And, yeah, fanfic IS crap.

Comprehensive research into these respective “fan” or “customer” bases is traditionally the publisher’s responsibility. Maybe the internet changes some of that, for certian genre writers and not others.

That said, am I alone in thinking this whole debate is rather petty when carried on in public? If it works for the market and for the institutions or individuals in that market, then what’s the point of this snide flame-fest?

The argument over which principle is “best” doesn’t mean much if the two groups have found novel if opposite ways of acheiving that same end. If it works for you and your situation then great, nobody’s going to tell you no. But by the same token that success shouldn’t be a licence to claim this way is now the ONLY way forward.

By all means share the wisodm gained, but please, do so with dignity. The internet, you know, doesn’t always have to be about dirty laundry and disagreements. A willingness to compromise and work together can go a long way.

I realize that genre-boundary arguments are doomed to failure, but calling all derivative works “fanfic” is as unhelpful and reductionist as calling all parodies “filk”. Roots and pedigree are important when describing artistic forms. Both fanfic and filk, if they’re to be useful categories, must be linked to particular movements that are as much social as artistic. Filk music is produced by a particular slice of SF fandom, not by Spike Jones or Weird Al (Yoda notwithstanding); fan fiction is not fan fiction if you can’t trace its roots back along some kind of path through internet fandom to ‘zines.

Cory, would you be happier with “(the enormous, vast majority of) fanfic is crap”?

Certainly, but that’s just an application of Sturgeon’s Law. 90% of everything is crap. This is no more (or less) true for fanfic than anything else.

Printgasm BINGO
http://moriahjovan.com/mojo/printgasm-bingo

(And yes, I hold this as true for the previous one as well.)

(And, for the record, I didn’t think you were suggesting that you’d suddenly sold thousands of copies. I just find Sales Rank fascinating, and love to talk about it if given the chance.)

Best of luck with your book!

And, yeah, fanfic IS crap.

Except for those times when it isn’t.

Tell that to the authors of My Fair Lady and West Side Story.

In fact, the arguments should be made worse, or really, just whinier.

Many of these Bingo cards carry (a few) perfectly reasonable arguments, but when repeated back in a whiny voice, they are supposedly defeated and rendered worthless.

But most of the arguments are straw men. The Bingo card maker would have cognitive dissonance if good arguments were used.

The few good Bingo cards are made up simply of cliches that we all know and love, and thus manage to take a neutral stance.

That seems very arbitrary to me. I can’t imagine why it should be part of the definition of fanfiction, when it has zero to do with the actual fiction or process. Can you clarify?

For example, I was writing fanfiction about my favorite television show long before the internet, and without ever having heard of anyone else doing what I was doing, much less producing ‘zines full of it. My first fanfic can’t be traced to ‘zines by any path, so, is it not fanfiction?

Now it’s 2011. Yesterday after reading about Amanda Hocking I let my facebook friends know that I had a novel out there in ebook format for $2.99 as an experiment. In 36 hours it jumped 353,134 spots on Amazon to #45,093.

The moral of the story: Times have changed. Writers need to 1. write 2. edit 3. edit some more and 3. self-publish. I look back on the changes of the last eight years with a sense of amazement.

If you have a book, and it’s good, don’t put yourself through the hoops of agent/publisher rejection. Go out there and Make. go out there and DIY.

-Michael McClung

Try replacing a few with:

- A lot of people don’t want to like ebook readers and won’t even try them.

- People like owning and being able to resell their books. Please show me an example of a resellable ebook.

- Not all books are fiction.

More about that last one: for us, the cost of publishing referential non-fiction (what my company does), is about 80% editing, research, design, pre-press, marketing, ongoing web support and don’t forget author royalties. Only about 20% is printing, warehousing and shipping.

It’s great if you’re appealing to a huge audience (SF fans, for example), but for those of us producing reference material for a relatively small market, how do we take this $32.95 book and sell it profitably for $9.95? If I sell it for $29.50 (passing along the savings in printing etc, and keeping other margins the same), will anyone even pay that much for an e-book? How many people’s jobs am I willing to bet on that gamble? Would the universe really be better off with us out of jobs and these books not getting written? (the book I’m talking about, our flagship book, is about 800 magazine-format pages in its 14th edition and still selling very well. Nobody’s come up with a crowd-sourced wikified version of the same thing, probably because it takes a fairly dedicated team years to produce each edition.)

