fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3441 ]

[ SECRET POST #3441 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3441 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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06. http://i.imgur.com/BRddb42.jpg

I agree that writing a quality story (original or fanfic) is more important than promotion, but to be honest, having a good story doesn't necessarily mean it'll get any promotion, let alone the kind it may deserve.

I've written stuff I'm proud of, that I've poured my heart and soul and tears and blood and sweat into (figuratively of course), and it gets ignored in favor of the next Cloti (or popular pairing) or trollfic or story that took only twice the time to write as author took to upload it. Yeah, it's great when you DO have people to promote your stuff, but there are times you don't get that lucky. It just depends, I guess.

Or your stuff just isn't as good as you think it is.

Or it's good but not popular, which happens all the time lbr.

NAYRT Yeah, exactly. It's less likely but it does happen. My published books have pro reviews that talk about how good the writing is. I'm lucky to sell fifty copies a month.

Sometimes the market just isn't available. I write non-tropey romance without gender roles and people just don't like that as much as the more tropey or more traditional stuff. It's no one's fault, though. People read and spend their money on things they like.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-06 00:06 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-06 01:17 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-14 00:05 (UTC) - Expand

So by your measure "50 Shades of Grey" is a masterpiece.

Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good, either. :p

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-05 22:04 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-05 23:10 (UTC) - Expand

I'll admit I'm not half as good as the authors whose works I enjoy, but the stuff I slaved over is a hundred times better than the shit I used to write. I have a lot of good ideas, and while I don't always convey them perfectly, I know when I've hit bingo. The reason being, I can take pride in it regardless of the amount of attention it receives from the public.

So you can take your ugliness elsewhere.

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-05 23:13 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2016-06-05 23:40 (UTC) - Expand

That might be true, but popularity tends to be about giving an audience what it wants. Something that's well-written but doesn't use certain tropes or feature a certain pairing isn't going to be as popular as something that's tropey.

I've definitely gotten more notice for my stuff that followed popular trends, even when it wasn't up to my usual standards.

It's true that you can't promote something you haven't written, and it's usually easier to promote things that are good than things that are complete rubbish. But you're being willfully ignorant if you think that every story that languishes in obscurity is rubbish, and stories that are popular do so because they're an example of wonderful writing, rather than being something that scratches a common itch.

Gaiman himself is as popular as he is because he filled a particular niche at a time where demand was very high, and supply was very low. He'd probably have some fans anyway, but he wouldn't be anywhere near the household name he is if he hadn't been writing the right things at the right time.

He also started writing a blog in 2001 (I think?) when blogs were kind of a new thing. More right thing at the right time, as far as building more readership goes.

Yeah, he's been very good at keeping with the alt-audience trends, through a combination of luck and very savvy marketing both on his part and on the part of his publicists.

Luck in the timing and meeting social interests is also very important to having people notice and promote a book. Neil got lucky. He could have just as easily joined all the good writers who fall short of getting attention.

It seems obvious to me that yes, of course a story in a juggernaut pairing is going to get more attention. Some people read juggernauts and don't like or have time for rare pairs. And it's a little unrealistic to think that either more promotion OR better quality is going to make people read a story when they don't follow the pairing or fandom. Though between the two, good quality together with competent promotion (ie, put it in a place easy to find, tag it clearly + share w/ comms or people likely to rec it) beats bad quality and overpromotion.

At the stage of worrying about "promotion" most fic authors have put however much work they're going to put into something, which these days isn't much. But while people are going to occasionally skip over a fic that has bad SPAG in the first sentence (I say occasionally because the amount of kudos on a lot of those fics don't reflect the connoisseur environment OP thinks is the most relevant factor) they're not going to click on it at all if they don't care about the pairing/fandom, etc.

Let me tell you about the most popular fic in my corner of fandom OP. I've talked about it here before because it boggles me so.

In it, the male MC has this problem where he's a really great lover who can spend hours pleasing a woman...up until he takes out his dick. As soon as he takes out his dick, everything goes to hell. He loses control of himself and brutally fucks the woman, and he can't stop until he orgasms, even if she begs him to. So, he tries not to get involved with the female MC, because he doesn't want to brutalize her.

But she really wants him, you see, so she convinces him to fool around with her. He figures he'll just keep his dick in his pants, but she wants him to fuck her. So, he does, but WAIT there's more, because he doesn't want to cum inside of her, because he feels guilty that his wife died in childbirth, so he winds up fucking her up the ass so roughly that there's blood streaming down her legs and she can't walk afterwards. He carries her upstairs and gets her lying in bed...

...and then she wants to HAVE MORE SEX. The author explains this as, "she's sheltered and doesn't know that this isn't normal." He facefucks her and cums in her mouth. She wants to break down his walls, so she takes his cum from her mouth and puts it on her vagina, and then gets him to have intercourse with her and cum inside of her.

It's completely OOC, filled with purple prose, and dialogue that doesn't make any sense because the author doesn't use enough dialogue tags and doesn't know how to format paragraphs within speech. So you have to spend a good five minutes figuring out who's saying what.

BUT.

It's the most popular, because there's a ton of semi-kinky sex in it.

Basically, you're not...quite...right.

Why did I read that entire description? D:

MTE

Link please. For research purposes.

Isn't that a pro romance novel where he has to, and I quote Smart Bitches Trashy Books, "fuck your ass to save your life"?

Is that a Twilight rewrite?

Maybe it's navie of me, but I just assume anytime someone wants to write something they're going to try to make it the best they can.

The artist in me can't imagine trying to promote things I didn't work hard on.

I used to think that. But to be honest, anyone's who's been a beta for a while has horror stories about authors who react VERY badly to constructive criticism. I certainly do. The sad truth is, there are quite a few people who think they're doing their best already, and they don't expect to be told that there are mistakes in their work. Deep down, they don't believe that there are any ways the work could be improved and that running it past a beta is simply a formality.

So when a beta says something like, "Hey, I love the interaction between X and Y in this scene, but there are a lot of run on sentences", some authors BLOW.THE.FUCK.UP. Because they weren't expecting you to find anything wrong, you see. In their mind, they wrote an awesome story, and you're being a hater. I've been a beta for authors who didn't even bother to run a spellcheck, and it showed. But I promise you, they 100% believed they were doing their best. It's just that their "best" didn't involve basic proofreading.

Heh, it's funny, I was talking with a colleague of mine, and we discussed if there was ONE thing we could teach budding pro artists, it was basic business skills. Because godDAMN did we both know brilliant artists who would sabotage their own success at every turn and seemed to think that their books would sell themselves.

Yes and no. While I do think that's good advice, I also think it's a little of both. How the hell are people going to know of this other thing if it doesn't get at least a little bit of publicity? I've seen some stuff I've liked get so little attention because it doesn't get talked about (and I'm too much of an hermit to go and talk about it in fandoms).

Also Neil Gaiman had a movie made out of his book, and I say that's a really good publicity. Before that I didn't even knew he existed (because I live under a rock and haven't read much YA fiction in years). My point is that people can write wonderful books but if it doesn't get at least a little bit of publicity they tend to go unnoticed.

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