Smaller Fandoms at FanLib
After reading some stats at life_wo_fanlib, I went to FanLib, thinking, "There is no way there's a Third Watch section. If there's a Third Watch section, I'm going to hurt people."
Well, there's a Third Watch section. Worse yet, it's got 36 fics, which puts it on their most popular page.* Our tiny fandom is on the most popular page, currently kicking The X-Files' ass. (To give you an idea of just how wacky that is, on FFNet, there are 1,640 Third Watch fics to The X-Files' 6,495. On Third Watch's main fan-run archive, ThirdWatch.Net, there are 647 stories, while on The X-Files' main fan-run archive, Gossamer, there are 33,758 stories.)
I'm going to toy with this thought for a minute, and share the questions it immediately raises in my mind.
01. Third Watch is fairly isolated from the rest of fandom. Has news of FanLib's suckage spread so far and wide through the fannish community that even Third Watch fic writers are aware of it?
02. We're looking at no more than nine Third Watch writers posting at FanLib. We're a small fandom, but we're not that small. FanLib wants to "bring fanfiction into the mainstream," but are they having issues getting the word out to even the fannish community?
Anyway, it doesn't look particularly good for FanLib if Third Watch is 40 out of 2,250.
Before you go take this poll, I have a few things to say:
- You can use your judgment as to what constitutes "small-ish," since I don't think there's any specific set of criteria laid out for that, aside from possibly, "It's not Harry Potter." I'll take your word for it, since a member of the fandom probably has a better feel for its size than, say, the story count at FFNet.
- If you don't feel like doing the legwork, there's no need to answer the last two questions. If you do feel like answering them, but you have more than one fandom you're supplying data for, please reply in the comments.
- I do not have a FanLib account, so I'm going by the information that is available to someone who is not logged in at that site -- in other words, your average non-fannish creature, who FanLib says they're trying to appeal to. This means that the adult stories are NOT included in my tallies, although some of that information is available in life_wo_fanlib's stats posts. If you're going to give the story count for your fandom at FanLib, please use the number EXCLUDING the adult stories.
- If you want to note anything else that might be useful, like the name of the fandom's main fan-run archive, feel free to leave it in a comment.
- Please, please pimp this. Please?
Poll Small Fandoms at FanLib and FFNet
Basically, the idea here is to see if other fandoms are just as screwed up as Third Watch. And now I'm going to shower.
* Twenty-seven of those fics were written by the same person, though, so that makes me feel better. Hell, if I went and added my fics -- which I most emphatically will never be doing -- that would bring the total up to 83, or even 90 something, if I included fic I no longer have available online. Do you know where that would put us? Right by The West Wing's 87 and Pirates of the Caribbean's 88. We'd be 12th.