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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
(Stop snickering in the back. If I wanted to be short, I could.)
This might have appeared later in the month, after taking through more process-of-writing things, but instead we have entirely relevant events happening that pushed this idea forward to its current position.
Welcome, if you're seeing this because you've recently migrated away from a place that turned out not to have your interests as its guiding principles. We do hope you'll stay a while and help our community grow with your presence and your comments.
Once you have a completed work in hand, deciding what to do with it is a decision that comes with interesting consequences. Traditional publishing routes for works that are not going to infringe on someone else's copyright is certainly offering the most money, but also has the highest degree of difficulty to achieve. Expect a lot of rejection and a lot of waiting for something that will result in rejection. And then have someone who knows what they're doing looking over any contracts you might receive to see what rights you're giving up and what ones, if any, you get to keep in exchange for getting published.
Past the point of building a portfolio of things you can then show others as a reason why they should take your work, (and frankly, you can do that yourself and host it yourself) anyone telling you to do it for "exposure" and not for cash is telling you to starve so they can profit. If you're in it to get paid for your work, get paid for your work, so that others can demand and get paid for theirs, too. I know for a fact that Seanan McGuire was thrilled to be able to write X-Men for Marvel. (She's not shy about it.) But if Marvel had come to her and said, "Hey, Seanan, you're pretty cool, so we want you to write this Kitty Pride Annual that will be super awesome and the fans will love it, and also, we think you should do it for the exposure, without pay," I would have learned all sorts of new and creative ways to curse someone unto the seventh generation of their seventh generation of descendants. Not just because "O hai, multiple bestselling novels, excuse you," but because Seanan has some of the largest cats you can have without requiring very special permits, and they need food and clothing and veterinary care and that requires money, and Marvel can spare the money to pay their writers. (Everyone else should be ready to pay their creators, or wait until they can before trying to get a thing published. Pay people for their work.)
Fanworks and money has some settled precedent, mostly around visual work, but it's the sort of thing that you want a good army of lawyers to be present for...when somebody else ends up being the test case. So there's some amount of having to file the serial numbers off rather well if you want to make your fanfic into original fic.
Even if you're not in it for the money, they're are still considerations that have to be made about choosing where to post your work. Someone could certainly post it all in their own space, on their own servers, and then be more assured of the survival of their own work, but that requires significant know-how to do and keep patched and running safely and securely.
And while there are ways of engaging socially with other people when everyone has their own space and identity (webrings, for example. Yes, I'm ancient by the standards of the World Wide Web.), it's a lot less of a hassle to interact if everyone has an account in the same space, or is subscribed to the same mailing list, so there's one place to go instead of sixty.
It wasn't necessarily easier, because gatekeepers and technical savvy and issues involved with finding a fannish circle, much less contributing to one, but when you can generally trust the space to be run by fans with fandom in mind, the space can feel safer than throwing your work out for just anyone to see.
The tricky part about mailing lists and BBSes and a lot of those early attempts at interaction, though, is that those spaces have tended to remain small, intimate, and utterly fragile. If the maintainer decides they're done, or disaster befalls, or a payment is late or not made, the whole thing evaporates, and all the works in that space are gone at the touch of a button. (I do not work for the Organization for Transformative Works, but one of their projects is trying to capture and import archives that are blowing up, winding down, or otherwise ceasing to exist so that we can at least preserve what was done, even if the thing itself no longer exists.) The place you find where you can be unabashedly yourself, and it vanishes into the aether.
So, small venues have small appreciative audiences and a tendency to disappear without warning. What if you want a bigger potential audience, or something that's less likely to pop at a cross look? Well, then the social media sites step in. LiveJournal turned out to be a frontrunner among many possibilities of the time, offering each person a space of their own to create and an easy way of finding others whose creations you were interested in, in a single space, with places to leave comments and to control what comments of that set actually were displayed. It worked.
There is, of course, the perennial problem of sites that want to profit from people - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And, unsurprisingly, many advertisers and the companies they represent are somewhat skittish about having their products promoted on a page where a willing Ginny seduces a very unwilling Severus and the detail is quite graphic. Even if the work itself is properly tagged and mentions it all up front. For ad much as advertising claims to be working on ways of serving us products we want to see, they're terrible at it, and there's not Netflix-esque categorization going on to try and sort everything into hyper-fine buckets. This same story could equally well serve up an ad for children's vitamins as an ad for a site claiming to know all of the sexy singles in your area. And that still assumes neither of those ads are multimedia, so that not only do you get an inappropriate advertisement, you might get one with loud panting and sex noises that then have to be explained to anyone within hearing.
