Putting fanfiction in databases like Goodreads means the algorithm will include it in recommendations. Fanfic authors are then much more likely to get unhappy reviews and ratings from people who were looking for published works (which has professional editing teams) but ended up getting recommendations for fanfiction (which, at best, has beta readers.) Yes, there are fanfics out there on par with published fiction, but those are not the norm, and most fan-written works will not compare favorably to published works if the reader isn’t looking for that.
I truly hate the people putting fics on Goodreads. Harry Potter fandom is horrible for this due to the insane influx of new readers who came from romance novels first
I'm begging the HP fandom at this point, please just leave Manacled alone. Stop binding it, adding it, selling it, just... stop. Poor author must have been living through a nightmare lately.
I saw a tiktok about that a few months back, wondering what all the fuss was about I read it. I read HP fics, but that was my first DM/HG fic.
I thought it was good, but it doesn't feel like a story I'd consider eye-opening or life-changing in any way that would garner it that much acclaim. I don't mean this in a bad way. Maybe I'm just not that into 'dark' romance, which if iirc was what the vid said it was.
What made it so popular? /gen
I'm honestly convinced it was just a lot of "romance readers discover fanfic."
It's not exceptional as either fanfic or smutty/dark romance, but it's a whole influx of people who are so *shocked* that fanfic can be good that they're praising it like it's god's gift to fandom.
This is exactly what happened. It escaped containment and now people think it’s somehow the only good fanfic ever written because it’s the only one they’ve read.
A lot of romance novel readers had never encountered a story with actual rape or dark themes before. It stuck with people. especially with how it's written, frankly most "dark romance" romance novels don't go that hard because they have to comply with Amazon and certain contries content restrictions. It's a freedom only fanfic and amateur has to explore topics that dark.
Iv been on the internet long enough there weren't content warnings on fics and read some disturbing tragedies in the mid 2000s and manacled just comes off as more of the same. It's fine, it's just a dark fic tho.
For me the depth of the emotional anguish was just so well crafted that it genuinely fucked me up. Like, there would be a chapter where people casually talk about how they anally rape their female slaves at a NYE party and the writing felt so realistic that as a woman I felt disturbed to the marrow of my bones because in the context of how casually people justify murder and genocide these days it felt so chillingly realistic. Dehumanisation is the name of the game in the Roaring Twenties.
The fact that the fanfic author pulled what is, beyond a doubt, one of the best plot twists I have ever seen AND made the romance believable with that dark of a backstory just amazed me.
Also, usually most fanfics that would be as daring as to start entire chapters' worth of backstory in the MIDDLE of the fic would be shit quality. The timeline in Manacled is so complicated and yet, somehow, it works perfectly.
I'm not even in the HP fandom and it completely blew me away. Your mileage may vary, of course. Shitting on Manacled is also a very popular pasttime on this sub.
This doesn't seem like a reasonable complaint about a comment responding to a question about what made a darkfic stand out. One could reasonably expect that the answer would be dark.
Idek I hated it.
The characters were so wildly out or character I didn’t feel like I was reading HP fanfiction. Also the torture porn was clear and made me so uncomfortable.
Also I guessed the twist that people sing praises about, about three chapters in which I do think impacted my enjoyment, but yeah I didn’t like it.
I especially hated how they destroyed Harry’s character and Hermiones by extension.
I wasn't reading it that closely and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that it was AU to Deathly Hallows and Hermione wasn't just creating a false history in her head due to memory loss 😹 that really made it feel like original work with Harry Potter names inserted to gain popularity.
From what I understand, it isn’t even the real fandom doing this. It’s people coming in and trying to make a quick buck off something popular. They aren’t real fans. In the HP fandom communities I visit, most if not all fans I’ve seen commenting have also condemned these practices unless people bind it for their own personal libraries.
Why would binding it be an issue? If they're selling it for money then yeah that's illegal, but binding for a personal library isn't hurting anything. Im probably missing some context but wouldn't it be the same as people downloading epub or pdf's of their fav fics just in case they get deleted or orphaned?
The problem is it's being sold. I think I saw someone say they saw copies of it for sale on Etsy for $150+ USD, and that people were buying it.
No it wasn't the fanfic author selling it either; just some rando who wants to make money off someone else's work
Storygraph has its "not a book" feature which is a neat compromise imo. Users can create book pages and mark them as "not a book", which hides reviews / ratings and excludes them from recommendations.
It lets people count fic toward their yearly challenges and have all their reading tracked in one place, but without treating fic the same as commercial books. I've seen both generic titles like "Fanfic by Various Authors", and specific fics. Other not-book media like fiction podcasts are tracked this way too.
