Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans

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Title:	Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans
Creator:	Leva Cygnet
Date(s):	July 17, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:	fan site execs behaving badly
External Links:	Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans
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Do Not Tease Nor Feed the Fans is a 2008 essay by Leva Cygnet.

It was posted on Firefox News.

Some Topics Discussed

• the science fiction semiprozine, "Helix" (winner of Nebula and Hugo nominations)
• a unprofessional rejection letter containing, among other things, an ethnic slur, that the zine's editor, William Sanders, sent to a writer, Luke Jackson
• other writers whose fiction was in "Helix" ask Sanders to remove their stories, as they don't want to be associated with this zine
• Sanders' continuing terrible communication and statements that included profanity and epithets
• Sanders tells writers if they want their work removed from the website where they are posted, they each need to pay the $40 in labor costs
• a link to Darn, these gnats are hard to swallow. Please pass the camels. by Patrick at Making Light (has 677 comments, in which "Helix's" managing editor is one of the many commenters) (July 10, 2008)
• a link to Helix again. by Yoon Ha Lee (July 14, 2008)
• Luke Jackson's original rejection letter, which closes with " you'd have a hard time anyway; most of the SF magazines are very leery of publishing anything that might offend the sheet heads." (many comments) (July 8, 2008)
• public image, public relations, the computer age, and working with a large community of people (science fiction fans, fans in general) who are technologically literate, extremely intelligent, sharply critical thinkers, and who deal with everything by debating it to death.
• three examples of fan site execs behaving badly: "I've been boggled by the sheer level of incompetence at public relations":
  • a link to It's like deja vu all over again! by telesilla, a post about LiveJournal's poor communication during Strikethrough (May 14, 2007
  • a link to Livejournal Employee Publicly Mocks Fandom
  • a link to A note to English-speaking readers by Антон Носик - anton_nossik (March 20, 2008)
• the ethics of sharing personal emails with a larger audience.
• a link to FanLib wholly exploded by Teresa at Making Light (topic is FanLib and its pitchy brochure] (May 23, 2007)
• fandom and profit.
• a link to something about Xing and financials for Fanfiction.net that is now offline.

From the Essay

In my opinion, Sanders is an idiot and has managed to torpedo his own ship. And now he's standing at the bow of the sinking vessel, stamping his feet and screaming obscenities about the whole mess, blaming the world for his own mistakes, and all the while denying that he's about to get wet.

Dude, fen will argue at great length about the bathroom habits of Disney's Gargoyles, the color of Superman's eyes, or the exact magical phrase needed to turn Harry Potter into a toad. If an editor of a 'zine, or anyone in a position of power, acts badly -- it will be noticed and then discussed with server-crashing volumes of traffic coupled, likely, with monitor-melting levels of heat. Stupidity by The Powers That Be is way more interesting and important than how a cartoon character goes potty. We fans just go ape over Powers That Be Stupidity.

This editorial is specifically about fandom, but could also apply to many other interest groups. I am constantly astonished by the people in charge of things who "should know better" who just can't seem to deal with the "public relations" part of the internet. The difference between fandom and other groups online is that our percentage of Really Smart People is a bit higher than the average, as a general rule. And we're also, as a general rule, very good communicators. However, the basic rules of "dealing with people online" apply everywhere. They're just amplified when it comes to fans.

Don't ever put anything online that you don't want your end users to see. Actually -- be careful with the content of any marketing material intended for clients, because you never know when someone might slap something on a scanner. Be respectful. I'm reminded of Fanlib with this rule; they had one web site for clients, and another for fans ... and the web site for their clients presented the company in a very different light than the face they were trying to show to fandom. Fandom found the client web site, and the response was an impressive volume of wank.

Don't assume that the people you're talking to are "just fans" and you can get away with being rude to us because we're "nobodies." The line between "fan" and "pro" is grey, nebulous, and ever-shifting. Many pros go incognito with anonymous handles. Many pros identify as fans. Many, if not most, pros started out as fans. Many fans are good friends with pros, or will become pros someday. If you offend the little bitty uninfluential fans, you're likely also offending pros -- and the pros may be people you really want to like you for business reasons, if you're a business person trying to market something to fandom.

Don't try to make money from fandom without honestly giving something back. My personal theory on why Fanfiction.net generally gets a pass from fen for what is likely tens of thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue, and Fanlib doesn't, is that Xing started Fanfiction.net as a college project and ran it out of his own pocket for a very long time before ever putting ads on it. Fanfiction.net predates the commercialization of the 'net. He didn't mean for it to be an 1,100,000-page-a-day site. He's earned fandom's good will. Conversely, Fanlib's wanted to make money off of fandom from the get-go, is run by media moguls (one member of their board of directors is the brother to CBS's CEO) and they come across as highly and greedily commercial. Yet fandom doesn't really benefit from Fanlib; they're not providing anything new and they're not genuinely "giving back." And because of the way Fanlib presented themselves, between a bad TOS and a foul-mouthed leader who cussed out the very people who he intended to market the site to, fandom's reaction was massively negative.

Honestly -- this article was mostly a bit of venting. I don't expect the William Sanders or Chris Williams or Livejournal execs of the world to read this and take it to heart. But it sure felt good to stand up on my virtual podium here and say it. And maybe a few people will clue in that if you behave like an ass fandom will notice that you are braying.

And for the people who don't have enough common sense to behave professionally when faced with a fandom mob ... well, stupidity from The Powers That Be does keep things interesting, I'll give it that. And inevitabley, it does give me something to write about ...