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

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Wow, if memory serves, I heard that complaint from my supervisor. (He was outgoing.)

You see, what I heard was GE never really understood GEnie. They just saw it as a neat way to make money in the off hours, but they never wanted to invest much into it. Hey, the main frames were sitting idle at night. Why not use them? But they only wanted a sideline, that's all. (I bet they're kicking themselves now.)

We were stuck in a little closet-sized office with cubicles crammed together. The rest of GE was steel and glass, plants and new furniture. I had to squeeze past a panel to get into my cubicle. They gave it to me because I was the skinniest. (I liked it. It was like having four walls.)

Icarus

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Exactly. [nod] That's what I heard too -- that GEnie was just a way of selling some otherwise-idle cycles on the Honeywells after Citibank was done with their payroll.

And that's fine, they could have it during the day. I like having my internet open 24/7 nowadays, but I had a job at the time and wasn't home during prime time anyway. [rueful smile] But any idiot should know that you need to spend at least some money to make money, and for the last few years there they would've (or should've) seen what some marketing money was doing for both Prodigy and AOL. And the fact that both of them (and especially Prodigy) hemorrhaged users over to GEnie in waves every time they made a stupid policy should've told them that 1) yes, it does make a difference how you treat your customers, and 2) that there was a huge opportunity there to be The Cool Service and maybe keep some of those customers their competitors were so kindly sending their way. [headdesk] It was a fantastic opportunity and they completely blew it.

And what really pissed me off at the time (and still gets me steamed when I think of it, in case you can't tell, LOL!) is that GEnie was the best service at the time. OK, I was biased, but I was on Prodigy for a little while, I was on staff at CompuServe for a year or so (when they shut down the History RT and moved the function to the Genealogy RT, the sysop there decided she didn't need us. Coincidentally, one of the assistant mods from History had a friend who was setting up the Living History Forum on CompuServe at the time and was looking for staff, so about six of us went over there and settled in and helped him get it up and running. Matt considered sending GEnie a thank-you note. [wry smile]) And when Simutronics expanded over to AOL, we all got accounts there too and I did some board monitoring as well as my usual GMing gig with them. So I've had a little bit of all the major players and GEnie had IMO the best software for message boards and chats and such, plus Aladdin which made it rock even more, and the best community of people to make use of it all. And they threw it all away. :(

Corporate idiots....

I wonder if any of them are working for FanLib these days? :P

Angie

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

...that GEnie was the best service at the time.

That's what my supervisor said, though he was a little biased. ;)

My job didn't entail a huge knowledge of the service as I mostly dealt with problems people were having in signing up, and called people to verify that their accounts were real (we got a lot of bogus sign-ups when the "new" idea of "online sign-ups" was introduced). I was... 19?... at the time, starting my freshman year of college. Gosh, even talking to you about this makes me feel like that uncertain 19-year-old again. [chuckles]

I wonder if any of them are working for FanLib these days? :P

No doubt. [wry grin]

I have to admit, this FanLib discussion has been fun. It's brought up a lot of interesting questions, it seems to be leading to a multi-fandom archive. I find it reassuring that people haven't fallen for it. The ineptitude of the venture has helped us. Always good when the bad guys come clearly marked with black hats and obvious self-serving TOSs in their back pockets.

Icarus

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Your supervisor was right. ;)

And yes, nice of the scumbags to come in wearing name badges. [wry smile]

I checked out the Archive at the End of the Universe or whatever it was called, but everything I've written so far except for three short pieces (two Harry Potter, one Fantastic Four movieverse) has been RPS so there's not much for me there. If we're moving toward a good homongous multi-fandom archive, though, then that's still cool for the folks who write fictional-person stories. [nod]

Angie

[sayhello.livejournal.com]

Hi, I just had to jump in here. I worked for CompuServe at corporate (as a programmer) back in 1994, just as "the Internet for the common man" was taking off. It was a joke. CompuServe had that boring, hard-to-navigate menu system, and THEY LIKED IT. I attended a big presentation, where they showed CompuServe up against AOL and Prodigy's front ends, and the CompuServe bigwig *laughed* at their front-ends, saying "Who wants to look at stupid pictures? Who wants graphics?" They were clueless. Most of them still though DOS commands were the way to navigate, and that the menu was cheating. Of course, about 3 years later AOL *bought* CompuServe, and then *I* was the one laughing.

