And all good! The genre differences can be really significant in publishing! For example erotica books are: less likely to be published in search results, less likely to be listed in libraries, less likely to be listed on multiple publishing platforms, and more likely to be throttled/restricted in sales. They’re also less likely to be found on ‘people also read’ lists.
That’s just the marketing side. In terms of the reading side, the general consensus is that people who primarily read published m/m romance (instead of say, fanfiction like the rest of us who read a mix, or mainly only fanfiction), strongly do not like erotica peeking into their romance series. Erotica can be defined by: the number of sex scenes in the case of non-BDSM, or the book being primarily sex-focused, or it can be defined by the presence of BDSM (though this is a grey area, some people will automatically call any book with BDSM elements ‘erotica’ even though that’s not true at all).
Idk about you, but people like myself used to fanfiction are happy to bounce back and forth between the two, regardless of the series, and don’t always see a really distinct difference. But that’s because fanfiction regularly breaks the formula (or isn’t even aware there is a formula) for the sake of self-satisfaction and what feels right or what feels most self-indulgent or for whatever reasons!
But in publishing…I mean you can set about to break the rules if you want, but it’s generally discouraged, and anyway, in Perth Shifters I wanted to see what it was like if I mostly followed the rules. It’s not as natural to me as writing fanfiction or Fae Tales, and the kink is certainly a lot lighter than what I normally write!
I do think it’s partly one of the reasons why I am so drawn to fanfiction and fanfiction-style serials in the first place though. Because I like heavily character-focused erotica, with solid worldbuilding, and some romance, and that doesn’t really neatly fit into many categories in the current publishing world.
As soon as you have the erotica, they (many publishers and many readers) want to turf it into pulp erotica. It’s as though…once you have a focus on explicit sex, you can no longer actually have a story, or people don’t realise you can have one. But I don’t know why this is the case, when you can see explicit violence in a ton of stories that still have plot (i.e. Game of Thrones). Just because there’s a lot of something explicit – violence or sex – doesn’t mean it’s by default pulpy.
But unfortunately erotica as a published genre is still…thorny for a lot of people. And definitely for folks who consider themselves romance readers, which, when it comes to published books etc. is a very different world to people who also consider themselves erotica readers.
“fanfiction regularly breaks the formula (or isn’t even aware there is a formula)”
I’m not sure this is quite it – I think it’s more that fanfiction has its own formula, which just doesn’t map to anything that you can find in published fiction. @earlgreytea68 did a great post on fanfiction-as-a-genre (which I just spent, like, an hour going through my fandom tag to find, lol) that goes into this concept.
Fandom’s rules are obviously not as formalized or as strict as the rules for published fiction. But there are rules, and I know this because I’ve read fanfictions that aren’t written “like fanfiction” and… it’s weird! and noticeable! And – although fics like that can be a badly-needed breath of fresh air, sometimes it’s just annoying, because it’s like, I came here for fanfiction-qua-fanfiction and this is not meeting my expectations.
So, yes, from a fic reader’s perspective splitting up romance and erotica is bizarre. But it’s also true that we have our own things like h/c that totally cut across traditional genre lines and probably seem equally bizarre to outsiders. I mean there are published books that do fall into the h/c genre (obviously – like, Blackwood) but it isn’t something that people outside of fandom have a concept of as being its own specific thing. I think “erotica” is like that for us, in that it’s just not definitional in the same way.
Case in point, earlier today I saw a post about porn consumption in men vs women and I realized I have no idea how much porn I consume, because basically all my porn is delivered to me via fanfiction and I just don’t categorize fic that way in my head. I almost never go into a fic thinking, ah yes, this is porn, it’s Porn Time now. I can easily go for quite a while not encountering any explicit sex scenes at all without feeling anything lacking, and then on the other hand I once made a recs list for someone who was not in fandom and I had to really triple-check that I wasn’t letting anything through that might scare them off – I’d go back to a fic that I remembered as being tender romance and it’s like, 20% hardcore BDSM by volume, lol.
God, this post was meant to be really short and concise and basically just a link to that other post and it ballooned out of all control and ended up being not that. oooops.
Yes! Getting into m/m original for-profit fiction has been interesting. There’s a lot of overlap with slash fandom, but a lot of differences too.
That thing you wrote that isn’t “good enough” to put up on the AO3. You can put it up there! The AO3 isn’t meant to be The World’s Classiest Showcase. It’s an archive. It exists because most other forms of hosting fannish work eventually degrade or disappear. Accounts get deleted. Websites shut down. The AO3 preserves those things. Ten years from now you’ll be like, “Shit, there was this really great tag essay, but the person changed their Tumblr URL and then Tumblr closed up shop…” (look, even Tumblr will die eventually) and your only hope of finding it will be if the page was cached, or if somebody uploaded it to the AO3.
The AO3 exists to preserve ephemera as much as substantial works. You know how valuable it is for archaeologists to be able to read the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? The little things, the notes, the headcanons, the notfics, the meta, the back-and-forths, are all important too.
YES YES YES THIS.
