fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5959 ]

[ SECRET POST #5959 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5959 ⌋

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

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Notes:

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The fact of the matter is that the difficulty of having to drum up interest in your work is shitty and it's completely valid and legitimate for people not to want to do that.

It doesn't make them right but like.... yeah, I can't really look at the state of writing and publishing in 2023 and get mad at someone for having the desire to say "fuck that shit"

Yeah, but the underlying problem here is that a large part of why more people will read your work on AO3 because more people are interested in visiting a site that isn't clogged up with commercial promotion and advertising, and the reason it isn't is that they enforce the no commercial promotion rules and run the site 100% volunteer/gift economy. You can't have it both ways.

And also, the blessing and curse of the internet is that these days ANYONE can put their writing/art/music/you name it online and make it available to the entire world.

The drawback is that there are actually a ton of extremely talented people out there, so it's hard to make your stuff stand out from all of the other people who are all equally talented/skilled.

Exactly. These days I pay for entertainment for one of two reasons: either I actively want to support the people who made it and encourage them to make more, or a lot of other people are talking about it and I want to join the fun. If I just want some entertainment, there's plenty of free stuff that's just as good as the paid. Which does make it tough if you don't have a following yet, and I can see why people want to be able to throw up a patreon link on the free sites. But unfortunately it never stops with the occasional unobtrusive patreon link.

But the other drawback is that running a site well is a much rarer skill and much more ongoing work than making good art, and the people who are willing to do that for free aren't interested in running a site where other people make money and they don't. And the people who want to make money on art make a heck of a lot less if they have to pay the sysadmins and mods out of it.

DA

See, I don't see that as a drawback. There's no shortage of talent online, but my feelings for different artists' work (especially with fanfic) are not interchangeable. Every time I go into a fandom and try to take stock of who's where and what they do well, I develop a sense for "oh, this is my go-to person for [very specific thing that's only sort of related to what I knew I wanted before I read their work]." That's as unique as a fingerprint, maybe more so. And that's not something I tend to call attention to, because I don't want them to get self-conscious or uncomfortable with showing this aspect of their personality and not some other one, and because a lot of people are just terrified these days of being one-of-a-kind and memorable online. But big fandom or small, I've never had trouble keeping track of authors just because they're all talented.

And it's such a relief to be able to interact with all that in a medium where no one can force them to only write what a publisher would feel comfortable trying to profit from! It's almost hard to remember what the world looked like before the internet took everything by storm, but I remember back then hearing educated people argue that creative writing was an extremely rare talent and if you thought otherwise you were probably one of those contemptible, deluded wanna-be's who thought their writing was good when actually no one but you would want to read it. They would assert that comedy took a special kind of genius, and normal human beings were incapable of being witty day after week after year - unlike the very special people who were already identified by the industry and being paid to make people laugh on television and in film. And, of course, that scriptwriting and film making were basically dark arts. That kind of talk went on and on and on. The default position was "stay in your place, consumer, even thinking you could do as well as the people who are PAID to make what you watch and read and listen to is horribly arrogant of you." And it is a long-term source of joy for me that the internet discredited that so resoundingly.

I don't disagree, I'm just saying I get where the problem is coming from

Just passing by, but I agree wholeheartedly with this.

This right here. I didn't put in all those volunteer hours for someone else to profit off all our hard work to have a place for fandom to thrive free of commercial interests and the threat of losing our works to take-downs. Go tumblr/patreon your shit and leave AO3 alone, OP.

having to drum up interest in your work is like...that's how all creative works have worked for 6000 years, patronage during the Renaissance aside. if your work can't stand on its own without knowing the characters' personalities and the entire setting before you start reading, then that's the problem, it has nothing to do with the state of publishing. I've known authors to try and fail because it wasn't until they changed out the names and any obvious magic/superpower basis that they realized just how much their oh-so-original idea actually was propped up by the framework of the fandom it came from. the state of publishing has jack-all to do with whether or not fanfic can be morphed into a decent book.

I haven't formally researched this but I'm pretty sure I'm right when I say it - the number of creative works that exist has absolutely exploded compared to the past. Even just compared to 30 or 40 years ago, there's exponentially more fiction written today (and more movies and TV shows made, and more music made). Compared to 100 or 150 years ago, the gap is titanic. And that absolutely has made it harder to get anyone to pay attention to your work, for reasons that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with its quality.

