What is ‘late in a fandom’? It’s after the first heady flush of media excitement. Six months after the standalone movie or book comes out, a year or more after the series ends.
We get inspired by late canon: the behind-the-scenes book, the deleted scenes, a revealing creator interview. We get inspired by fanon and meta. We get talking to that one – one! – person who likes our ideas.
Sometimes a fic even needs to be written late in the fandom. After thinking and creative ferment, worldbuilding and character development. ‘Late to the fandom’ is a good time to take risks. To do the dark AU, focus on the minor character from stage left. It’s also a good time to offer up tropetastic fun.
Whatever you do, you will get readers who appreciate that you are writing. Because for every writer considering writing ‘late’ there’s a hundred fandom members wanting some fresh content.
Imagine you have a coworker who likes to bake. Every week, they bring in a batch of delicious, homemade cookies and leave them in the break room. Next to the plate of cookies is a sign, “If you like my cookies, could you please just leave me a note and tell me what you like about them? The more feedback you leave about what you like, the more incentive I have to bake.” A hundred coworkers walk by and take a cookie. One person leaves a note. “Great cookies! Bake some more soon!”
The next week, once again there are cookies in the break room with the same sign. Once again a hundred people take a cookie and only one person leaves a note. “Nice! More soon!”
Week Three- Once again, a hundred people take a cookie. No one leaves a note.
Week Four- One hundred people take a cookie. No note.
Week Five- There are no cookies. Someone leaves a note. “Where are the cookies? I loved them. Please, please bake some cookies.”
Week Six- There are no cookies. Ten people leave notes. “I miss your cookies. They were my favorites. I loved the chocolate chips. My friend really liked the way you had almonds in the cranberry ones.”
Week Seven- Motivated by the wonderful notes, the baking coworker stays up late to bake the best batch of cookies they have ever made. That week, a hundred people take a cookie. No one leaves a note.
The co-worker gives up baking for their colleagues.
——————————————–
Please, if you like the fan fiction that you are reading, let your authors know. Stories are abandoned for a myriad of reasons, but it is very, very hard to stay motivated when you receive no positive feedback. If there is a story that you like, whether it is a completed one or a work in progress, please leave an up-lifting comment or review. By doing so, you’re providing that writer with motivation to spend their time and energy creating more stories for you.
And that way, you both win!
We got more feedback the year we took our website offline than at any other point in our 15 years of writing fanfic before that. So we put the archive back up. And all the feedback vanished again. Disheartening, but at that point, unsurprising.
Support your writers, your artists, your content creators: the people who spend time making things and sharing them for free so fandom can be nicer and a richer place for everybody.
Okay… You knocked some sense into me. And I’m honestly surprised because of it. I’ll try to write more revives.
This is the cause of a lot of unfinished fic. FFN has a page to show you your stats and you’ll have like 60K readers for chapter 1 and then chapter 2 will have only 17K readers. And the list of readers shortens as the chapters go on, until your in only triple digits and are getting maybe 5 reviews a chapter. It’s disheartening.
That last reblog about the chapters is super true. Please, if you love the whole series, don’t just like/reblog/comment on only the first chapter. When we notice that the feedback has depleted on the chapters beyond the first, we assume it’s because people aren’t enjoying the direction of the story and/or they’ve stopped reading the story. And hey, that might be true for some. But future chapters receiving a whole lot less feedback than the first has become too common to solely blame it on that.
So please, if you enjoy the next chapter, let us know. Whether that be through a like, a reblog, or a message. It’ll make us more motivated and invested in writing the following chapter, and it can potentially save the story that you enjoy reading from being added to the “discontinued” pile!! ✊🏻✨
I always want to leave feedback, but my timing is always wrong. For example, the fanfiction I’m reading now is written in 2012 and I don’t know if the author will be able to still see it, or if it’ll even play a part in making the author continue the story, or that the author will still appreciate it.
I’m chiming in here because of that last comment. I don’t get many fic reviews anymore, but most of the ones I’ve gotten in recent years include a qualifier exactly like that – “you wrote this so long ago, you might not even seen this!” or “I hope this doesn’t bug you.”
In one case, the person was basing their assumption on the AO3 date, which is just when I added it to that archive. It was actually several years older than that – I wrote it a decade before they left their comment.
What I tell them, and what I’m telling you now, is that I LOVE KNOWING SOMEONE ENJOYED WHAT I WROTE! In all my years in fandom, I’ve never known a fic writer who didn’t feel encouraged, validated, and happy about getting feedback, even a single sentence like “This was great!” Point to any of my old-ass fics, and I can tell you where I lived when I wrote it, what my motivation was, and like 283835 additional thoughts and feelings I still have about it.
I can’t speak directly to chapters, because I’ve never posted fic that way, but please, please don’t treat fanfiction like it has a shelf life, or assume the person who wrote it doesn’t care anymore. I haven’t posted a fic in five years, but any time someone bothers to comment, I feel a little more encouraged to keep trying to write again.
I hear a lot of people bitching that they can’t leave kudos multiple times per story, or can’t leave kudos on every chapter, or whatever.
Well, take a page out of this marvelous book, because I swear I’ve never been so happy to receive kudos as waking up to multiple people having done this on multiple chapters on a story I just posted.
Pre-internet era: You walk into a room and sit down at a table. Someone brings you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Perhaps you are a vegetarian, or gluten-free. Doesn’t matter; you get a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda.
Usenet era: You walk into a room and sit down to your turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a soda. Someone tells you that over at the University they are also serving BLTs, pizza, coffee, and beer.
Web 1.0 (aka The Great Schism): You walk into a room. The room is lined with 50 unmarked doors. Someone tells you, “We have enough food to feed you and a hundred more…but we’ve scattered it behind these fifty doors. Good luck!”
Web 2.0 (present): You walk into a room. Someone points at the buffet and says, “Enjoy!” You turn to see a 100-foot-long buffet table, piled high with every kind of food imaginable. To be fair, some of the food is durian, head cheese, and chilled monkey brains, but that’s cool, some people are into those…and trust me, they are even more psyched to be here than you are.
Tumblr (a hell pit): You try to serve yourself a baked potato. An angry child runs up and slaps the plate out of your hand. “NIGHTSHADE PLANTS ARE POISONOUS,” the child yells. You are hungry. The child gives you a turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a kick on the shin.
The fact that a potato is replaced with a different form of potato is what makes that last one so accurate.
fandom as a whole is migrating away from a mutual appreciation of a story and towards an endless cycle of nitpicking and discourse and frankly that’s just Exhausting
Its just an endless stream of “you’re doing it wrong”. You’re reading this wrong, you’re appreciating this character wrong, you’re appreciating this character too much, you’re not appreciating this character enough, its not enough that I don’t like this pairing but it’s wrong to like it, you’re enjoying this wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
projecting all ur issues™ onto fictional characters is a time honored tradition. if kafka can give a cockroach his depression and deepseated fears of uselessness i can give a comic book character my personality disorder and sexual traumas. god’s dead and soon we will be too so in 2018 write all the weirdly specific Coping Fic you want and don’t let people get on your case about it
fivepercent 