Why It’s Bad Fandom Etiquette To Put Other People’s Fics On Goodreads
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| Title: | Why It’s Bad Fandom Etiquette To Put Other People’s Fics On Goodreads |
| Creator: | ingberry |
| Date(s): | Dec 7, 2014 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Fanfiction |
| Topic: | GoodReads |
| External Links: | Why It’s Bad Fandom Etiquette To Put Other People’s Fics On Goodreads |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Why It’s Bad Fandom Etiquette To Put Other People’s Fics On Goodreads is a meta essay by ingberry that was posted to Tumblr.
On September 1, 2019, it had 2462 notes.
Some Topics Discussed
The Essay
Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t speak for every fanwriter in fandom, but I do know for a fact that I speak for several of them.
Books and fics exist in different contexts. Fandom has its whole other set of tropes, conventions, and expectations. Some tropes and conventions are common across different fandoms, but often individual fandoms have their own conventions and things that are only recognisable to the reader within the frames of that particular fandom.
As a fandom writer, we write for the fans within our little corner of the internet. We write based on their expectations, we interact with tropes and ideas from other fics we’ve read. Fanfic is a conversation between fans of a source, and are often products of each other. Taking fanfic out of its context doesn’t work - people not familiar with those fandom codes won’t get it.
Books are commercial products that are written over long periods of time, and have gone through many rounds of editing. That is not to say that all books are good, or that a lot of fanfic isn’t actually better than some published books because they certainly are. But books are longterm projects, and fics are definitely not always that.
We write comment fics for our friends because they were screaming about that new headcanon they have. We spend a single week writing a pinch hit for a fest because someone dropped out and we want people to have a gift. We write while on a sugar and feelings-induced high at 3 AM because that gif set on tumblr sent us into an emotional crisis.
And that’s the fun of fandom. As a fanwriter, that’s what I love. I don’t publish books, because that’s not what I want, at least not at this point in time. I want to have fun with my fandom friends and contribute to the fandoms I love with both more and less thought-out fics.
Do you know the best way to take away that fun? Take my fics and put them alongside published books on goodreads and rate them from 1 to 5. Because, suddenly, my fics all potentially have to hold up next to published books on a site that isn’t made in the context of fanfic. It doesn’t matter if my fics are rated 1 or 5 - it’s the pressure of it. It’s the knowledge that even the silliest comment fic I might write and put on AO3 will suddenly be put on goodreads and judged along with books that people have spent months or years writing.
If you want to put fics on goodreads - ask. Don’t put fanwriters in that position, because it’s also really difficult to get them removed.
Reactions
From Tumblr
According to Goodread’s policy, they do take down fanfiction at the author’s request. [source one] [discussion and source]All you need to do is contact Support and ask them to take your work down. [to their contact form]
Also, please don’t use artists work for cover art without their permission as well. [1]
Additionally, 1) you are dropping someone into a fandom space without giving them any idea what they’re getting into. Sure they get a notification that there’s mature content, but most warnings and trigger info is in the tags. Even people in fandom sometimes forget to look at that and sometimes get triggered, are people outside of fandom going to even know to look? And if they do, that shit’s all abbreviated, are they going to even know what it means? And 2) Authors have zero control of information about themselves. I have a fucking profile on there that I have no access to delete and when I asked for it to be deleted on the librarians post they basically told me to go fuck myself. I’m forced to join their shitty website and bump up their numbers just so I can control my own fucking information.[2]
In the light of recent events (as in, someone just linked me to a profile someone put up for listing my fanfic on goodreads, complete with links to most of my social media accounts): IF YOU SEE MY FIC POSTED/LISTED ANYWHERE ELSE THEN ON THIS TUMBLR/MY LJ/MY AO3, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.The goodreads thing, as the op said, especially sucks because of a) the pressure and b) the legal risk. I’m immensely paranoid when it comes to the grey area fandom operates in sometimes anyway, and the whole reason I bailed on a book I was considering to write is that I couldn’t even take the thought of having to compete in professional literary environment. So this? Pretty much core melt accident over here. I’m angry and I’m anxious and I kinda have to resist the urge to delete everything and march straight off the internet altogether until that profile has been removed and I can sink back into my fannish non-existence.
Don’t do this to people. If you want to do ANYTHING ELSE with someone’s story than rec it in fannish spaces, then, for the love of fuck, PLEASE ASK THEIR PERMISSION.[3]
My group of Goodreads friends splintered over this issue. A lot of us were casual readers of fanfic but not active in fandoms, so we truly didn’t understand that this was wrong (including me). We argued that anything posted on the internet was fair game, which of course made the people who were active in fandoms livid. It got really ugly. I ducked out of the debate early and deleted everything I had added to Goodreads, but it wasn’t until I actually joined a fandom and started writing fic that I finally understood. The overall attitude of people on Goodreads is completely different from that of people in fandoms. It’s night and day. [4]
I don’t really know how I feel about this issue. I was really startled when I found lap-magnet on Goodreads, partly because I have a Goodreads account (somewhere) but now there’s this ‘author profile’ that I have no control over at all. In some ways it was interesting to see the other sorts of reviews you get on Goodreads, because a less fandom-orientated audience is in certain ways more critical and seeing a different perspective on my writing had its value, but I found it unsettling because it’s like someone has created an identity *for* me, one that I cannot manage at all.I agree with the OP, that you can’t really build a profile of an author based on something they write in an afternoon (not that I wrote LM in an afternoon!) with something that a professional writer wrote over years with heaps of other professional feedback.
[...]I don’t really want non-fandom people building up their ideas of me as a writer based on throw-away fiction I wrote at 1am. Also, depending on how things go in future, I may one day want to link my fandom and my RL-publishing identities, and once again that is something I want to be able to control.
Luckily in my case no one has actually put anything other than Lap Magnet on Goodreads, but I agree with the OP, that it’s not something you should decide for someone. If you think it’s a good idea for fanfic to be on Goodreads, then go ahead and ask the author. They may not mind and it gives them the chance to have agency over what’s happening with their work. :)[5]
Can I also add that it’s also not cool to do this with blog posts? Especially longer blog posts that people wholesale copy and paste into Goodreads forums? A link to the blog post is ok, but don’t steal someone’s long, thought-out post or copy and paste selections that take things out of context. I had someone copy and paste part of a post of mine on Goodreads and it was awkward.[6]
From GoodReads
References
- ^ 2014-12-15 by cherishedsaulie
- ^ 2014-12-15 by elandrialore
- ^ 2014-12-15 by lostemotion
- ^ 2014-12-15 by seekingidlewild
- ^ 2014-12-13 by prairie-grass
- ^ Dec 24th, 2018 by mediaeval-muse