Which is to say that ads suck, and the fact that we haven't figured out something better yet says a lot about us. All the same, though, the advertisers still don't want their company associated with your smut, kinks, or anything else that might not only acknowledge the existence of sex, but suggest that people actually enjoy it. They will have to deal with the lost or never-gotten business from their ad running in your story and linking them together. So advertisers, since they can't be sure where on the site their ads will appear, want to make sure there's nowhere on the site that would cause a bad association. Several major payment processors, as Dreamwidth found out, [not actually true: also get very jumpy about the possibility that you might be letting people write sex, whether intended as erotica, people recounting what happened to them, or people having frank discussions of technique and consent for sex, with or without kink, and/or kink, with or without sex.] can get cranky about the potential extra overhead and fee charges they might incur by taking on a "porn site," even if a place like Dreamwidth isn't what people think of when they think about porn sites. Beyond that, there's a persistent idea that people who take the money are, in essence, endorsing and facilitating whatever happens on the site. With advertisers, it makes a bit more sense, because ads are supposed to be put in front of people who will be interested in the product, so they would want to be seen in a more endorsement role if reading the content made others want to buy the product. And there are certain statutes that have to be kept in mind where taking certain types of money is committing a crime or becoming an accessory to one (or more.)
In any case, to preserve their images as companies that make products for the family, and not ruffle the feathers of the Moral Guardians whose followers those companies want to buy their products, advertisers can bring some crushing pressure to bear on those places that depend on them for some significant portion of their revenue. So any platform that depends on ad revenue always has this sword hanging above them that can fall at any time. Which generates a certain amount of tension between the service and the fandom on that service that wants to be able to talk about the things they want to talk about, the survivors looking for others to share in solidarity, the people wanting to be their open and authentic selves (because being queer anywhere openly is seen as an invitation by those Moral Guardians to attack and try to shame someone away from being themselves), and / or the people using the service to make a living.
The thing that makes a place popular is also sometimes the thing that causes it to break apart. Sometimes outside forces intervene, like when the Moral Guardians manage to get legislation passed that disproportionately affects queer folks and sex workers in the name of protecting children from strawpeople. Sometimes a company gets sold to a different country entirely, where the laws are even more punishing than before. More often than not, though, there's enough "adult" content in a space that the corporate overlords, the vulture capitalists, or the advertisers start putting on the pressure, and if there's an inciting incident or a convenient excuse, especially if it can be spun as a way of protecting "innocent children", whatever has been designated as "adult content" or material too "mature" for the site gets sent off, and sometimes that means works and entire communities get erased without the chance to archive their work. (Local backups are good, keep them!)
More often than not, once a space shows that it follows the money rather than the fans, the fans show the service the door. If the service overreacts or otherwise goes about trying to clean its own house in a way that doesn't get the intended targets, or if there is a large amount of damage to persons who aren't targeted, or if the targeting turns out to be about something other than what it was named to be about, those affected are often way more vocal and swift in their departure from the platform.
What is old is new again, and will do the same again in the future, so long as the underlying issues don't change. So when considering where to hang your shingle, do some research on the organization that is behind the service you want to migrate to. Are they beholden to advertising dollars? Do they have policy statements about equity, diversity, inclusion? Do they explicitly spell out, either in the Terms of Service, or in policy documents, what they will and will not allow on their platform? Do they provide plain language versions of things that have to be in legalese? And, if they manage to get off the ground long enough to look like they might fly, do they then stick to those positions they have staked out? If not, do they provide clear explanations about what's changed?
That's just a sample of possible important questions. You may have more, depending on your life's experiences and needs. Evaluate the places, the sources, the contracts and the terms. You don't have to stay away from other places, but if you go in knowing where the likely failure points are going to be, it helps you decide whether you're willing to accept the risk that those failure points will be exactly what you thought they were.
And keep backups. Just in case.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.](Stop snickering in the back. If I wanted to be short, I could.)
This might have appeared later in the month, after taking through more process-of-writing things, but instead we have entirely relevant events happening that pushed this idea forward to its current position.
