FanLib Invitation. One of the select few. Like hell.

[icarus]

Drawing on the FanLib discussion, I have to say that I was invited to archive my fanfiction on FanLib back in March.

Hi Icarus,

I saw some of your Stargate fan fiction online and really enjoyed your writing. I work for a brand-new fan fiction website called FanLib.com and my colleagues and I want it to be the ultimate place for talented writers like you. In case you're wondering, FanLib's not new to fan fiction. Since 2001, they've been producing really cool web events with people like CBS, Showtime and HarperCollins to bring fan creativity into the big leagues (see below for some links).

We're impressed by your writing and impact in the fan fiction community and we value your opinion. That's why we're inviting you to be among the first to experience FanLib.com. As a member of our Beta Team (not like "beta reader" but "beta software" that's still in development), you'll get an exclusive peek at what we're doing before we open the site to the general public.

Feel free to take a look around, upload some fics, maybe read and comment on a few. Do as much or as little as you like. On FanLib.com, you'll be able to connect with other first-rate writers like yourself, exchange ideas with the site creators, and get some of the fun stuff we're giving away to celebrate our launch.

Don't worry, you won't get spammed. We're not selling anything. We just want you to try the site and hopefully give us some feedback.

You'll need to use this special individual login to access the protected site:

http://beta.fanlib.com
Username: Icarus
Password: ****

(This is just to access the beta site and is separate from your site registration.)

We look forward to having you as a founding member. Together, we can create the greatest fan fiction site the web's ever seen!

Best,

Naomi
FanLib Beta Launch Coordinator
FanLib.com

Well, ain't that fine and dandy. I was "personally selected" because of my great writing. Why did that sound like a credit card offer? (Bring fanfiction to the big leagues? Really. You're going to what -- publish it? Hmm. Just looks like another archive to me.) I scanned through the possible places they could have gotten my name at random.

Remember. I'm an author who posts everywhere. If anyone's going to turn up on a random search, it'll be me.

Then I remembered the Gen drabble I posted at, aha, Gateworld. Gotcha.

Curious, I checked FanLib out. At the time, they had only four authors on the archive. Three were so-called "Multi-Fandom Authors." There was something strange about these authors. First off, I'd never heard of them. Okay, okay, I don't know every author in fandom, and I'm certainly out of step with the immense Harry Potter fandom. But Stargate Atlantis, while prolific, hasn't been around that long, and they wrote slash. You'd think I'd at least run across a multi-fandom author on sga_flashfic. Huh. Odd. I let that go.

Then each author had exactly two stories in each fandom they wrote for. Now, usually how an author becomes multi-fandom is they are a little obsessive. They'll go through phases where they write massive numbers of stories in a fandom and then flit to another fandom that they'll flirt with for a while. But, hey, maybe they were only uploading their two favorite stories.

Then I read some of the stories. They weren't bad. Whoever wrote them definitely had taken some creative writing classes. But they had that kind of awkwardness and close ties to canon that you see in an author's first story in a fandom. All of them. They started slow and uncomfortably. One had Rodney flipping a coin (and described the coin in vast detail) a reference to "Rising," in a Rodney/Carson story. I dunno. They felt forced.

They didn't reference fanon at all. It was like these authors existed in a vacuum. A multi-fandom author is usually connected to fandom in some way.

I decided that the owners of FanLib had hired some interns (okay, "hired" for an intern implies pay) to write some "fanfiction" stories to seed their archive. It annoyed me.

Then I was annoyed at the "bright colors!" and "bold stars!" layout. What is this, kindergarten? They didn't even know the average age of a fanfiction writer. The site seemed marketed to high school students. I contemplated sending them a scathing (if politely worded) email on how poor their market research has been, but I decided I didn't want to help them.

But here's the weird part: of those four authors, only cpt_ritter is still around, and cpt_ritter wasn't one of the "multi-fandom" authors. Once they got their archive started, they pulled their "seed" authors out.

Now I'll post my stories anywhere. I've joked that I'll staple them to telephone poles. But even I draw the line here. These guys were dishonest and manipulative. I don't trust them.



ETA: I agree with astolat: It's time for a truly all-inclusive multi-fandom archive. Now there was one called The Archive At The End Of The Universe. Let me see if that's still in business.

Comments

[cofax7]

Huh. Now, I got one of those letters, I believe, but I've never posted at Gateworld. I think they went to a bunch of different places.

Still, skeevy in the extreme, and clearly unfamiliar with this end of fandom.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Where do you think they checked? Wraithbait? Oh. I post at ff.net -- okay, I post everywhere else, too. I'm curious (since I'm wrong) about triangulating this.

