How to Win Fans and Influence Fandom

Meta
Title:	How to Win Fans and Influence Fandom
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	July 10, 2008
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	How to Win Fans and Influence Fandom
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How to Win Fans and Influence Fandom is a 2008 essay by Merlin Missy.

This week's discussion is about applying good business practices to your fannish activities in the hopes of winning more minions, I mean friends, to your cause. Which is you. So yes, I mean minions. Deal with it.

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• self-promotion in fannish spaces
• fandom and profit, and how fanfic shouldn't make you money
• feedback and attention as currency
• ways to piss off fans
  • "Shipbashing and character bashing"
  • "Bad spelling, poor grammar, and lack of basic research will piss off people quickly."
  • Politics, fandom leans liberal, don't write issue fic
  • crappy subtext and problematic canon
  • "Eye-bleeding site design" - turn off the flashy colors and the blinky stuff
  • "Respond to the comments people leave on your stories."
• sometimes it's a good thing to rattle cages and piss people off
• an embedded link to The Gifts That Keep on Giving: Fanfic Exchanges and Ficathons
• "...be true to yourself and your story. Always tell the story you need to tell."

From the Essay

One of the first laws of any business, be it manufacturing, a political campaign, or even a non-profit fundraiser for blind puppies in Ecuador, is: do not piss off the person who is about to give you money. Now Dr. Merlin, you say, one of the very first rules of fanfic is that we don't get money for our efforts. And I will agree that is the case. But money is generally defined as the default token of value exchanged for goods or services, and in fandom, the payments come in the form of good reviews, recommendations, and acknowledgement throughout your sphere of influence that you rock.

So if our payment is in accolades, and our customers are the people reading our stories, visiting our websites, and so on, our goal should be not to piss them off. Why? They'll go somewhere else. That's why. And the more people you piss off and encourage to go elsewhere, the fewer folks will stick around and continue to send in the good vibes. Plus, if you piss off enough people, your reputation could spread to piss off people you've never even "met," driving off customers before they've had a chance to see anything you've done.

That sucks. You don't want to lose readers and viewers before you've even had the chance to piss them off yourself, much less entertain them so they'll leave comments and feedback and recs and all the good things in life.

Politics. This one is tricky. Fandom tends to lean liberal, mainly because most people really can't manage to write explicit porn featuring a furry, winged alien ghost vampire and his male, hardboiled, human partner without eventually thinking maybe gay marriage won't destroy society as we know it."

Crappy subtext. This goes back to character bashing, and can often overlap with politics. The majority of fans are sick and tired of having the racism/sexism/homophobia/ableism/religious discrimination/etc. discussion and would rather not think about it. Then there's everyone else, the folks who have to live with those issues every single day and can't turn them off just to have a good time. They're going to be reading your stories too, and they're going to get really pissed off if every female character is a shrieking, jealous harpy, if every gay character lisps and then dies, if every non-white character talks in stereotypes and exists only to help out the white characters' troubled relationships, and so on. Don't be afraid to write characters outside of your comfort zone, just be willing to step back enough to ask yourself (and other people who will be honest with you) if what you're writing is going to offend your potential readers, and if so, to fix those problems as they arise. No one's going to assume or ask that you come from a perfect place of cultural appreciation and sensitivity to all peoples, just that you engage your brain, do your best, not actively try to piss people off, and apologize and do better next time if you screw up anyway.

And then there are the times when pissing people off is what you need to do. There are times when pissing people off is secondary to helping someone else or standing up for something you believe. Take a quick look at the quick list above again, and realize that what you write may very well piss off half or more of the people who read your work or visit your site, and you'd better decide up front that a) it's worth it, and b) you're willing to stand by your work when the fan gets hit by the flaming excrement.