Yeah, I was going to bring up again the whole comparison to dance/music. These are activities that are allowed to be community-building and non-professional without the wankery value-judgement or the assumption that non-professionals aren't professionalizing because they're intimidated by the process of professionalization.
My favorite memories of faire are sitting around listening to jam sessions afterwards. None of the music played was original...and at least half of it was not public domain. Most of those musicians were not full-time professional musicians, though they would sometimes play paid-gigs (especially on St. Patrick's day). Some of them had recorded and released their own CD's (the equivalent of vanity publishing).
In music, this type of casual, fluid crossover between the two is more accepted, in part I think because musicians still view their work as both performative and communal. I don't get the feeling that pro-writers get together and share their writing just for the fun of doing so. Even writing groups and workshops are done with the aim of critique. I think fanfic writers are more apt to view writing as a performative activity (which carries with it an expectation of the immediate response and gratification, often positive, of the audience). The structure of the contemporary professional writing complex makes pro-writing less peformative. I think it's (again) condescending to view a writer's desire for performative acknowlegement ("egoboo") as something shameful or less admirable a motivation.
I'd also like to point out that general consensus in the fandoms I've participated in is that reviews come about 1:100 -- that is, one review for every 100 hits. It is also the case that most authors have one or more beta's, whose job it is to provide the constructive criticism that often is lacking in reviews. I've also noticed that about 1 in 5 of reviews I've received has some sort of constructive crit.
I've noticed some slight fluctuations in these trends, depending on the site, mostly correlating to the strength of community feeling (how responsible community members feel towards each other), and the maturity of the community members. I've noticed that people who author or are heavily involved in the community are more likely to review than non-authors and lurkers. I've noticed that over half of the reviews people receive tend to be "repeats", that is, people who have reviewed other stories or other chapters of the same story. One of the sites I frequent has an under-reviewed category, where you can go and read a fic that has statistically been under-reviewed compared to hits and length.
All this is to say that the other folks who've pointed out that this is more than just "egoboo", but is in fact a highly developed social economy are right on the money (heh), and that the social circles that are created are actually rather small and tight-knit.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yati
Re: $0.02
Date: 2007-04-29 04:38 pm (UTC)My favorite memories of faire are sitting around listening to jam sessions afterwards. None of the music played was original...and at least half of it was not public domain. Most of those musicians were not full-time professional musicians, though they would sometimes play paid-gigs (especially on St. Patrick's day). Some of them had recorded and released their own CD's (the equivalent of vanity publishing).
In music, this type of casual, fluid crossover between the two is more accepted, in part I think because musicians still view their work as both performative and communal. I don't get the feeling that pro-writers get together and share their writing just for the fun of doing so. Even writing groups and workshops are done with the aim of critique. I think fanfic writers are more apt to view writing as a performative activity (which carries with it an expectation of the immediate response and gratification, often positive, of the audience). The structure of the contemporary professional writing complex makes pro-writing less peformative. I think it's (again) condescending to view a writer's desire for performative acknowlegement ("egoboo") as something shameful or less admirable a motivation.
I'd also like to point out that general consensus in the fandoms I've participated in is that reviews come about 1:100 -- that is, one review for every 100 hits. It is also the case that most authors have one or more beta's, whose job it is to provide the constructive criticism that often is lacking in reviews. I've also noticed that about 1 in 5 of reviews I've received has some sort of constructive crit.
I've noticed some slight fluctuations in these trends, depending on the site, mostly correlating to the strength of community feeling (how responsible community members feel towards each other), and the maturity of the community members. I've noticed that people who author or are heavily involved in the community are more likely to review than non-authors and lurkers. I've noticed that over half of the reviews people receive tend to be "repeats", that is, people who have reviewed other stories or other chapters of the same story. One of the sites I frequent has an under-reviewed category, where you can go and read a fic that has statistically been under-reviewed compared to hits and length.
All this is to say that the other folks who've pointed out that this is more than just "egoboo", but is in fact a highly developed social economy are right on the money (heh), and that the social circles that are created are actually rather small and tight-knit.