Anonymous #1 1d

me everytime i walk into a forum ready to gush about the nature of capitalism and the publishing industry and the 130k break even margin and the simple reality of what becomes possible outside of it and then i open said forum and it’s people having Tag Discourse. about Tags. and Ships and CWs and jesus fucking christ guys

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Anonymous OP 1d

I'd love to see you start this conversation /gen

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Anonymous #2 1d

fuck ok so. let’s start by establishing the profit incentive. in order for a publishing house to make money off a publication, they have to be reasonably sure that the book is gonna recoup the production costs of binding and printing. and the longer the novel is, the more materials you need to create One copy

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Anonymous OP 1d

and keep in mind - most published books aren’t smash hits. They’re basing these calculations off average sales. Most publishers have decided that above 100-130k words, the sheer cost of Paper required to print the book will offset any profits they make from average sales. And so… it never gets printed

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Anonymous OP 1d

I, of course, made do. But then, I found fanfiction. I liked my shipfics. I liked my comfort stuff. I wanted more of it. It was easy, fun, and simple stuff. Great to read in the back of a class, y’know? I had no idea, no idea at all

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Anonymous OP 1d

Multiple fanfiction experiences have shaped my understanding here. I already talked about Daily Life in another comments section, so here were’re gonna talk “Anchor Foal.” “Anchor Foal: A Romantic Cringe Comedy” seemed RIGHT up my alley. Vapid cringe comedy. Easy. Fun. New author too, let’s check this out-

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Anonymous OP 1d

three hundred thousand words later and i’m taking a walk through campus while literally sobbing as i try to understand what in the fuck i experienced

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Anonymous OP 1d

no spoilers, of course. it’s that good. i’m not ruining it for anyone here. but chekhov’s gun was a muzzleloader, and this shit hit me with the unexpected second shot from semiauto

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Anonymous OP 1d

And that REALLY emphasizes the point. When you aren’t bound by publisher maximums, if you know what you’re doing, you can pull some shit off. For instance. Predicting january sixth with Princess Celestia and a member of a Hentai’s harem! That’s Daily Life. I was somehow not prepared for Daily Life after that

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Anonymous #2 1d

The ultimate form of this is conveniently designed to fuck me over. There is a series. It is millions of words long. And I have literally never seen a single piece of media pull off what it did. Three thousand people on planet earth have read it, because it will never get published. Too costly.

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Anonymous OP 1d

And of course i also can’t spoil it cause the fanbase is a cult. i am part of said fanbase. i originally read this out of spite because nobody would tell me shit about it and i was like “there’s no way it justifies this level of insane secrecy” and i wasn’t even a million words in before i was fully cultpilled

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Anonymous OP 1d

This is fascinating and I do genuinely love your passion. It’s so great to see someone loving something so throughly. I would however suggest doing that without implying that everyone else here is vapid, bc tbh before I saw your passion, that’s most of what I got from your comment. I’m in the book club yak too, and I expected the reoccurring argument about romance and smut, just in fic terminology. Tl;dr, genuinely very cool, just don’t be an ass. I agree it’s sad that so much is unpublished

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Anonymous #1 1d

Fanfic and the archive especially had so much potential for creation. It’s a beautiful hub of art and community. It sounds cheesy to say, but it really has changed my life in many ways

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Anonymous #1 1d

How to not be an ass about this when I previously approached fanfic in this manner and then had my eyes forcibly opened

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Anonymous #1 1d

No glue no borax, i genuinely didn’t realize this came across like that

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Anonymous OP 1d

It’s okay bro, I realize that now <3 ! Next time just leave out the “yall don’t want to read anything challenging.” And tbh the emojis also read as sarcastic (not trying to dump on you, I just have trouble with tone over text and I’d want to know if it were me) Fanfic can have very complex plots and be thought provoking, or it can be fluff, or anything in between, and that’s part of the beauty of it. You can like your thing without commenting on what isn’t your thing

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Anonymous OP 1d

Thank you for sharing! You're right; publishing is often out to make money and can make decisions which can ultimately harm a work to its detriment I'm a history grad student, and the amount of times my classmates and I complain about something done stylistically just for it to be a publisher decision? Ugh (Like endnotes over footnotes (footnotes are better, less pictures than needed (if it's a military history, please for the love of God include a map), word spacing, font size, book length)

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Anonymous #2 1d

Fanfic is beautiful and I'm so glad you shared some of what you find beautiful about it!

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Anonymous OP 1d

my sibling in christ it’s FANFICTION.

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