These Curious Times Interview with Aimee Fleck

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Interviews by Fans
Title: These Curious Times Interview with Aimee Fleck
Interviewer: Curious
Interviewee: Aimee Fleck
Date(s): April 16, 2016
Medium: online
Fandom(s):
External Links: online here
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These Curious Times Interview with Aimee Fleck ("Gold Foil and Bad Influences") is a 2016 interview with Aimee Fleck.

Part of a Series

See These Curious Times Fan Interviews.

Some Topics Discussed

Excerpt from the Introduction

In September 2015, the call for entries for RAW: A Hannibal/Will Fanthology came across my Tumblr dash. The final season had wrapped up a week before and the fandom was still endlessly turning over the end, an incredibly “Wait, what? Did that just really happen?” ending of a “Wait, did they just do that on TV?” series. I immediately got super excited at the thought of more Hannibal content created by the fandom, and then tagged the folks I know who created in the space, and reblogged it back out.

Over the next month I watched as questions flew back and forth, participants were finalized, and when the Kickstarter finally launched on November 1, I threw down my money to secure a copy. Then suddenly, overnight actually, everything about this Hannibal/Will Fanthology grew very big very fast. And when everything settled one month later, the first thing I thought was, as incredible as all of this was to witness, I can’t begin to imagine what the person at the center of this all must have gone through… So I decided to ask. And Aimee Fleck was kind enough to tell me her story.

Excerpts

Aimee: I remember [Camp Fuck U Die] was started by Biz. That was her handle. I got in on the second round, which was fine, because after that the quality [necessary to get in] exceeded, by far, my horrible application. The best part of the story is that for several years at Camp Fuck U Die, I played Ron Stoppable from Kim Possible.

The thing about that was that since it was interfandom it was every single character from anything ever all hanging out. They had a really, really busy and alive out of character community. Everyone got pretty close. There’s one person, especially, who I still talk to today, which is a miracle because I was 13 and she was not 13. It was like, “Bless you, we liked you a lot, but you were very 13 years old.” That was probably my first real fandom community experience, and honestly it was super awesome. It was mostly people who were significantly older than me, but they were all very nurturing, very supportive, very open to being mentors. They welcomed me in and let me play with the big kids and be a weirdo on the internet.

I feel like that, for me, it continues to define fandom today. I really love the community aspect and I love interacting with people who are very different from me. I like mentoring if I get the opportunity. I really like doing that. I think that probably a lot of that I owe to having had such a super great experience at zombie summer camp in middle school.

Curious: How did the people wrangling go? Trying to organize [Brooklyn] and pull it all together.

Aimee: Honestly, they were a great group of people to work with. I don’t know if it was lucky or fandom is great but … This is the thing that I told people from art school and everyone was like, “Holy shit, that never happens.”

Every single person turned in their work on time or within a day of the deadline. Which is literally impossible. It’s scientifically proven to never happen. When that happened I was like, “Oh my God, do you guys understand how nuts this is?” I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I basically did not stop talking to everyone the whole time.

Tumblr sucks for fandom communication, so I wanted to do something that was halfway between a professional art book and a Big Bang, which is why I wanted to accept everybody. I wanted it to be about community.

When I set it up, I sent out regular emails telling everyone what was going on. I also set up a Google group, which is like a forum. You can set it up sort of like a combination forum and chat room. I encouraged everyone to post their works in progress and give each other feedback and hang out in the chat room. For the most part, people did. It was really good, and I still know some of the people from that. Some of them are in RAW. Some of them I’ve become very close friends with, actually.

It was a really good experience, I feel like even some of the people I haven’t necessarily stayed in touch with, I still see them, and they’ll still be talking to other people from Brooklyn too. I’m really proud of the fact that I think I sort of succeeded in that aspect of giving people a chance to do work in proximity.

