the character dynamics/tropes so I read the stories. I still read fanfiction that way, the difference is that picspams and gushing have disappeared. Now it's just easier to find and immediately watch the movie.
What I can't believe is that people would find AO3 without knowing about fanfiction. There has to be an entry-point and even if people branch out and read stuff where they don't know the source material you don't land on AO3 without searching for it first.
I think what has fundamentally changed the author's experience is the "hits count". I've only ever posted on LJ before but I think you didn't see how many people clicked on your fic?
Also I agree with your point about monetization. If people don't expect money, they expect a reward for their emotional labor (of writing fanfic).
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Date: 2025-01-06 08:26 pm (UTC)"What I can't believe is that people would find AO3 without knowing about fanfiction."
I think it's one thing to know about fanfiction it's another to know the social mores of fandom. I think if people only discover Ao3, how do they know the fandom etiquette? When I first found fandom I didn't know the expectations, however I think I went in the completely wrong direction with contacting authors and badgered them for new updates...until I learned that behavior wasn't cool from other fans.
I agree with you on the "hit counts" I wish they never shared that metric with the author. It's a bad metric. I know I rack up the hit counts with how I interact with stories posted to Ao3. Most stories get about 5 hit counts from my behavior alone, some get 50 or more depending on if the fic is a WIP or not. I clear my cache frequently and revisit fics but I only tend to leave 1 comment and 1 kudos. I can't be the only one that visits the same story multiple times with different browsers, cleared caches, and over a period of months if not years.
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Date: 2025-01-06 10:07 pm (UTC)I'm the same when it comes to hits. It's embarrassing how many times I reread stories (when I also download everything I like).
It is easier to understand when you are on the other side of it. When you don't just read but also write. I think the threshold is now much higher because AO3 rewards long stories when a lot of people dipped their toes in the fanfiction pool by writing drabbles or stuff under 1000 words.
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Date: 2025-01-07 01:17 am (UTC)I don't always read short fics because I add a lot of stories to my ebook reader so the stories almost always need to be over 10k words to be worth the effort to add them to my device. However, if a short fic is recced I'll read it on my computer and leave feedback. It's just I can't be at my computer reading because in the past it gave me neck and back pain. Since switching to the ebook reader the pain has gone away.
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Date: 2025-01-04 11:16 pm (UTC)I joined fandom back in the mid nineties, so when fanfic was hosted on archives or posted to lists, and fandom was on mailing lists and forums. It was incredibly easy to get in and fandom was so comparatively small and open it was a wonderful community. And then the halcyon LJ days when fic and fandom were in the same place was amazing.
Now, after a decade away, I say ‘I’ve come back to fandom’, but really that’s not actually true. I’ve come back to fanfiction over the past year, but I can’t get back in to fandom despite really wanting to. I’ve never got on with tumblr (which is dying as a fandom platform anyway) and I find discord impenetrable… even if you get an invite, I can’t really manage the servers anyway, I find them too confusing! 😬
I’ve been ‘back’ for a while, but without fandom I imagine I’ll drift away again eventually for lack of engagement and links to tether me here…
The lack of a real accessible community is such a shame. We’ll never get back to something like the LJ times where everything was on one platform because fandom has fragmented too much to be put back together again! 😞
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Date: 2025-01-06 05:39 am (UTC)I'm unable to keep up with Discord enough for it to be useful for me. Things happen too fast there and you can't just join a conversation at your own pace. It reminds me a lot of IRC in many ways.
I'm still attending Escapade which is an in-person slash convention and it's helped me to meet people at the convention that could show me how Discord works and offer invites to different servers.
I think what keeps me engaged and tethered to fandom is that I'm not just reading the fic. I'm reading and leaving feedback for authors AND I post recs on my DW/pinboard. I think having a purpose in fandom really helps and I do get social interaction from the feedback.
Though, I may be rather lucky that I have two friends in fandom that also live in Anchorage. Because of the in-person interaction I don't feel like I need the online interaction as much to stay engaged. I can't say my situation would work for most people. Posting recs for example does not require finding a beta reader.