Not one sincere word in the entire thing. It really annoyed me that they implied some sort of legitimacy. They're not doing anything different from any other archive (except making money).

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ah, Interesting bit o' news.

Apparently jdsampson, an employee of FanLib has been replying to people at fanthropology. She mentions that she was interested in Supernatural and Stargate fanfiction. I'm thinking she probably means she targeted SG-1 writers. That takes the wind out of the sails of this being a random pitch.

Icarus

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

She's replied to a number of posts. She's another one who's claiming to be a fan Just Like Us!! but was completely becroggled at the idea that there are no women on the FanLib board might be any kind of an issue. Nor does she have any understanding of why we might be concerned or annoyed over the idea of people making money off of fanfic. Whether she agrees with those concerns or not, anyone who'd been active in fanfic fandom for the last six months or year, even, would at least be aware that those are huge issues. [sigh]

But yes, I remember her saying somewhere that everyone on the FanLib staff is a fan of whatever fandom and that she identified her favorite writers from her two or three fandoms and made sure they got invites. But I still have yet to see anyone involved in this discussion say that they'd gone over to the FanLib archive and browsed through the section for a fandom they were familiar with and recognize any of the writers represented there. So much for "The Best!!!"

Angie

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

I went and checked out her LJ, since she claimed

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I went and checked out her LJ, since she claimed <a href"http://community.livejournal.com/genreneep/132162.html?thread=201794#t201794">here</a> that she's been writing fanfic since the 1970.

The journal has been around since 2005, so that seems to be legit, but under the fic tag there's one measely story (and I don't read Wincest, so I didn't check it out). But really interesting is the homepage linked to. It's two other blogs, that have existed for only a few months each. One seems to be connected with tvguide.com and the other is a blog, whose apparently only purpose is selling stuff related to tv. Not a single piece of fiction in sight. And on her fanlib profile (god, what an eye sore) are 9 stories, most of them SPN. So really, for somebody who's been a fanfic writer for at least 30 years, her output is curiously low or interestingly badly advertised.

And saying that she's written a couple of published Buffy novels (in other words, tie-ins) doesn't make her a fanfic writer. Not every tie-in writer is a fanfic writer. Together with the very polished, marketing speech quality of her posts, this woman makes me very suspicious.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Well, I am into Wincest, so I read that fic. It's good. The character voices are great, characterization dead on, it's an original idea, believable, and it's pretty hot, too. (It's probably a mark of my cynicism that I'm hoping it's hers and not....)

Writing fanfic since 1970? No sign of it. The oldtimers have certain attitudes and a certain voice. She's nothing like them. Tie-ins are not the same, not by a long shot. There's no way someone who's been involved in fandom that long wouldn't know the whole history of C&D issues, up to and including George Lukas going apeshit and tearing after the Star Wars fandom.

I've nothing to do with Star Wars, and even I know about that.

Icarus

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely not an oldtimer.

The way she went "I'm not aware of gender issues in fandom." when people noted the the whole board of directors of FanLib is male was another huge tip-off. I mean, lots of the misogynistic shit in TV-land, that pisses of the more feminist trained people in fandom, sails over my head by a mile and I'm aware of the gender issues in fandom.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It's also been a very big issue recently, cutting across the Supernatural fanbase as well. Regardless of how long she's been around, I'm hard-pressed to understand how she could have missed it over the last month or two.

Icarus

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

And I've been poking around a little more on the FanLib website (can you tell that I'm bored at work?).

I found it revealing that their message of proudly welcoming their new friends Harper Collins, Showtime, Startrek.com and so on, does in fact not link to any website of those "friends". It links to the press release of FanLib, where again names get dropped but no links are provided. In fact, so far I haven't a single link to any of the PTB, that they claim to work with, on the whole site.

Then I checked out their Ghost Whisperer Contest. Only people from the United States and Canada are allowed to participate. Ok, it would be complicated to get some of their prices to Europe or Asia. But if you are a Canadian living in the Province of Quebec, you are not allowed to participate either. Why's that? Reading further along the rules of the contest, the very last point was the real kicker. The sponsor of the contest is not whoever is producing Ghost Whisperer. No, it's FanLib itself. So even if I'm willing to given them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the network or production company or whoever holds the rights of Ghost Whisperer works with FanLib, for me as a fan it seems almost impossible to verify that this is actually the case. So one of their big "selling points", sanction by the creators, is proven nowhere on their site.