Curious: I love that there seems to be this new renaissance of fandom zines coming out. Through Kickstarter I’ve discovered and bought so many different fandom zines, and it’s wonderful. It seems like they are maybe easier to produce?

Aimee: I think part of it is that … Part of it is just that printing techniques are a lot more easily accessible. It used to be like most zines were produced by librarians who already had a Xerox machine and a spiral binder. I don’t know if this is true [in general] or not, but a lot of the people I know who are doing work even similar to this, their career is in line with the sort of fandom work they’re doing.

Where it’s like, “I know how to make books, so I’m making books.” I know people who are academics and they are writing essays or people who are journalists and are doing columns and stuff.

Well first of all, it’s not secret anymore, so you can raise money and do fundraising stuff. Also I think a lot of people doing the production are people who have skills or know people with the skills to do it. Whereas people making zines before were like, “We need to make a book, so we got to figure out how to make a book.” Now it’s kind of like, “I know how to make a book. I like books. I’ll make a book.” Those of us who can make books are stoked about making books.

Curious: $16,000. That would cover the basic costs?

Aimee: That would cover printing 1000 books, and minimal rewards, and shipping. It’s a weird thing with Kickstarter where shipping is integrated into the total amount that you make. It’s bizarre. Anyways, $16,000 was our guess at what would fund a print run of a 1000 books, which is pretty much the minimum print run to make something offset print worth the money, because otherwise the books get expensive per book.

I agonized over that price point for weeks. I wanted to get it down to $15,000. There was no way I could swing it. If you asked somebody who was hanging out with me that week before we launched, it was just being like, “No one will ever give us this money. It’s way too much. This is ridiculous. It’s going to fail horribly.”

Curious: How long did it take to make that $16,000? I remember it was a crazy short amount of time.

Aimee: 48 hours.

Curious: Do you know how how often you’d like to take on a new publishing project?

Aimee: I have a day job, which is only three days a week. Life happens, shit happens, so I’m not quite sure. My goal is basically, currently I’m saying around … I’d like to publish one thing like RAW either once a year, or once every two years. I would like to be publishing somewhere between one and three smaller works a year. Again, subject to the vagaries of life. Stress. Money. Et cetera. The individual books will be run differently from RAW. Currently I’m looking at basically printing them up front, and then selling them, and doing limited runs. It’s not something where it’s like, I suddenly have to scale up and print 3,000 of it. It’s like we’re printing 300 books. When they’re done, they’re done, unless I renew with that person, kind of deal.

I will be paying people for their work and time. That’s really important to me. I’m done with the idea that fans don’t deserve money for their work, because it’s fan work. I don’t like it.

[snipped]

Aimee: The idea that people are uncomfortable supporting other fans makes me wonder where that comes from, because I don’t think it’s the moral vagaries. I think there’s this idea that fan work isn’t worth anything, and it’s something that’s perpetuated inside the fandom as much as it is outside. It’s very self-policing, but the AV Club comments were literally the worst of the shit we got, which is impressive.

There was somebody who was saying, “Why would I buy fan fiction? You can get fan fiction for free.” I’m like, fan fiction isn’t worthless because you don’t pay money for it. Paying money for something doesn’t give it worth, but on the other hand, something being free doesn’t mean it’s worthless. I have really mixed feeling about financial success making fandom more palatable and noteworthy. It’s like a slider bar going up with the amount of respect we got on this project.

Even from my own parents, as the dollar amount went up, the more they were like, “Is this real?” Where it’s like, I was joking over the holiday that the difference between a weird nerd and a business person is $100,000, because my dad bragged to his friends. I was fielding questions about my gay Hannibal book at our neighborhood Christmas party.

Let me tell you, you’ve never been in an awkward situation until you’re trying to explain to somebody what you made without using the words “Gay Hannibal Book”. People are like, “You made $100,000 on Kickstarter?” And I was like, “Yeah, off Hannibal dicks.” How do you tell your mom’s friends that?

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