Welcome, if you're seeing this because you've recently migrated away from a place that turned out not to have your interests as its guiding principles. We do hope you'll stay a while and help our community grow with your presence and your comments.
Once you have a completed work in hand, deciding what to do with it is a decision that comes with interesting consequences. Traditional publishing routes for works that are not going to infringe on someone else's copyright is certainly offering the most money, but also has the highest degree of difficulty to achieve. Expect a lot of rejection and a lot of waiting for something that will result in rejection. And then have someone who knows what they're doing looking over any contracts you might receive to see what rights you're giving up and what ones, if any, you get to keep in exchange for getting published.
Past the point of building a portfolio of things you can then show others as a reason why they should take your work, (and frankly, you can do that yourself and host it yourself) anyone telling you to do it for "exposure" and not for cash is telling you to starve so they can profit. If you're in it to get paid for your work, get paid for your work, so that others can demand and get paid for theirs, too. I know for a fact that Seanan McGuire was thrilled to be able to write X-Men for Marvel. (She's not shy about it.) But if Marvel had come to her and said, "Hey, Seanan, you're pretty cool, so we want you to write this Kitty Pride Annual that will be super awesome and the fans will love it, and also, we think you should do it for the exposure, without pay," I would have learned all sorts of new and creative ways to curse someone unto the seventh generation of their seventh generation of descendants. Not just because "O hai, multiple bestselling novels, excuse you," but because Seanan has some of the largest cats you can have without requiring very special permits, and they need food and clothing and veterinary care and that requires money, and Marvel can spare the money to pay their writers. (Everyone else should be ready to pay their creators, or wait until they can before trying to get a thing published. Pay people for their work.)
Fanworks and money has some settled precedent, mostly around visual work, but it's the sort of thing that you want a good army of lawyers to be present for...when somebody else ends up being the test case. So there's some amount of having to file the serial numbers off rather well if you want to make your fanfic into original fic.
Even if you're not in it for the money, they're are still considerations that have to be made about choosing where to post your work. Someone could certainly post it all in their own space, on their own servers, and then be more assured of the survival of their own work, but that requires significant know-how to do and keep patched and running safely and securely.
And while there are ways of engaging socially with other people when everyone has their own space and identity (webrings, for example. Yes, I'm ancient by the standards of the World Wide Web.), it's a lot less of a hassle to interact if everyone has an account in the same space, or is subscribed to the same mailing list, so there's one place to go instead of sixty.
It wasn't necessarily easier, because gatekeepers and technical savvy and issues involved with finding a fannish circle, much less contributing to one, but when you can generally trust the space to be run by fans with fandom in mind, the space can feel safer than throwing your work out for just anyone to see.
The tricky part about mailing lists and BBSes and a lot of those early attempts at interaction, though, is that those spaces have tended to remain small, intimate, and utterly fragile. If the maintainer decides they're done, or disaster befalls, or a payment is late or not made, the whole thing evaporates, and all the works in that space are gone at the touch of a button. (I do not work for the Organization for Transformative Works, but one of their projects is trying to capture and import archives that are blowing up, winding down, or otherwise ceasing to exist so that we can at least preserve what was done, even if the thing itself no longer exists.) The place you find where you can be unabashedly yourself, and it vanishes into the aether.
So, small venues have small appreciative audiences and a tendency to disappear without warning. What if you want a bigger potential audience, or something that's less likely to pop at a cross look? Well, then the social media sites step in. LiveJournal turned out to be a frontrunner among many possibilities of the time, offering each person a space of their own to create and an easy way of finding others whose creations you were interested in, in a single space, with places to leave comments and to control what comments of that set actually were displayed. It worked.
There is, of course, the perennial problem of sites that want to profit from people - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And, unsurprisingly, many advertisers and the companies they represent are somewhat skittish about having their products promoted on a page where a willing Ginny seduces a very unwilling Severus and the detail is quite graphic. Even if the work itself is properly tagged and mentions it all up front. For ad much as advertising claims to be working on ways of serving us products we want to see, they're terrible at it, and there's not Netflix-esque categorization going on to try and sort everything into hyper-fine buckets. This same story could equally well serve up an ad for children's vitamins as an ad for a site claiming to know all of the sexy singles in your area. And that still assumes neither of those ads are multimedia, so that not only do you get an inappropriate advertisement, you might get one with loud panting and sex noises that then have to be explained to anyone within hearing.