Pretty much all of goodreads is run by unpaid "Librarians", trusted users who have permission to edit metadata and add stuff that isn't listed on Amazon to the database. I'm not sure if non-librarians can access, but the discussion is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/874633-fanfiction
TL;DR:
Fanfiction is allowed on goodreads if it's novel-length and complete, based on the manual we all have to follow. So takedown requests won't do anything.
I have no opinion on this myself, I'm just posting to highlight Goodread's official policy on the matter.
Goodreads "librarians" were created back when goodreads was a small, independent website. These days it's owned by Amazon. And yet, Amazon depends on unpaid users to fix problems in their book database. You know, Amazon, the company that sells books, and should really have employees for this.
Sarcasm: Sorry, do I sound bitter? I don't know why I would be at all bitter about years of people's unpaid work getting sucked into Amazon, or the fact that Amazon would like us to continue doing that work for free.
There are a lot of reasons not to love Goodreads. The fact it lists your fanfics against your will is only one of them.
Amazon also bought out a really good online bookstore called bookdepository....and then shortyly after it closed own. :'( It was really good if you wanted books from other countries.
Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t really know how the internal structure worked. I was gonna complain that it would just be so much easier if they’d require a valid isbn before an entry could be made 😅 but looks like that’s purposefully not in the cards lol
Yeah but that would exclude a LOT of small writers who are trying to publish. You have to pay for an ISBN and getting one is a huge obstacle. I used to work for a major bookstore chain and having to explain to local writers that, despite our claims of being friendly to local writers, we couldn't have a book event until they'd gotten one was.... Really fun. So much fun. All the fun.
As for why? It was because corporate didn't want to bother with any book so small that it didn't already have one, as it made stock tracking and selling impossible subs you can't simply scan the books in or out.
Yeah no I totally get that. It’s just one of those either or’s, I guess. Either you can allow all “self published” stuff or none. Manually drawing a line somewhere is too much manual work for a site without a paid full-time staff.
Oh absolutely. On some level, I'd almost be flattered if my stuff got added but I literally don't have a beta reader for anything and I've caught some truly HORRIFIC typos in my already published works. So if someone came into them expecting pro editing, they would severely let down 😂
Seriously! Finding my stuff on goodreads or somewhere similar sits in this weird nether-space between “dream come true” and “literal nightmare” 🤣🤣🤣
Typos aside I think anyone looking for a legit novel and finding my junk would be mostly confused about “why is this book just the same hyper-specific, self-indulgent scene over and over again? Shouldn’t there be a plot?” 😅😭
Oh Lord. Mine would be all "ummm... Why the characters constantly getting knocked up/adopting kids?"
I write about family dynamics, found family and rough sex smut lol. That's literally it.
If you really want to dig in, the manual is here:
https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Librarian-Manual-Table-of-Contents
However, note that as far as I know, Amazon isn't accepting new librarian applications, isn't giving existing Librarians any new tools to work with, the lead moderator has been gone for years, when we fix up a book, if our data differs from existing data on Amazon it just gets overwritten, etc. These days I just use my powers to update cover art or series info for my author friends who don't want to be on goodreads. So please don't expect goodreads "librarians" to be able to do anything much at all if you want policy change. We're just a bunch of unpaid users with a bit of extra power that Amazon doesn't much care about.
This was a big issue for me in 2016. I had a very popular SPN fic but I hated that people kept putting it on a website it wasn’t meant for. At the time, Goodreads responded well to my reports that people were putting fanfiction on their site. Not sure if they care anymore.
Yeap. I get so worried a lot of authors will go the Anne Rice route and just ban sites from hosting their fandom works because people are trying to profit off it.
I have a pretty popular Drarry fic and just checked Goodreads, and yup, it's up there (along with another one of my fics 🤦♀️) Guess I'm gonna be emailing them later.
It's apparently allowed on Goodreads but it's very annoying and I wish people wouldn't.
If a fic writer wants to add their own work, I mean good for them I guess. But there's no reason a reader needs to do this without the author's permission.
I'd be very salty if that happened to me.
I considered for a minute putting my fanfics on Goodreads, but it might mess up my chances for trad publishing plus I want to keep them separated. Completely agree you should not be adding any author’s work to GR. If they want it there they’ll add it.
I hope there's some take-down procedures for pages on Goodreads. Doesn't look like my fics are on there, so that's good.
**Update**: Why was this downvoted? I mean, seriously, there should be procedures to take down Goodreads pages. If there isn't, that's messed up.
Wild to me that this is even a thing!
And if people want an easy to alter spreadsheet, Bookriot do an annual reading challenge and make a free tracker available every year using Google sheets. It’s a great base to work with and very customisable.
