Katie Fairchild talks to us about marketing for Radish and how an expertise in fanfiction informs her work.

In the final installment of our fanfiction series, we talk with a publishing professional and fan fiction expert who works in the business of serialized fiction. Katie Fairchild is a marketing associate who uses her expertise in the way fandom audiences read and interact to promote stories on the Radish Fiction app, which is primarily focused on a romance audience. We talk with Katie about the types of campaigns she runs, how serialized fiction fans interact with stories, and how her expertise informs that work.

Guest Bio

Katie Fairchild is a digital marketing professional, fandom aficionado, and lifelong book person. After graduating from Portland State University’s publishing program in 2018, she moved to New York to further her publishing career. She is currently a Marketing Associate at the digital publishing startup Radish Fiction, where she specializes in the strange and steamy world of romance marketing. When not working, Katie can be found experimenting in the kitchen, harassing her cat, or curled up with a good video game.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Link to Radish app
• Katie Fairchild on Twitter @ktfairchild
• Our interview with Historian and Romance Author Kat Jackson, who has some of her work on Radish, in Episode 49 

The post Episode 65 — Katie Fairchild of Radish Fiction first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 65 — Katie Fairchild of Radish Fiction appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

If you are a fanfiction writer or reader, you probably know about the biggest location for fanfiction on the web: Archive of Our Own, aka., AO3. It’s a free, open source, multifandom archive where people can post, read, and comment on fanfiction. In case you missed it, we talked about it a bit in a previous episode. What you might not know is that it’s under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization called the Organization for Transformative Works that does…well, a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. Emily was fortunate enough to get to speak with Claudia Rebaza from OTW’s communications department about how such a large, multilingual organization, with a worldwide network of volunteers, has kept itself running for nearly fifteen years!

Today’s Featured Organization

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan culture.

The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanworks using open-source archiving software.

Their other projects include Fanlore, a wiki devoted to preserving the history of transformative fanworks and the activity in the fanworks they have come from. Legal Advocacy, which is dedicated to protecting and defending fanworks from exploitation and legal challenges; Open Doors, which helps rescue and preserve fanworks at risk of disappearing from the web; and a peer reviewed journal called Transformative Works and Cultures.

Other Links of Interest

• My favorite Instagram account featuring a number of silly/fun aO3 tags—@ao3tagoftheday
• The transcript for this episode

The post Episode 64: Claudia Rebaza From The Organization For Transformative Works first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 64: Claudia Rebaza From The Organization For Transformative Works appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

For over 15 years, online smartasses content creators have been doing dramatic readings of a single, infamous fanfic—My Immortal. It features an OC (original character) named Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, Draco Malfoy, Good Charlotte, Harry Potter (who now goes by the name “Vampire”) and a whole lot of very bad spelling.

STOP FLAMMING DA STORY PREPZ OK!
—XXXbloodyrists666XXX

The ever-talented JT joins Emily to do something that, frankly, I am surprised we haven’t done yet: indulge in the age-old tradition of reading the fic, then speculating about whether or not it was just one very clever troll. Emily also tells a story of a moment in time that the mystery was thought to be solved, and how that story heavily involves traditional publishing taking on, then canceling, a pertinent memoir.

Content Warnings

This is mainly for the actual fic, which includes.

• A very embarrassing, arguably glorified incident of self-harm
• Homophobia and a flippant reference to a character having AIDS

(I feel a bit silly adding CWs to this really awful piece of work, but just in case.)

Mentioned in this Episode:

• The text to my Immortal itself
• A link to the transcript

A series of news stories that will take you from uncertainty, to cautious belief, to doubly confused uncertainty:

• The Bizarre Unsolved Mystery of My Immortal (Posted before the memoir incident)
• People Think They Have The Answer To The Decade-Long Mystery Of Who Wrote “My Immortal”
• The My Immortal memoir has been canceled, and the mystery of the notorious fanfic deepens

The post Episode 63: JT Reads the Most Notorious Fanfic of All Time first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 63: JT Reads the Most Notorious Fanfic of All Time appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

Friend of the pod Tara Lehmann and YA author and fanfic veteran Mary Elizabeth Summer join Emily to define different fanfic conventions and talk about their experiences writing and reading fic. If you’re worried you won’t be able to remember all these terms, never fear! We have included a glossary below for your reference. (Also, you can @ me on Twitter to split hairs, but I do not have the energy to join the anti/pro argument, thank you please.)

I think it is a valuable exercise for anybody and everybody who is willing to sit down at a keyboard and just write. It doesn’t necessarily have to be anything fantastic; it doesn’t necessarily have to be long, but I do feel that it is a very important addition to our popular culture In this day and age. —Tara Lehmann

Listen to our interview with Tara here. (This is from our early days, so beware the sound editing.)

