Meta/Rant: It's like deja vu all over again!

[telesilla]

Once upon a time--back in the mid 90s--John Ordover, the then Star Trek editor of Pocket Books, posted on alt.startrek.creative advertising a contest for fan writers. If you wrote a fic that fit into their guidelines--which were the same stringent ones tie-in writers had to follow--you could win a cash prize and be published in an anthology. If I

Comments

[ladycat777]

Oh my god, there are already so many people!

I know there's always going to be someone trying to make a buck - and lemme say seeing names like HarperCollins and Simon&Schuster do not fill me with any kind of relief or trust - on any kind of market, but... so many people!

[telesilla]

Well I think the beta site's been up for a couple of months, so people have had time to load their stuff. There's a way you can import from fanfiction.net, which kind of says it all about the quality involved here.

/bitchy

[ladycat777]

Actually, that's what scares me the most. I mean, I know I'm a snob for saying this, but often the type of fan who posts to ffnet is the most vulnerable to this kind of this -- aspiring writers who think if they write that One Fabulous Story their lives will be set, not having any real idea of how horrible the business can be; people who have that teenager glee and love for something without any realism to temper it.

They're gonna get suckered. Hard. And that - I hate when that happens. I know Barnum said it, but I don't have to like it :(

[telesilla]

*nods* Exactly. And for all I mock the teenies and their utterly atrocious fanfic, I don't want to see them being used by bastards like this.

[monster_of_hope]

There are no ads and no fees involved.

There are ads now. All of the main pages have ads for TV shows and movies.

It looks like FanLib's plan is to suck money out of fans. Fanfiction writers and readers are the ideal audience to sell the Extra-extra-special edition to, movie tickets, T-shirts, tie-in books, tie-in comics, the DVD boxed sets, the action figures, etc.

Really disgusting: they already sold a bogus eight-week "learn to be a writer" course. God I hate those things. They prey on the weak. I can't find a link to it, unfortunately.

You did notice Star Trek is one of FanLib's sponsors, right? :D

[telesilla]

Really disgusting: they already sold a bogus eight-week "learn to be a writer" course. God I hate those things. They prey on the weak. I can't find a link to it, unfortunately.

Dude, seriously? Do you have a link to it?

You did notice Star Trek is one of FanLib's sponsors, right? :D

Wow, imagine my surprise. If ever there was a franchise that lived to make money off its fans....

[monster_of_hope]

Dagnabbit, I can't find it. It was somewhere in the "about" section. There was a timeline showing FanLib events starting in 2003, when the company was first formed. I don't know if the website has been around since 2003 -- the fanfiction archive part of it is definitely new.

*does whois lookup*

Yep, the site name was registered in 2003. Not sure when the web site launched.

[king_chiron]

Archive.org shows a version of the site as far back as June 2003. But the site looks very different, it was aimed at people collaborating on scripts, nothing about fanfic that I can see.

"Driven by a revolutionary patent pending technology two-years in development, FANLIB lets a mass audience collectively and democratically create original scripts one scene at a time."

Then they started excluding spiders via the robot.txt file, so I can't see when it changed to focus on fanfic.

[king_chiron]

My guess is they won't explicitly charge for content but rather make their money off advertising (or just counting on cashing in on the whole user-content craze by selling their company to someone once their traffic gets high enough). I also noticed that they're the only company paying for the term "fan fiction" on Google.

[king_chiron]

PS - They do have ads, when I hit the site I got one for a new Showtime series (Meadowlands).

[telesilla]

Yeah did an ETA to that effect. At least I know that Adblock Plus works rather nicely.

[king_chiron]

I run Flashblock with Firefox, which in addition to keeping FF from getting stuck on pages with a lot of Flash, has the nice side effect of helping me ignore a lot of ads.

[darthhellokitty]

I can't find any content guidelines at all; I guess my Dragonriders of Pern/NASCAR RPS fisting story will fit in just fine.

This is an interesting development... thanks for pointing it out, can't wait to see what kind of mess it turns into.

[telesilla]

So far we haven't found anything more than PG-13, but they do allow slash and even Wincest. So if you can bring it in with a PG-13 rating....

[monster_of_hope]

Ha! I was about to tell her. The default is adult set to OFF. You are not surprised. *g*