Cory, would you be happier with “(the enormous, vast majority of) fanfic is crap”? …and actually, I do consider both My Fair Lady and West Side Story to be crap. ;-)

Basic idea, since the details aren’t actually known outside of Amazon: Sales Rank includes some combination of both historic sales data and a projection of what future sales might be like based on the data from the update period. (1 hour for items between ranked 1 and 9,999. 24 hours for any item ranked lower.) While the exact ranking calculation for items ranked between 1 and 99,999 before an update is unknown, it’s known that historic sales do play an important role in the final value.

On the other hand, if an item is ranked at 100,000 or lower before the update is applied, then historic sales suddenly aren’t that important and the projected sales becomes the primary indicator of what the new Sales Rank will be. (It’s why, for items in this range, you frequently see jumps and plunges of hundreds of thousands.)

So, in short: a sudden jump out of the 100,000+ range does mean that it sold more copies, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it sold more than the items in the 10,000-100,000 range that it’s ranked higher than. Rather, it means that Amazon’s predictive algorithm expects it to sell more than them. If, in the next 24 hour period, it turns out the algorithm was wrong, then expect a correspondingly large drop in rank.

(On the other hand, if you don’t get a drop, or really even if you do: congratulations on the new sales.)

Sure, I can try. Genre names are really just convenient handles for picking up a group of works with some connection and talking about them as a unit. A work in isolation doesn’t have a genre; it acquires a genre through its relationship with other works. The context and community/movement in which a work was written, and the works that influenced it, are important parts of that. This is part of why it’s useful to draw a distinction between “fantasy” and magic realism. (And yeah, I know a lot of people don’t think that’s a useful distinction, which is why I don’t want to get too bogged down here — ultimately, genre labels come down to personal language choice.) Though the artistic impulse may have been similar, West Side Story emerged from a very different community/movement from the one(s) that produce modern fanfic, and I think it’s worthwhile to consider them separately.

If you want an essentialist definition, I’m not sure I have a good one, but Cory’s examples are helpful for examining why I put WSS on the other side of a line from fanfic. I love both West Side Story and My Fair Lady — and I loved them before I’d seen Romeo and Juliet or Pygmalion, which is an important distinction. Fanfic is produced by fans for fans (hence the name), and apart from some funny or porny fanfics it’s hard for a non-fan to appreciate it — the writers don’t need to lay the groundwork for the settings and characters, so they generally don’t. It would be a waste of the author’s and readers’ time; a shared knowledge base is assumed. (This isn’t me harshing on fanfic; this is how people in the fanfic community have explained it to me.) For West Side Story, no shared knowledge base is necessary (except the very large body of Western cultural norms).

That definition-kernel has a lot of holes that can be poked in it, obviously, so I prefer the cultural/traditional definition: fanfic is that which led into or emerged from the fanfic community. Maybe your young writings should be called proto-fanfic; I did the same thing, improvising Empire Strikes Back audio dramas into a tape recorder with my buddy Jay, but I’d've called that “play” rather than trying to fit it into a genre. Some things just emerge from our playful minds independently; kids with fingerpaints aren’t working in the abstract expressionist movement. :) (And, less dismissively, neither are outsider artists who’ve never seen a Pollock.) But I think your example is closer to fanfic than Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and don’t have strong feelings about excluding it.

My end point is, we attach labels to things to make them easy to discuss. If all derivative works are fan fiction, what’s the point of having two different labels? If you want to say that fanfic drinks from the same wellspring of inspiration Lerner and Loewe drank from, and use that line of argument to legitimize a maligned genre, that’s one thing; if no real thread of influence can be drawn between them, I don’t think it’s useful to put them in the same bucket.

Yes, I had a vague idea about algorithms,and expect it’s a concrete sales jump of about 20-30 units. Your information makes it a lot clearer what goes on in the sausage making world of Amazon, though.

I don’t want anyone to think you can just tell your fb friends you haz a book and then you sell 200k copies :) Unless, of course, you has 200k friends…

But in 2011, you *can* tell your fb friends you haz a book, and you *can* sell copies, which in 2003 wasn’t happening, and you don’t need Random House or Del Rey or anybody else taking a massive slice of your revenue to do it.