And the reason I went to look for actual PTB involvement is, that I remembered that the copyright infringement discussion is actually a double-edged blade. When I was at Peg2 in Februray, David Nykl, irc, said when asked about fanfic (he brings it up himself) that the actors are not allowed to read it for the same reason that the production company does not accept unsolicited scripts: they don't want to open themselves to copyright infringement suits. They don't want some fan suing them for "stealing" an idea from a fic and using it in an actual ep. And I believe I heard long ago something like that is one of the reasons why Anne Rice blows a gasket over Vampire Chronicles fanfic. Which brings us back to anybody who's spent some time in fandom, is aware of the problems of shoving fanfic under the PTB's noses.

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

Ok, was shooting from the hip. My bad for trying to navigate that blinky site on 4.5 hours of sleep. There is a page with links to their co-sponsors.

Still hinky, though.

[caras-galadhon.livejournal.com]

Scooting in from metafandom, and mostly just lurking and reading as I try to get my head around all of this, but I thought I might throw in a quick tidbit.

But if you are a Canadian living in the Province of Quebec, you are not allowed to participate either. Why's that?
As much as I'd like to pillory FanLib for all sorts of things, that's a common codicil in Canadian contests. The gov't of Quebec has a different (and more stringent) set of laws around contests/winnings than the rest of Canada, and most companies simply hold a different contest in-province or skip Quebec altogether to deal with that difference.

*slips back into lurk*

[ggreenapple.livejournal.com]

I hate to see someone be misrepresented. I'm not friends with jdsampson, and I don't know her personally. But I have read several of her Spn stories. Even enjoyed a couple. Although she used to be on my flist, I don't really keep track of what she's up to anymore. She apparently stopped writing about a year ago, and started to focus on posting news and info stuff instead.

She's certainly not at the "core" of Spn fandom, and I don't think she ever was -- that's not a crime. Lot of people fit that category, including myself.

That said, I don't find her involvement with something like this at all surprising. All my interactions with her have been pleasant, and I have no reason to believe that she doesn't mean well; I just think she considers herself more a professional writer than a fanfic writer, and consequently has never really seemed to "get" fandom in the same way that others do.

(Also, as far as I know, the tie-in material she authored was not a novel, but a trivia book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/002-4303448-5614464?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Cynthia%20Boris). I could be wrong, and there could be more Buffy tie-in material she's authored that don't show up on Amazon. But that's the only thing I'm familiar with.)

Hope that helps clear things up some.

[rike-tikki-tavi.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean to say, she doesn't mean well or that she's not a fan or that she's a bad writer. I'm sure she's a lovely person, she certainly was very polite in the dicussions about Fanlib. If you ask me, the people at FanLib are using her ties to fandom for their money making scheme.

It's just that she said in that thread I linked to, that she's been writing in fandom for about 30 years. Now I'm not a writer myself, but I've been hanging around online fandom since the mid-nineties and I was surprised by her attitude. So I went and looked her up. And as you said, her main fandom seems to be SPN, which has only existed for 2 years. I was just pointing out that discrepancy. Maybe it came out a little harsh, but I feel very uneasy about the business model of FanLib and that makes me disinclined to cut people involved with it much slack. I admit, that's a failing of mine.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Frankly, the claim that she's been in fandom for 30 years is dubious. Buffy is also a fairly recent phenomena. I can't see how she could have been active that long without understanding the legal questions about making money on fanfic.

Also, the oldtimers have a different set of attitudes. For example, slash had a slightly different meaning 30 years ago. She doesn't use the lingo like an oldtimer, or have an oldtimer's world-weary attitude. She may have written a fanfiction story as a kid (I did), but she's far too ... innocent? naive? ... to have been around fandom 30 years.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I did read the SPN wincest fic she has in her memories (noted it in one of these comments, no idea where), and it was pretty good. I thought the date on it was Jan '07, iirc.

She's certainly out of the loop on fandom issues like gender, the gift economy, and, very importantly, the legal status of fanfiction.

But mostly, FanLib didn't seem to get that fanfic writers aren't as hungry as profic writers. Pro writers will leap at the chance to get published. Fanfic writers on the other hand have droves of readers, a staggering number of archives, communities, challenges, mailing lists, Yahoo Groups, websites, and other outlets, rec-lists, communities, beta readers, and specialized knowledge (need a translation in medieval Latin? I can name two experts on my flist alone).

FanLib never recognized that they have nothing to offer us.

a fan Just Like Us!!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I think she might be a newbie. Her "Supernatural is the best fanfiction!" isn't a marketing position that would help her and strikes me as sincere -- and a newbie sentiment. (Though she uses Supernatural instead of SPN, which is kinda... hmm.) Once you mention this, that, and the other fanfiction, no, she hasn't read that.

