Ah HA!

[blamebrampton]

FANFICCERS!

Worried about lack of reviews?

Sad that everyone is reading everyone who is not you?

Depressed to see teenagers who don't know how to spell frottage and cannot accurately gauge the bendability of the average penis with thousands of ffnet reviews while your finely crafted and beautifully edited masterpieces are lucky to garner 23?

FRET NO LONGER!

THE SECRET IS REVEALED!

''People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action,'' Hayward says. ''You have to have a sex scene in every chapter because that's how you get your reviews. The amount of people who review per chapter shows popularity, that's how your ratings get up. In fan fiction every chapter has to give you something to keep you reading it.''
(From an SMH interview with Amanda Hayward, the really rather brilliant publisher of the not as brilliant book.)

So there you go! You lot who've been telling me to porn it up were right all along! (I mean, obviously I'm not going to, but that's for the best. The Bad Sex Awards longlist is already inches thick.)

I thoroughly recommend the article, which is interesting and respectfully written, without being actually nice about bad writing. It includes this gem from The London Review of Books' Andrew O'Hagan, which I had previously missed: ''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

Comments

[fragrantwoods.livejournal.com]

I should totally go back to each chapter and add "And then they had sex" and see what happens :-D

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

Ooh! I'm gonna add gratuitous sex scenes to all my gen fics, repost the lot to AO3, and watch the kudos roll in!

Seriously, I'm sure it would work. *sigh*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

This made me wish for the awful like and reblog buttons.

I don't quite agree about the formula - in fact not at all, because there are different tropes at work - but it does boil down to fan service anyway.

I saw someone read it today. Just as I expected, a middle-aged woman with a mouth downturned into a horseshoe - actually the rest of the visual description would limit this to superficial sexism but I so wanted a photo when she put one short leg on the bench, the other still down, and the book lay between her thighs as she read on with unmoving face.
I still think it's worst that those who mock Sheds love the same thing just in different clothes but that's me, who used to dream of equality.

[nenne.livejournal.com]

If I ever take up writing I'll keep it in mind. ;)

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

As a reader, I'm much more inclined to read fics that have NC-17/Explicit or R/Mature ratings. That's just what I want to read. It's not that I won't read a PG or a gen fic, but because time is limited and there's so much fic out there, it really has to be something that was recced to me or something written by someone whose work I already know I like. So maybe that makes me shallow, but yanno, IDGAF really. ;-)

Sure there's a lot of bad porn out there, but that's true of fanfic in general. It's hard to find stuff that's both well-written and suited to your personal tastes, and narrowing your list of likes down to a few things you know you'll enjoy is one way of coping with the sheer volume that's out there. It's my way, anyhow.

I write a lot of sex scenes in my fic. A LOT. I don't consciously try to put one in every chapter or whatever; the sex is there or not according to whether it works in the scene. If there are eight possible ways I can think of to move the story or the character development forward at a particular moment, and if one of them does it through sex, I'll pick that one. I guess the point is that I write it because I like to write it, and apparently some people like to read it too, which is cool with me.

I know you're not porn-bashing here, but I just wanted to throw in my perspective that lots of sex scenes =/= bad storytelling automatically.

[leemarchais.livejournal.com]

I don't think sex defines the quality of a fic, either. There had better be a good plot and story. I've read your stuff and it's lovely. But there's no sex... Some people are truly idiots.

[sinden.livejournal.com]

People want bang for their buck -- or, you know, porn for their time investment because that is their emotional payoff.

Also, I concur that it would be really nice to actually have some feedback for the hours of time I spend writing the damn thing. It maintains an interactive dialogue between the author and reader. Kudos on AO3 drive me nuts because I don't know the context they're being used in -- I kudos everything I read, or only the things I liked or my finger slipped, oh well. WHAT DO YOU MEAN? Ahem.

[mrsquizzical.livejournal.com]

i enjoyed learning that they created that space to write and review together and had no idea where that story would end up. thanks for linking that article. :)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Guess that's where I've been going wrong too. Latest book not selling very well. Should have sexed it up more.

[oakstone730.livejournal.com]

I forget which romance writer tweeted that she was going to throw in some BDSM in her next book just 'cause what the hell it is clearly what people want.

All my stories (with one exception) are lime. Everything is off stage. Even without *it* though I still get reads and reviews. I did have one person posted a rec of my story with the caveat (paraphrased) "good story but isn't NC-17 so not many will read." Which is fine. Since I don't feel comfortable writing the NC-17 stuff, although I've no objection to reading it.

So many stories are NC-17, and very few write it well that I tend to skip it anyway. I like Fragantwoods idea of just adding "And then they had sex..." add in a slap and a tickle and we'll all be rolling in the reviews.

[mabonwitch.livejournal.com]

*snort* Oh, is that all? As someone who writes primarily sex, I've got to say: sex =/= reviews automatically. Although that's a hilarious thought, bound to lead to some, ahem, interesting stories.

[excentric397.livejournal.com]

I'm a reader, not a writer. I'll read pretty much anything except Ianto dies and some crossovesr, and I refuse to read RPF. I've found that I'm commenting less because I tend to convert everything to text and send it to my Kindle to read. No comment opportunities that way. I do kind of agree with fragrantwoods, too.. I would probably read most anything that had 'and then they had sex' in it. Unless it was Jack and Gwen. Then I'd just have to throw up.

[fourth_rose]

''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

Well, since the same is true for the source material...

[valkyrie17.livejournal.com]

Um...I love your stories very much as they are. You seem to have such a firm grasp of politics and such a wonderful sense of humour. I have everything I could find converted to pdf so that I can carry it around and read it at lunch or while waiting in long lineups. I read your stories (along with Calanthe, Mirabella, Oldenuf2nobetter,Emma Grant, Jennavere, Maya among others), over and over again.
I like sex in a story, but more importantly, I want a STORY...I want a plot and I want humour. You more than fill the bill.

[kath-ballantyne.livejournal.com]

To me a story is important. I know I had discussions with lots of people who weren't interested in gen. Even if there wasn't actual on the page sex they wanted the romance/relationship stuff or they wouldn't read it but I read fanfic for the same reason I read books and that is to immerse myself in a wonderful story and roll about in the characters. So to speak.
Doesn't mean I don't enjoy a PWP on occasion but if it's not in character then it doesn't mean anything to me.
I want to know why the characters are where they are and why they're doing what they are doing.
I enjoy AUs too and I'm amazed that people can change something fundamental about a character so they do end up acting in a way that would have been out of character in canon but you can totally see that it would go that way.


I discovered internet fandom when I was 17 (ah dial up at $2 an hour an it taking hours to load a pic. Sounds like my satellite internet). Came at a great time for me socially, not so much academically but if I wasn't going to be able to sleep anyway then staying up and reading fic and chatting on a message board to people who are still my best friends today was a good way to spend the time. Finding people I had stuff in common with rather than just going to the same school with changed my life.

I am amused that people are like women are reading porn in public! E-readers mean that women can read stuff without other people knowing it's dirty. *rolls eyes* Since the age of 17 when I had to print out the pages on my dot matrix printer I've been reading fanfic in public. It was perfect for long train rides. I've never had anything over than second hand phones after people have upgraded but as soon as they became capable I've been reading on their. I know hundreds who do. It's funny that mainstream is only now realising it.

It's a darn site easier now. Much better than carying a folder of fanfic and listening to tapes on your walkman when you had to change the batteries twice between Newcastle and Sydney and then it usually chewed your tape up.