Tumblr is very poorly designed for any kind of discussion. :/
I guess it is a matter of picking nits, but I'd shelve the brilliant lightweight fic in the literary bucket. To me, the "candy" is the stuff that does *nothing more* than clearly follow a well-known, accepted, popular genre such as genre romance, action-adventure, etc. Anything that subverts a popular genre or knowingly adds a "wink-wink" knowing layer on top of the genre gets reshelved as lit in my fanfic card catalog system.
For the past six years, 90%+ of my fic directly engages with socially problematic issues and, after writing a half million words, I feel safe saying that at least for the fiction I write, if I want to attract an audience in the US and CA (and, to a much lesser extent, UK, AU, NZ), I need to keep my socially problematic issue stories focused on m/m relationships and I need sprinkle some irony and knowing-author into it.
On the other hand, if I write for a continental European audience, I can get away with writing straight up psychological/sociological realism with m/f or a mix if m/m and m/f.
All I know is that I have 6 years of tracking data on my stories, including 250k words of stories that are now unavailable, and this is what the analytics plus comment count tell me.
When I compare this to best seller lists in north america versus europe, current trends in publishers weekly, differences between prize winning fiction in the commonwealth versus the U.S., etc., the little trend I see in fanfic makes sense from a larger demographic standpoint.
no subject
I guess it is a matter of picking nits, but I'd shelve the brilliant lightweight fic in the literary bucket. To me, the "candy" is the stuff that does *nothing more* than clearly follow a well-known, accepted, popular genre such as genre romance, action-adventure, etc. Anything that subverts a popular genre or knowingly adds a "wink-wink" knowing layer on top of the genre gets reshelved as lit in my fanfic card catalog system.
For the past six years, 90%+ of my fic directly engages with socially problematic issues and, after writing a half million words, I feel safe saying that at least for the fiction I write, if I want to attract an audience in the US and CA (and, to a much lesser extent, UK, AU, NZ), I need to keep my socially problematic issue stories focused on m/m relationships and I need sprinkle some irony and knowing-author into it.
On the other hand, if I write for a continental European audience, I can get away with writing straight up psychological/sociological realism with m/f or a mix if m/m and m/f.
All I know is that I have 6 years of tracking data on my stories, including 250k words of stories that are now unavailable, and this is what the analytics plus comment count tell me.
When I compare this to best seller lists in north america versus europe, current trends in publishers weekly, differences between prize winning fiction in the commonwealth versus the U.S., etc., the little trend I see in fanfic makes sense from a larger demographic standpoint.