Tumblr’s likely to die sooner than you expect, and suddenly – it’s owned by Yahoo. (Anyone remember
del.icio.us, later delicious.com?) Yahoo’s trying really really hard to squeeze money out of tumblr and it’s not working, for all the reasons discussed in synec’s post and because a huge portion of its userbase is 13-18 years old and HAVE NO DIGITAL MONEY so can’t buy things online even if they wanted to.
There is no “worthy to be on AO3.” None. The early fics were often really well-written; it was a high-standards archive – not because “it strove for high standards” but because the only people who knew it existed, who cared about a new multifandom archive, were the ones who’d been around watching archives disappear for years; they were veteran fic writers who wanted a permanent place to share their stories. It took a long time for AO3 to have enough server capacity to allow open invites; in the early days, it was friend-of-a-friend for invite codes. (They wanted more people; they couldn’t handle a flood. So they handed out a few codes at a time)
We even talked about it while setting up the original terms of service – knowing that by saying, our standards are less restrictive than ff.net, less restrictive than LJ, we were going to eventually have HUGE amounts of really bad fic. FF.net got the nickname “pit of voles,” and AO3 was going to outdo that… eventually.
And. We wanted it ALL. All the reader-insert Mary Sue “date with hot dude” fic; all the “quiz to find out which power ranger you would be” fic; all the “band came to my home town and their bus broke down in front of my house and they needed a coffee and…” fic. And later, all the meta: the thinky character analyses; the “who’d be best on a first date” discussions; the “why the new movie sucked rocks and should never have been made because they ruined my favorite sidekick” rants.
ALL. WE WANT IT ALL.
AO3 is not about “the best of fandom;” it’s about “the truth of fandom.” And the truth is, fandom is not comprised of 90% well-written tightly-plotted carefully proofread fic. Fandom is comprised of people who love their favorite shows and books and characters and want to share that love with others.
AO3 are not the fanfic standards police. We’re the ones cheering for the “GLOWING BLUE SKELETON DICKS” tags.
Someday, some fandom archaeologist (and yes, there will be fandom archaeologists, isn’t that awesome?) will sift through the badfic, the quick drabbles, the Mary Sues, and write articles for peer-reviewed journals chronicling the complete collected works of some of the 21st century’s greatest authors and how you can see in THIS self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck the origin of those characterization tactics and flow of prose that make your subsequent masterworks truly shine as beloved classics, and THIS short character drabble gives THAT story arc in your well-known later story an exceptional poignancy and depth if one considers it backstory.
Also that fandom archaeologist’s teenage daughter will think the self-indulgent Protagonist/OC clusterfuck is the best thing she’s ever read.
GUYS IT’S HAPPENING!
PLEASE POST ALL OF YOUR PROMPT FILL FICS, YOUR METAS, YOUR HEADCANONS, ETC, TO AO3 SO THEY’RE NOT LOST FOREVER! (If you don’t want to spam people, just do it as one big multichapter “Tumblr export” fic!)
THERE IS SO MUCH GOOD CONTENT ON THIS SITE, PLEASE SAVE YOUR STUFF!
AO3 has reached 25,000 fandoms! To celebrate, we’ve put together info about fandom tags and how all tags work: https://goo.gl/W4wPxH
Hey folks who use AO3 – please read and reblog widely. In addition to the celebration of our 25,000th canonical fandom, this post contains some great tips for making our tagging system work for you.
As a Support Staffer and Tag Wrangler for AO3, I beg you:
Among the tips:
Separate your / and & ships / is for romantic and/or sexual
relationships. & is for platonic relationships only – ones that are
neither sexual nor romantic. (Pre- and Post-Relationship are still /.)
& was created for those Gen fans who don’t want anything
non-platonic in the ships they’re searching for. You can help both Gen
fans and shippers by carefully choosing the tag that matches your work!
Look, I know you’re writing a slow burn where the friendship aspect of the relationship is important. I applaud that; I love it in my romantic pairings. But it’s a /, not a &. Please save & for those of us who want to find the three truly and purely gen fics for a popular romantic ship.
Folks, I LOVE AO3, please read and share!
As someone relatively new to using AO3, I did not really realise this. *goes back to check tags* THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS.
TAG WRANGLING: For Pairings
/ is for romantic or sexual relationships
& is for platonic, non-romantic, non-sexual relationships
but like who started the idea that fanfiction writers are somehow bothered by enthusiasm for their work???? cause i see posts all the time like “do writers really want to talk with us about their fics? Do writers really want long comments? I dont want to bother them” and i just think its absolutely ridiculous????
ofc i want to talk to you about it, and would love to hear you go on about it. i took time out of my real life to write this stuff down so we could all share these characters!!! the idea that you’re bothering a fanfiction writer, a fellow nerd, is absolutely crazy
Personally I attribute at least part of this to the shift of fandom onto Tumblr platform. Because of the way Tumblr works, multiple replies and reactions can get cluttered and overwhelming really fast, so leaving replies and feedback can be awkward. I have actually seen ‘tumblr etiquette’ posts going around scolding people for adding commentary onto posts when they reblog it! Actually discouraging people from reacting and adding their own words! If any of this attitude spills over onto fanfic posts and reblogs, no wonder readers are shy about adding their own words to an author’s posts.
