bettsfic:

foxghost:

On fic and popularity

All this talk about fic and not-so-good-fic and popularity got me thinking about an analogue of sorts: pop music.

I never did pop, but I did sing in a swing cover band, and lemme tell you: it’s nothing special. There’s no improvisation (it’s not like jazz) and you can play with it a bit but generally, we did well at being entertaining. It’s not deep, yeah? It’s happy-making stuff, or sad-making stuff, or ooh, slow-dance making stuff, depending on the song, but there’s no earth-shattering 16 bars of sax solo here or scatting (that wasn’t already written out). Move along.

Sometimes (quite rarely) we participated in a “battle of the bands” and usually we didn’t win anything specific, but we were usually audience choice. Not the technicals or particular band members, but overall? Popular choice. We made people happy. But one time, you know what a judge told us? We were “common denominator music.”

I got kind of mad over that, but she was right.

Fic is like that. Sure, just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s earth shattering literature, but it could mean that it resonates, and despite all the missed notes and the missed steps in choreo and the utter lack of creativity and sometimes subs learning the song 15 minutes before getting on stage, we resonated anyway.

And this of course goes back to the original point: the fic we love, that we wrote specifically for ourselves, is probably not common-denominator fic. There’s really no morals in this post. I mean we will all probably end up with one or two common-denominator fic in our time if we write long enough, but the idea of going out of my way to write one is kind of soul destroying, tbh. Will not recommend.

(Not like singing in a swing cover band wasn’t a blast or anything. Because it was.)

@ao3commentoftheday

i also think a lot – and by a lot i mean most – of a fic’s popularity has to do with timing and chance.

if you’ll notice when you go to a fandom page and sort by kudos descending, you’ll see all the page 1 fics are usually grouped pretty closely in time. the smaller the fandom, the smaller the range of time usually. the bigger the fandom, the wider. 

which is to say, every fandom has an apex of time in which a fic is likely to gain notoriety. you have to join and write for the fandom at a time when its first fics are being widely read. the longer you wait, the harder it is to gain popularity, because people’s interests change and move on to other fandoms.

what also affects it is an author’s user subscription count. the more people who sign on to get notified of anything an author posts, the faster the fic will get traffic, the more enticing it becomes for the tag-hunting readers to pick it up even if it might not be something they’d click on if it didn’t have surprising traffic. 

now let’s say one of those tag-hunters happens to have a huge follower count on tumblr, or a rec blog or something, and recs your fic. now it has the opportunity to get into the hands of a new audience, and for that audience to add to the user subscriber base that generates the initial traffic. 

right now you could write a 120k epic sterek fic which is objectively one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time. but sterek’s page 1 kudos are all from 2012 – 2014, with one outlier from 2017. the likelihood that you’ll become a page 1 outlier this late in the sterek game is slim, because even if the fandom is huge, sterek shippers have mostly moved on to more active fandoms. 

but let’s say tony stark/dr strange (ironstrange?) pics up speed as a ship because of infinity war. if you pounded out a 20k sappy modern au and tossed it on ao3 while other people are sniffing around going “i dug this in IW, i wonder if there’s fic of it yet?” the more people are going to click on it because maybe there are only a handful of one-shots right now and a few things written in russian, and the more likely they are to click on it because they want to see how other people have interpreted the canon angst, or written a fix-it, or what have you.

so i agree with op, popularity has almost nothing to do with quality. i would argue that there are a few basic things you generally need, like a strong conceit and conflict that grows rather than continually deflates, but otherwise, it’s about being at the right place at the right time and growing your “i’m here for anything you write” audience base. 

so, to conclude, as a writer you shouldn’t bother writing for popularity. you should write whatever ship you’re into and be prepared for whatever traffic comes your way. as a reader, you should put some effort into giving time and attention to less popular fics, offering promotion and feedback for the ones you like, and subscribing to the writers whose work will lead you into new places.