gwern comments on Fifty Shades of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Less Wrong

18 Post author: PhilGoetz 24 July 2014 12:17AM

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Comment author: shminux 23 July 2014 08:43:55PM *  11 points [-]

Interesting analysis, and somewhat surprising.

The number of people who finish a multi-chapter fan-fiction is, surprisingly, almost always 40-60% of the number who clicked on the first chapter, with the very best reaching 60%, and the misspelled, grammar-free, plot-free, alphabet-soup-vomit of ten-year-olds retaining about 40%.

Huh, that's unexpected.

perhaps 4,000 readers finished it.

I understand the calculation, but it seems very low, are you sure you haven't missed anything?

So what actually happened was that a moderately-popular fanfiction that had been read by a few thousand people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had an unusually large number of chapters.

If this was enough to get published, Worm would have been by now (not a fanfic, much better story, more readers, active online discussion and fanfic groups, large enough to be serialized into 10+ volumes). Yet from what I understand Wildbow has not had a single editor/publisher approach him yet.

I suspect that, while an inflated number of readers might bring a story to the attention of a decision maker in the publishing business, it is but one of many many factors going into a major decision like publishing a manuscript. 50SoG was simply lucky to get picked up, and lucky to do well. So the "self-fulfilling prophesy" bit is a big stretch.

Comment author: gwern 29 July 2014 05:31:18PM 7 points [-]

I didn't really intend to discuss this any further (because it's not like I care in the least about Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray qua Twilight/50SoG), but a random link on Reddit turned out to be relevant and give some more of the backstory, which if accurate explains a lot: http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/2byz2l/many_women_do_not_agree_with_me_on_this_subject/cjaqvmi

...FSOG got a shitload of karma. Ask me how! Well, the short of it: Erika [Leonard James / E.L. James] is a marketing professional. The long of it:

  • Erika made reposts of already-proven-popular content
  • Erika posted short updates to the story very frequently, keeping it at the top of the story search list
  • Since people could give 'karma' (reviews) for every single chapter/update, the more chapters a story had, the more karma it had

FSOG had 80 [edit: was actually 110] chapters. That means that a lot of people actually reviewed that fucking thing EIGHTY times. So even if she had only 100 super loyal readers, that's 8,000 [edit: actually 11,000] reviews (think upvotes). People see a story with 8,000 reviews and want to click it to see what all the fuss is about. I think it had something like 20,000 reviews when it was pulled down for publishing.

Hence, FSOG went viral.

To put into perspective the social power of the Twilight fanfic community, consider this:

There was a fandom-run charity auction to benefit pediatric cancer research. These auctions, held annually, lasted 1 week. That's it. Just 7 days. Mostly authors would auction off stories. So if you donated in my name, I'd write you 10,000 words of porn in my Tattward universe, or something new, etc. That's how it worked.

  • The 2009 auction raised $80,000.
  • The 2010 auction raised $140,000.
  • The 2011 auction raised $20,00.

This charity has raised more than $230,000 in 3 weeks. http://www.alexslemonade.org/mypage/19842

Erika participated in the 2010 auction. A story from her fanfic (FSOG) raised $30,000 of that, all by itself. In some chats made public by another author (that's some quality drama: http://gentleblaze.livejournal.com/), Erika freely admits to not wanting to participate in the charity at all, but felt pressured to do so by her readers.

...(Edit: Another fun fact! Erika's going to publish that story she wrote for the charity auction, for profit.)

But now, with the ability to connect the social power of the community with a monetary sum of her story's worth, Erika shortly thereafter decided to publish.

She then leveraged the community's sense of nostalgia and loyalty, urging everyone to buy the book and give it good ratings, so as to see 'one of their own succeed in the publishing world'. There were multiple campaigns from her friends (tens of thousands of what she only saw herself as 'fans') to blast her Amazon page and send the book up the ranks. It of course worked.

Once a (genre fiction) book gets to #1 on Amazon's bestseller list, you're done. Mission accomplished. Book and movie deals to follow. Enjoy your money.

...There's also a great reason why the 2011 charity auction made so much less money. Because after everyone saw Erika publish FSOG and make bank, they all wanted to do the same. Not really many popular stories left to leverage social currency--it's all going into their pockets. Most of those really popular fics (including the two mentioned here [The Submissive and Clipped Wings]) have since been published and done quite well.

...Seriously, Twilight fandom got really crazy big for a few years there. It was not totally uncommon to get multi-million clicks on a semi-popular story. It's weird looking back on it and calling it "Twilight fandom" because it was really more like "Romance Novel fandom"

...Actually, the fandom's pretty much dead now compared to how it used to be. After FSOG's success and everyone started publishing their own fanfic, stories would only stay online for as long as it took the author to complete them, then they'd take them away (sometimes they'd even post half and ask people to buy the book to get the ending), so people were either wary of reading new stories, or just didn't have any old ones around to read. Then you also get authors who come to the fandom and post their original novels, with the names changed to Edward and Bella, get a bunch of reviews and recognition, then publish it for pay.

Also, Twilight fandom now has multiple micro-publishers. Basically sites that used to archive fanfic now also publish 'books'. What they do is keep an eye on what stories get popular on their archives, then go to the author and offer to publish it for them. They slap a shitty cover on it, do minimal editing (change the identifiable Twilight names) and then take a significant portion of the profits.

The whole community is one giant scam these days.

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