Like, yes, absolutely, there are a lot of people out there who are shitty writers. But like... the state of writing things and trying to get people to read them is absolutely awful and terrible and rotten.

I'm not sure that's true about fiction writers (or creative works generally) - most of my many great-aunts and great-uncles either wrote, or were really into making music, or painted, or did some other visual art, or were notorious raconteurs, or several of the above (Grandfather wrote poetry, did fine woodworking, and told stories well enough that people came to visit just to hear him talk). There's more people making art now than in their day because there's more *people*, but I don't know that the proportion of artists to non-artists has gone up that much.

The huge change is that Great-Aunt Eppie wrote her poems in her little black book with no expectation that anyone would ever read them except maybe a few good friends and family, or maybe she'd get to read one out at a church picnic, or the factory newletter would publish one for her coworkers to read. Even if someone when she was young in the '30s really wanted to become a professional writer, it would have been hard just to find out how to start - from her small rural town, it would be sending letters to strangers completely cold hoping someone in the industry would decide to be nice and tell a complete stranger who to write to next to find a publisher or what book to mail-order to find out how to make money writing (and hope it wasn't a scam) (and hope you didn't only hit people who didn't think women could be writers, or didn't think people of your race could be writes, or didn't think people without a college education could be writers, or didn't think people from your state could be writers, or whatever, and just wrote back to say don't bother.)

But now that it's much, much easier to distribute art, all those people who would have written in a little black book with no expectations or done oil paintings just to give to friends are putting their stuff online to compete in the scrum with all those other people, and a lot more creators are visible.

I don't know if it's better or worse overall for creativity that now there are a thousand people actively posting their stuff online trying to get readers where a hundred years ago there would have been ten people being published in magazines and ninety working hard to get published and nine hundred who never even thought they had a chance. There's certainly a lot more people being strung along for years thinking they have a chance of making a career when they never really had more of a chance than that nine hundred. But there's also more people who might have never had their work seen at all who have ten, or twenty, or a hundred avid fans, and I feel like that's a net gain.

DA

One thing to consider is that maybe the capitalist idea that only a tiny handful of people should be paid (in most cases, little and badly, while very few are lavished with money and fame) for making art, and most people should shell out their wages for something from far away and mass-produced had its heyday, and now it's got to become something different.

For most of human history, I think what you're describing of people being on familiar terms with the people who made the music they listened to, and were known in their communities as good storytellers or appreciated for being painters or the rest - was normal. With my relatives who live in a third world country, it's expected that most people can do all of these things, and the ones who are especially distinctive have other people ask them (often as a favor or for something other than money) to decorate their furniture, or to come over to dinner and tell stories, or so on. Their talents are helping them make ends meet, in a way, but no one involved is really thinking of it like that.

And, I mean ... I think it's normal to consider that and have mixed feelings. Compared to everything we've been conditioned to expect an artistic career might offer. At the same time, I look at Hollywood and the way famous people are afraid of their fans and the way fans are often weird and demanding around celebrities, and I see a profit motive that incentivizes dehumanization and has really fucked up people's ability to just interact as people. I don't think that's doing the mental stability of artists any favors, even if they did get picked up to do their thing professionally. A world where most people assume they can't act or make music or write or paint is a poorer world. A world where the few people who are hand-picked by the wealthy and paid to do those things are kept at a remove from overwhelming masses of other people, and treated like exotic freaks that should command a very high price - that mostly still goes to their promoters as opposed to them, personally - is also a poorer world.

What are we going to develop, instead?

But like... the state of writing things and trying to get people to read them is absolutely awful and terrible and rotten.

... I mean, what solution are you proposing here? You can't just tell some people that they need to stop writing so that other people have a chance to get more exposure.

All I'm saying is that shit sucks and I understand why people would be frustrated about it.

the state of publishing has jack-all to do with whether or not fanfic can be morphed into a decent book.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are missing this. Being able to write fanfic and being able to write good original works are two entirely different skillsets. Fanfic is playing house in a pre-built dollhouse with dolls you bought at the store. Original fiction is having to make the dolls and the dollhouse from scratch before you ever get to start playing with it.

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[ SECRET POST #5959 ]

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