A Glossary of Fandom Terms

• Anti-ship: a position some fans take against problematic fictional ships between characters with unhealthy dynamics or canon abuse within a work; this is an opposing viewpoint to pro-shippers, and this disagreement between the two groups is a source of many conflicts (sometimes extreme ones) in fan communities.
• AO3: the abbreviation for the website Archive of Our Own, which is currently the largest fanfiction website on the internet.
• Beta reader:a person who provides a second pair of eyes, comments, and often edits to a standalone work or chapter of a fic before it goes online. They also often provide ego boosts, reality checks, and cheerleading. Beta readers are often used by people who write original works for self-publishing and sometimes traditional books (though often the author’s editor or agent fills that role).
• Canon: the source material without the addition of any fan works, whether that be a book, movie, TV series, comic, podcast, or some combination of all these things.
• Discord: a chat app that is used by many for professional or recreational purposes, and often serves as a meeting place for members of different fandoms.
• Fandom: the collective noun referring to people who are aficionados of a particular media property.
• Fanfiction(.)net: one of the first websites used as a location to share and interact with different works of fan fiction.
• Fanon: tropes or storylines that develop within small groups of fans or fandoms at large outside of the canon material.
• Fanworks: any derivative work that someone makes using the characters, storylines, or other features of a work; could be fics, art, video mashups, or other creative ventures.
• Fic: a shortened way to say “fanfiction.”
• Headcanon: a personal belief or story a fan maintains about the canon work that enhances the story for them or fills a gap in the original work; this could be shared with other fans or kept to oneself.
• Lemony: a way to describe a fic that has explicit material in it—a throwback to the days where fanfic was mostly included in forums and on Livejournal.
• Pro-ship: conceived of as either a shortening of “problematic ship” or someone who has the attitude that all ships are valid, even ones that would be problematic, illegal, or abusive in the real world; some use the term to imply endorsement of inappropriate relationships outside of a fictional context, and this disagreement is the basis of many and conflicts (sometimes extreme ones) in fan communities.
• Real Person Fanfiction (RPF): a genre of fic that uses real people, specifically celebrities, as characters in fanmade works.
• Ship: a relationship—usually romantic—between two characters that may or may not appear in canon, but that is supported and promoted by writers and readers within the fandom.
• Tagging: the words used to describe what type of story is being told in a work of fanfiction; usually includes tropes, characters, ships, content warnings, and the odd original statement that has nothing to do with the actual fic.

You can also read this very comprehensive summary the website Vox put together of different fandom terms.

Mentioned on this episode:

• Mary Elizabeth Summer’s books Trust Me, I’m Lying and Trust Me, I’m Trouble
• Mary Elizabeth’s Good Omens fanfic
• That fanfic with 1 million words and 1,700 tags.
• The song Ophelia by Natalie Merchant

Read the transcript for this episode here

The post Episode 62— Fanfiction Part 1: An Introduction first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Episode 62— Fanfiction Part 1: An Introduction appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

Notice I said “book” reading.

This batch of statistics from the fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, however, indicates folks flocked to fanfiction in droves. And when I say they were reading fanfiction, what I mean is we. Yes, late bloomer that I am, I too joined the chaotic world of ships, fixits, and wish fulfillment, eventually writing a book-length fic of my own, and no you cannot read it. Yes, I am on a Discord server where most of the time we talk about how much we all love a single fictional character who only appears in less than 3% of canon content. I regret nothing. Do what you need to do to cope, amirite?

Despite the surge of new users and my own, personal late adoption of the habits of fandom members, fanfiction has always been relevant. There is a ton of overlap with people who write and read original fiction and people who write and read fanfic. As someone who loves books and is part of the process of creating and selling them, it would be foolish to ignore the movement and the intersections. People who consume media consume it within many different formats and mediums (and if you want to hear more conversations about omnivorous media consumption, listen to our interviews with Dr. Rachel Noorda And Dr. Kathi Berens and literary agent Dongwon Song).

Fanfiction readers are often writers, and many of them are big name traditional authors, including one of my favorites, N.K. Jemisin. And if that doesn’t convince you that the land of fanworks is worth paying attention to, hopefully we’ll see you back in a couple months!

Here’s what you can look forward to:

• I sit down with a friend of the pod and a new friend who is both a traditional YA author and a veteran fanfiction writer to define fandom terms and discuss the experience of writing fanfiction.
• We grace you with a dramatic reading of one of the most notorious fanfics of all time.
• I interview a communications representative from the largest platform and preservation project for fanworks on the entire internet—and damn does she know her stuff.
• A marketing professional from a popular reading app joins us to talk about how their platform’s way of presenting serialized fiction has a kinship with the way people read and interact with fanfiction.

Do you love fanfiction? Don’t be shy! You’re in good company, and I look forward to introducing you to some smart, creative folks who are in the same boat.

—Emily

The post A Porthole to the World of Fanfiction first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post A Porthole to the World of Fanfiction appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.