Meta: Questions about FanLib's FAQ; or Who With the What Now?
ETA2:
Fan Lib has now taken their FAQ down with the following explanation:
We're currently revising our Frequently Asked Questions page. A new version will be posted soon. In the meantime, please feel free to email us at support@fanlib.com or post to the forums.
Thank you.
I have edited this post so that the links to the questions go to the ( Read more... )
Comments 135
The purpose of this site is to be an awesome place for fanfic fans. Whether posting, reading, finding, sharing, reviewing, discussing, paricipating in contests, or meeting others, we want to make the whole experience of fan fiction as great as possible. Easy, powerful, fun!
Our mission is to broaden fanfic's appeal, bring the entertainment and fan communities together, and bring it into the mainstream. We do things like conduct official events and contests around major fandoms, like Star Trek, feature quality fanfics prominently on the homepage, and provide "embedded badges" to easily and attractively share your own stories as well as your favorites on other sites.
We fervently believe that fans should be celebrated. And, we are literally investing millions of dollars to advance that cause. The entertainment companies are listening and changing.
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Yes, because that's what we in fandom want, for it to be easier for other people to post our stories all over the place.
That just chills my blood.
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The American Heritage Dictionary defines "Fan Fiction" as "Informal fiction written by fans as an extension of an admired work or series of works, especially a televsion show, often posted on the internet or published in fanzines."
Some writers write "missing scenes," to capture a space of time between two scenes in a TV episode. Some write "AU Fiction" which places the characters in a totally different time or space. Some write to experience scenes which are more romantic or explicit than what they get on TV and some write just to extend the experience with their favorite characters and worlds.
Mostly, though, fanfic writers write because they love it. It often keeps them up at night and has them furiously typing when they should be sound asleep or studying for a test.
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I'd love to read his comment.
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I'm very put off.
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I'm curious: if the big flag these guys are waving is "we're fans just like you," then why is this paragraph full of the word "they"?
Something about that paragraph just amuses me. I'm trying to imagine "most" fanfic writers all writing "furiously" between the hours of 1 and 5 AM (and apparently we are all college students).
ANYONE who's written ANYTHING knows that you pray for the nights when you're "furiously typing." More often it's staring at the screen with a WPM of 2 if you're lucky.
(I don't really have anything to add about the overall debate. Ruth, your post is awesome and stands as the best response possible.)
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Yes. Some people think that makes us evil. But, sometimes to do things really well, it takes money. We are backed by major investors and we make money mainly by selling advertising, but also by helping other companies like HarperCollins and MSN produce their own fan events.
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Yeah, and sometimes to do things extremely badly, it takes even more.
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Many sites that are run by fans as labors of love do not intend to make a profit. But most, if not all, of the large sites that host fan content are decidedly commercial. LiveJournal is for-profit, as is Yahoo!, MySpace, Quizilla, TheForce.net, AtomFilms, and many others with loads of fan fiction and other fan creations. FanFiction.net as well, though many people don't realize it, makes a lot of money.
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When we ask "other fanfic sites" we're not talking about large commercial sites that have fanfic content. We're talking about archives for the posting of fanfic.
What does "decidedly commercial" mean? Does it apply to Skyehawke, The Archive at the end of the universe, fiction alley and sugarquill, Twisting the Hellmouth, the House fic archive on squidge.org?
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Could you please cite your sources for this? Are we talking gross or net profit?
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The legal status of fan fiction is complicated and varies on a case-by-case basis (Learn More).
However if you post the new Harry Potter book on the site, that's a problem. In this respect, we're no different than anywhere else online. The entertainment companies increasingly recognize the reality of fan creativity online and are looking to make it work for them rather than against them. Suing or telling all their most avid customers to take everything down is simply not in their interests.
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