When LJ cratered I had really hoped most of fandom would move to Dreamwidth, but instead it scattered to all these different social media platforms. I'm still holding out hope something will come up that would bring fandom back together again on one platform.
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Date: 2025-01-05 07:23 pm (UTC)I've also been observing community erode for some time as people either interacted on massive soc media sites or else invisibly on Discord servers. The one thing both these interaction sites had in common was real-time activity. I am very used to asynchronous community and think it makes a huge difference in who can participate, because real time stuff is very time intensive. Even in the past when people would do watch parties or live blog reactions that was a weekly thing. If you could catch up in a day or two you could still be in step with things.
The other is the ephemeral nature of these sites. Technically individual accounts may have long histories but they tend to be individual ones, and subject to deletion. It's not the same as having community blogs or bulletin boards or other spaces that are topic focused rather than people focused. It makes it harder for new people to really feel part of something as opposed to simply observing.
The commercial aspects have been growing for some time and I think that Minkel does well in connecting the dots to how we got to this point. Ironically the one thing she did not investigate is one that she is most involved with herself, which is the monetization of fannish meta. For example here:
in meta after meta, I’ve seen frustration over a larger but increasingly passive fic readership; dismay that traditional publishing has a growing influence over a practice that partly exists in opposition to it; and anger that some guy can just copy-paste your work and charge money for it, and no one outside of fandom seems to care.
Some of those may be meta pieces but I'd bet most were simply fannish discussions. A lot of meta has disappeared because people who wrote them were able to get them placed at news outlets or able to make careers out of what used to be done within fandom alone in fannish spaces. And it is some of the most ephemeral of works because it was often embedded in larger posts or it was not salvaged when the author moved the rest of their fannish content to new spaces. Yet meta documents the history of individual fandoms as well as fandom as a whole.
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Date: 2025-01-06 05:54 am (UTC)I think this is what keeps Discord from working with me. I live in Alaska so by the time I'm done with work, got home and eaten dinner, most people are already done for the night. With LJ and Dreamwidth I'm able to participate in conversations when I'm available. I suspect this is also a problem for anyone that lives outside the United States. I have no clue how the Australian and European fans hang out.
I think I'd also like the meta to come back to fannish spaces, however I'm not sure where those are exactly. I think Ao3 allows meta posts but I'm not 100% sure about that. I'm not sure I'd want the meta to move to Twitter (or whatever it's called these days), Tumblr, Reddit, or some other social media platform I'm unaware of at this time.
The article and everyone's responses in my post have given me a lot of food for thought.
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Date: 2025-01-06 11:32 pm (UTC)Fortunately Squidge.org is very welcoming of all meta formats but not many people know about it, and it's rarely used as a platform for initial posts.
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Date: 2025-01-05 08:51 pm (UTC)(Oh, and I wouldn't mind a copy of Manacled if you're willing to share with a stranger.)
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Date: 2025-01-06 02:38 am (UTC)With Manacled, did you want the epub or html version of the fic? I can share the dropbox link with you in Dreamwidth private message.
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Date: 2025-01-11 07:31 pm (UTC)In addition to all the things that are given top billing in that piece (the amorality/a-ethics of people using machines to do things without the slightest thought about whether it would be a good idea), I think there's an interesting sub-thread there about how trope language is becoming the primary method by which we identify and describe the things that we are interested in reading, both in materials published for money and in materials published for fandom. Trope language supplanting fandom language also helps to erode the community aspects of fanworks that older fans cite as an essential component of enjoying the work and understanding its context. If what you're reading for is the tropes and how well they're executed, then there's no necessary connection to the author or shared squee about what kind of good work and how nice it is to see someone writing a pairing and so forth. It's interesting to see this shift happening.
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Date: 2025-01-12 07:07 am (UTC)I hadn't considered that fandom tropes were making it outside of fandom with a few exceptions like the Omega verse stuff....This could explain some of the alienation people are starting to feel in fandom.
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Date: 2025-01-12 09:47 pm (UTC)