"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.
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?
Yeah, I think we agree on the problem statement. As to the solution, that's an interesting question. Let's do some Fermi analysis.
We first need to know what popular fanfic is actually looking at in terms of readers. ff.net doesn't expose that information, unfortunately, but AO3 does. If a comment on AO3 is roughly equivalent to a review on ff.net, then each review is worth about a thousand hits. Assume that five or ten percent of those hits, for a long work, are unique readers (logged-in users aren't double-counted, but I assume anonymice on dynamic ... (read more)