She doesn't distinguish between Stargate SG-1 and SGA, so she's not a real fan there, though sometimes SG-1 fans refer to SG-1 as Stargate out of habit. That was one of their other mistakes from the original headhunt. I write for both and was confused instantly which one they meant.

There's no way she's interacted in fandom though. It took me, hmm, four months in the Harry Potter fandom to learn about C&Ds and the legal concerns.

But yes, I remember her saying somewhere that everyone on the FanLib staff is a fan of whatever fandom

Fan of whatever fandom, or fan of whatever show? I think that's part of the disconnect. FanLib doesn't know there's a distinction.

Icarus

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Exactly. [nodnod] They use the words interchangeably. (Rather like so many fanfic fans say "fandom" when they mean "fanfic fandom" but anyway. [wry smile]) I don't think she sees a difference between the active fans who are part of the community, even if it's that furrin' community over there on that other service or the one over there at that archive/forum site, or whatever, and the fans who are just really into watching the TV show or whatever.

Which also makes sense, since my theory about their marketing and business plans assumes that those fans (the ones who just watch the show and such) are their true target audience. Those are "the fans" so far as FanLib is concerned. They're the ones who'll make them their money and it makes sense that those are the people the FanLib staff would be identifying with and thinking about.

Angie

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Assuming "fanfiction fandom" and "fans of the show" are one and the same is where they're making a mistake. My experience over at David Hewlett's forum is that the majority of fans for a show don't give a flip about fanfiction. I would (I'm being generous here) estimate 75% to 80% don't care about fanfiction. It's not that they don't know it's there, it's that they're not interested.

I don't think they're going to get the droves of readers they expect.

The other mistake they've made (among so many) is that assumed fanfic writers were as hungry as profic writers. New pro writers are desperate to publish. They'll leap at the chance to get their work on paper. Fanfiction writers are pretty fat and happy. We have plenty of readers, lots of praise, communities, reviewers, rec-lists, awards. We don't need FanLib. Even if they'd handled it well, they have nothing to offer us.

Icarus

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[auctasinistra.livejournal.com]

Most importantly, she works for them. When she comes in here defending fanlib (she came to my lj too), she says she's speaking as a fanfic writer, but she is not. She's an employee. That's an entirely different, and in fact all but contradictory, position.

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Her job's on the line here. Plus, it sounds like from her comments in Fanthropology she was hired as the fandom expert, so the blowback in the community is going to be hung on her in a "why didn't you tell us" and "why is this happening" sort of way.

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[auctasinistra.livejournal.com]

Your point's a good one. I've written fanfic since the 70s, but have been actively involved in fandom (mostly online) for about 5 years. She could be one of those, hence not at all up on the issues that are constantly discussed online (I mean, hell, even I smelled a rat here that anyone who's been involved in online fandom for a year or two, if they care at all, would have smelled). But her language - Supernatural instead of SPN - that smacks of her being one of us old people who don't cotton to them there 'breviation things. ;-)

Re: a fan Just Like Us!!

[liresius.livejournal.com]

I'm not a writer (well, published anyway), but I have been reading ff for 10 years and since late 2005 in LJ, fb-ing and just generally keeping up with the main issues when I see them from my remote corner of the FF fandom (on LJ). I'm a year older than her (according to her user info) and have cottoned on to those 'breviation things'. *g* I went and checked out her journal but there doesn't seem to be anything there now, by way of entries.

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

I got the exact same letter you did. (synecdochic got a very similar letter a few weeks before -- it was slightly tweaked to get to this version.) I have only ever posted in my journal and jackslashdaniel, plus a few random/obscure challenge communities. This girl definitely plumbed her fandoms via LJ for whom she wanted to invite. At the time I checked FanLib out, just to see who was going over there, and... ew. Nobody I knew, and not good fic. Plus I hated the interface, but I didn't care enough about them to give beta comments. There are plenty of archives I'm perfectly happy with.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

This is far more targeted than I realized, those are all good writers. Apparently FanLib did their homework about which writers they wanted to invite.

I think they just didn't realize that fanfic writers aren't as hungry as profic writers.

Even without their rabid TOS and eye-searing design (they didn't have the ads yet when I checked them out), they don't offer us anything we don't have everywhere else, with people we know and trust.

Icarus

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

I think they just didn't realize that fanfic writers aren't as hungry as profic writers.

And that is the crucial point. I think they'll end up bleeding off the FF.net hordes who are unhappy over there for whatever reason, and the "good" writers will still be curled up over here on LJ, and in the fandom-specific archives, and at their personal websites.