Dear fans on tumblr:
WE, THE AUTHORS, REALLY WANT TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS.
As a writer, I second this, call the motion, get a unanimous response from all writers and it’s carried. To be clear, there’s pretty much nothing worse than feeling like you’re writing into a vacuum or black hole where no one reads your stuff and nothing much better than a long enthusiastic commentary about what a person liked and why and could they ask a question and maybe discuss a perspective – and I’ve made a LOT of GREAT friends all around the world that started out just like this, with a comment on a story. If you don’t want to reblog, then send a note or an ask to the writer to share your comments. We live for these kinds of comments, this feedback that what we wrote touched someone. Tell us we made you laugh or cry and we’ll be thrilled and forever grateful. But if leaving a long comment is too much, takes too much time, a simple ‘I really liked this,’ or ‘thanks for writing this’ is also treasured.
I also think part of the hesitation comes from the massive stigma the outside world places on fannish enthusiasm. Readers are hesitant to talk to creators because they’re afraid of being seen as overenthusiastic or somehow weird.
I noticed this when I started writing and getting comments like “not to be weird but I love this” or “I didn’t comment on the other works in this series because I didn’t want to seem creepy,” and I realized that readers were intimidated by me. ME. HAVE YOU EVEN SEEN ME. But it’s exactly the way I’ve felt with authors whose works I admired.
So let me say this loud and clear:
AUTHORS ARE FANS TOO.
ARTISTS ARE FANS TOO.
ALL FAN CREATORS ARE FANS TOO.
We are the LAST people in the world to judge you for how or how much you like something and the first to understand and appreciate your enthusiasm. Because the way you love things? That’s the way we love things too. And if the things you love are the things we made, that is the greatest compliment in the world.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes – tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.
(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)
I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark. It was a real loss. The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.
But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo. They weren’t the only ones. And they won’t be the last. It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc. If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.
AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever. So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories. Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom – where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever. Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.
Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away. Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all – a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).
So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom. Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes. You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are. If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first. If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.
Many Flickr users are upset at the changes. They expected their photos to be archived there forever. Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay – since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.
I fear that applies to fannish works as well. Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution. They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced. Any commercial service can’t be relied on.
I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said. He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available. Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read. I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.
A good post to revive!
I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.
The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.
Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.
Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.
This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?
AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.
Do you ever read someone’s fanfic and realized it was so good that you went to look for the rest of their stuff and you read all of them too, and now you just wait for them to write something new? Like you don’t even care what they write because everything will be gold. Just give me the soulmate starbucks hooker AU or anything else you write, I’m desperate here.
So when I was a kid, probably 12 or 13, I checked out a compilation of post-apocalyptic science fiction stories from the public library. It looked like every other book on the shelf. It was fic from a dozen different authors, and the blurb on the inside cover was pretty vague.
Of the stories in that book, 2 were R-rated. One had surprise rape. One had surprise inter-generational incest. For the shock value. To make the reader ~think. Dude authors. Do I wish I hadn’t read it? Yah. Kinda. It lives in the back of my head with the other gross detritus of the world, all the horrible upsetting shit I’ve read. I read a Star Trek licensed novel with animal torture in it, to illustrate the horror of sociopathy, and I wish I hadn’t read that too.
During the summers of middle school and high school I read voraciously and while I managed to steer clear of MUCH upsetting content I sure as hell stumbled on some doozies.
If my library had been Ao3 I would have gotten a pop up asking me — hey, kid, there’s gross shit in that book, are you old enough to check it out?
And if I was a dumb kid I still might have said ‘yes’, but I would have had a heads up.
Quick personal statistics!
Surprise incest I’ve read in paperbacks I bought in a store or checked out from the library: I’m going to say…. half a dozen instances? Dozen? Surprise rape, at least double that. What is it about the fantasy genre that brings out the creepy writers, and why do they consider sexual assault ‘gritty realism,’ could they fucking stop.
Surprise incest I’ve read on Ao3: none. It has warnings and I avoid it like the plague.
Surprise rape I’ve read on Ao3: none. It has warnings and I avoid it like the plague.
Ao3 is one of the safest goddamn places on the web to read fiction because it has a standardized, mandatory labeling system. Is there appalling content on it? Oh god yes. Does it do a better job of warning you about that content than any library or bookstore? Oh my god yes by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.
I vote funding for my local library every time it’s on the ballot, even though there’s gross shit on the shelves, because I think it’s a resource that’s important to have.
I donate to Ao3 even though there’s content I find fucking appalling archived there, because I think it’s a resource that’s important to have.
Because I know that defunding libraries won’t stop gross dudes from writing gross shit and calling it ‘thought provoking literature’, and I know shutting down Ao3 won’t make creepy fic vanish from the internet. It’ll just take the warning labels off it.
Question of Smoke 