Which is to say that ads suck, and the fact that we haven't figured out something better yet says a lot about us. All the same, though, the advertisers still don't want their company associated with your smut, kinks, or anything else that might not only acknowledge the existence of sex, but suggest that people actually enjoy it. They will have to deal with the lost or never-gotten business from their ad running in your story and linking them together. So advertisers, since they can't be sure where on the site their ads will appear, want to make sure there's nowhere on the site that would cause a bad association. Several major payment processors, as Dreamwidth found out, [not actually true: also get very jumpy about the possibility that you might be letting people write sex, whether intended as erotica, people recounting what happened to them, or people having frank discussions of technique and consent for sex, with or without kink, and/or kink, with or without sex.] can get cranky about the potential extra overhead and fee charges they might incur by taking on a "porn site," even if a place like Dreamwidth isn't what people think of when they think about porn sites. Beyond that, there's a persistent idea that people who take the money are, in essence, endorsing and facilitating whatever happens on the site. With advertisers, it makes a bit more sense, because ads are supposed to be put in front of people who will be interested in the product, so they would want to be seen in a more endorsement role if reading the content made others want to buy the product. And there are certain statutes that have to be kept in mind where taking certain types of money is committing a crime or becoming an accessory to one (or more.)
In any case, to preserve their images as companies that make products for the family, and not ruffle the feathers of the Moral Guardians whose followers those companies want to buy their products, advertisers can bring some crushing pressure to bear on those places that depend on them for some significant portion of their revenue. So any platform that depends on ad revenue always has this sword hanging above them that can fall at any time. Which generates a certain amount of tension between the service and the fandom on that service that wants to be able to talk about the things they want to talk about, the survivors looking for others to share in solidarity, the people wanting to be their open and authentic selves (because being queer anywhere openly is seen as an invitation by those Moral Guardians to attack and try to shame someone away from being themselves), and / or the people using the service to make a living.
The thing that makes a place popular is also sometimes the thing that causes it to break apart. Sometimes outside forces intervene, like when the Moral Guardians manage to get legislation passed that disproportionately affects queer folks and sex workers in the name of protecting children from strawpeople. Sometimes a company gets sold to a different country entirely, where the laws are even more punishing than before. More often than not, though, there's enough "adult" content in a space that the corporate overlords, the vulture capitalists, or the advertisers start putting on the pressure, and if there's an inciting incident or a convenient excuse, especially if it can be spun as a way of protecting "innocent children", whatever has been designated as "adult content" or material too "mature" for the site gets sent off, and sometimes that means works and entire communities get erased without the chance to archive their work. (Local backups are good, keep them!)
More often than not, once a space shows that it follows the money rather than the fans, the fans show the service the door. If the service overreacts or otherwise goes about trying to clean its own house in a way that doesn't get the intended targets, or if there is a large amount of damage to persons who aren't targeted, or if the targeting turns out to be about something other than what it was named to be about, those affected are often way more vocal and swift in their departure from the platform.
What is old is new again, and will do the same again in the future, so long as the underlying issues don't change. So when considering where to hang your shingle, do some research on the organization that is behind the service you want to migrate to. Are they beholden to advertising dollars? Do they have policy statements about equity, diversity, inclusion? Do they explicitly spell out, either in the Terms of Service, or in policy documents, what they will and will not allow on their platform? Do they provide plain language versions of things that have to be in legalese? And, if they manage to get off the ground long enough to look like they might fly, do they then stick to those positions they have staked out? If not, do they provide clear explanations about what's changed?
That's just a sample of possible important questions. You may have more, depending on your life's experiences and needs. Evaluate the places, the sources, the contracts and the terms. You don't have to stay away from other places, but if you go in knowing where the likely failure points are going to be, it helps you decide whether you're willing to accept the risk that those failure points will be exactly what you thought they were.
And keep backups. Just in case.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 06:05 am (UTC)When what you have is a site that you can buy accounts to, and that site contains smut, the rules of most payment processors are sufficiently unimaginative that the site qualifies as a porn site. Never mind that the payment and the porn are sufficiently disconnected that someone could ignore it sufficiently to clutch pearls a few years later. Never mind that the actual chargeback rate is practically non-existent. It's still "a porn site" and nobody wants to make exceptions to their rules.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 05:22 pm (UTC)