"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift
might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game
theory."
-- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"
Three Worlds Collide is a story I wrote to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct. It grew, as such things do, into a small novella. On publication, it proved widely popular and widely criticized. Be warned that the story, as it wrote itself, ended up containing some profanity and PG-13 content.
- The Baby-Eating Aliens
- War and/or Peace
- The Super Happy People
- Interlude with the Confessor
- Three Worlds Decide
- Normal Ending
- True Ending
- Atonement
PDF version here.
I think I'd expect an S-shaped curve for fanfic, with a term for the popularity of the original work, and a more exponential-looking curve for original fiction. People who read fanfic tend to read a lot of fanfic, and that gets a certain number of eyes on your work that wouldn't be there if you were publishing original fiction, but it's exceptionally rare for a fanfic to attract readers that aren't either part of the (still relatively small) fanfic community or fans of the original work and usually both.
HPMoR is unusual in that it has managed to attract an audience independent of those considerations, but that audience is, as best I can tell, quite small compared to the numbers a bestselling original fantasy novel can be looking at.
Oh, without question. A bestselling original fantasy novel has many more readers than a popular fanfiction. Agreed.
So now, if I want to do an expected value calculation, I should consider the likelihood of my work becoming a bestselling original fantasy novel vs the likelihood of my work becoming popular fanfiction, and the effort involved in pursuing those paths, and cash those out in terms of expected readers gained per unit of work. Agreed?
Assuming we agree on that: what would you estimate the ratio of those numbers to be for EY, while preserving the various ideological/educational purposes he had for his work?