It was a horrible place to work, because I was an intelligent, capable woman (I'd been in the business over 10 years at that point), and the place was run by a bunch of geeky guys who had by accident become a bunch of very rich geeky guys. They had NO IDEA what to do with me. It was pretty sad. I lasted there less than a year. Became a race whether I was going to find another job or they were going to fire me first. I won (they fortunately had a woman in HR who wasn't stupid nor blind).

Hewene

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Well, I have to say that Prodigy's front end sucked canal water. Did you ever actually use it?

Keep in mind that we were all on dial-up back then, and 2400 baud was pretty much the standard, with a lot of people still on 1200.

I was playing a game on Prodigy once, a sort of fantasy-ish thing where you had to run around in a maze-like area and find some things and do some stuff, etc. Single player. You'd make a move, and the screen would blank and redraw, every time. I got to the end of the first part of the game and met some king or whatever who had some things to say to me. It drew the frame around the screen, then it drew the major divisions -- banner area for the advertisement, tall and narrow block for a picture of the king on the left, tall and narrow block for dialogue text on the right, a short and wide strip on the bottom for... directions I think, and navigation buttons. It added some decorative details around the framing. It drew the ad. It drew the directions and buttons at the bottom. It drew the picture, which took a horridly long time for the lousy art it was -- a fairly crude line drawing, better than ASCII art but not by much. It printed the dialogue text on the right, but because the text block was so narrow it could only get a couple of words per line and the king had a lot to say to me so there was an ellipsis and I had to click on "Next" or "More" or whatever it was when I was done reading, which took about half a second since the text was fairly large and we're talking about maybe fifteen or so words here.

OK, so I clicked on the button and the screen blanked. And it drew the frame around the screen, and it drew the major divisions. It added some decorative details. It drew the ad. It drew....

[headdesk]

I'd have been laughing too if I hadn't been looking for something to put my fist through. I wasn't a Prodigy member for very long. Neither were a lot of other people and thousands of them came to GEnie.

AOL's interface was a bit easier to use, but every time you logged in you had to -- no options, no "Do you want to...?" -- sit there while it downloaded new art, new ads, new whatever. If you'd been off the service for a week or more you might as well go get coffee. And breakfast. And read the paper. The blue download bars were a joke among AOL users and the laughter was pretty frustrated.

The graphic interface was the way the industry was going, but the way AOL and especially Prodigy executed it was definitely deserving of laughter. And at that time, the Windows OS wasn't much to be proud of either -- ugly and clunky and prone to freezing or crashing. The Mac interface worked more smoothly and was the gold standard of GUIs at that point, but it was cutesy and cartoony and treated the user like a moron. I had to use a Mac at work and found it very annoying; I had a PC at home and used command-line DOS until I was forced to move to Windows. :/

The CIS execs were wrong about people not wanting graphics, but neither AOL nor Prodigy at the time were great examples of why a graphic interface was worth looking at for an online service.

That said, though, it does sound like your bosses were a bunch of idiots if you had a hard time just for being a female programmer. [eyeroll] Congrats on getting out -- hope you found something better. :)

Angie

[sayhello.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting perspective. I never actually used AOL or Prodigy. I guess I just based my opinions on the fact that it was obvious that most laymen were not going to be happy with the Compuserve menu, and would jump on GUIs. Actually, the first graphic OS I used was OS/2, and it was far superior to Windows on so many levels. And not nearly as "cutesy" as the Mac. I really resisted the concept of "dragging files to the trash bin" and stuff like that. I resented that it took control of everything, and you couldn't "do it yourself". I lost that fight...

And I ended up working for the Bank that I work for now -- three acquisitions ago. Very good job, I'm really respected here. High percentage of women in management. Obsessed with the bottom line, but what else is new.

Hewene