This. I feel like most people who put them up there are being nasty and want to shit on them and have others who aren't looking for fanfic/think it's ridiculous do the same.
I follow a Lupin/Hermione shipper and someone put her incomplete fic up there just to rate it a 1 star.
I'm not clear on the opposition to goodreads. It's not a bookstore, right? It's just a place to list recs? And people make fic recs offsite all the time, like on tumblr. Is it because people can leave reviews on goodreads or something else?
its a place to rate and talk about book, officially published works, which had the expectation of works that were edited and published in some capacity. Compare that to fanfic, which is a labor of love done for free and doesn't have to be edited at all or even finished.
Plus people on goodreads tend to rate harshly, some even to the point of taking off a star or a half star (on a 0 to 5 stars rating) and of course reviews can be used very very subjectively just to hate on a work or to lift one up. Which a very very stark contrast to fanfiction, esp on ao3 where the prevailing culture is 'don't like don't read' and 'don't leave constructive criticism unless the author asks for it'. There's lots of post here on reddit debating this feedback culture, but imo it boils down to people sharing their free work hoping to connect to fellow fans and not looking to be criticised or shot down - because that way we get no new fanfic.
There's also the issue that reccing fic on mainstream book sites such as goodreads only brings in readers who don't know and may not care about fandom culture. Def a larger risk of assholes.
With the amount of work that goes into writing and finishing a long work, which are generally the only works being recced on goodreads, its perfectly understandable that the author makes the mental calculation of risk to reward and comes up firmly in the negative. That's why people don't want their fics on goodreads.
Wow. People do this?! That is so fucked up. I hate it. I really wish these types of people would f off and leave fandom in peace. Along with the 'filing off the serial numbers' authors who are also ruining fandom because they're too lazy to write separate original work from their fan work. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant influx of the types of people adding fics to goodreads due to those authors since it's kinda the same energy.
Curious why you include the serial numbers filling authors in with this? Just because people find out the origins and it brings more attention to fanfic?
Yeah, it's brought a huge surge of people who aren't *fans* to fandoms where a lot of authors have done it. So they've been flooded with people that don't actually know anything about the source material or care about the source fandom at all. It's very much 'give me free erotica and romance novels on demand and I'll just pretend it's not a fanfic' vibes and they tend to be very rude and entitled to fan creators. Especially in the context of this thread, that's the big thing I've noticed.
I fully admit I'm a little salty from being an oldschool Reylo once upon a time, who gave up on the fandom due to a combination of not loving the third movie (which of course has nothing to do with those people, just acknowledging it's not like, all their fault or anything!), and feeling a bit pushed out of the fandom by this surge after it became one of the primary fandoms that fell victim to this.
I also have a few issues with the whole filing off the serial numbers thing in general more from the author's side as it feels like exploiting free fandom labor, but that's less relevant to this specific thread.
LOL, sorry, not sorry... you're literally dealing with generations of Internet uses who have been enculturated, programmed, and mentally conditioned to provide feedback and reviews on anything that relates to any dimension of their lives.... it's incredibly Pavlovian.
I don't visit Goodreads, whatever the frak it is, but you can't really stem the tide of people desperate for validation through every conceivable venue, attempting to garner notice from anyone... no matter how annoying it is that they engage in such activity.
I love it when I stumble across fanfiction on Goodreads. If a friend (or just someone I follow) has a curated list of 500 books and 3 fanfics, those fanfics stand out as something I should try.
I want to find fanfiction that can actually compete with books in terms of quality. Rating fanfic alongside books makes sense if that’s your goal.
Why not look for recs in the fandom? I feel like that would have a better chance of being recced some well written fic rather than hoping that people on goodreads also read fic..
ask for your friends ao3 bookmarks? I know that fic rec posts are very rare today but if no one makes such post on their blog nothing will change..
The list of 500 books provides context for the rest of the recommendations. If I read 30 of the same books, and had similar feelings about 20 of them, then I have a reason to trust the other recommendations on the list.
And frankly, the ratio of "99% books, 1% fanfic" also leads me to trust that person's recommendations more.
One of my fics is on there. I thought it was neat. 🤷♂️ It was clearly someone who loved the fic, and I would be far too embarrassed to set up my own Goodreads author page and add my own fics there. It would feel too self-promotional.
But I understand people's reasons for not wanting their fics there.
counterpoint: once you share something publicly and openly online you can't police how people choose to talk about it. If you want to control the discourse around your fic, you need to keep it to a private community, because posting things publicly means you are releasing a certain amount of control over it.
As an example, i am currently working on a fiction peripheral project (not fiction, but related) and because i'm not ready for people to make general impressions and want to keep discors around it tightly controlled and managed, i have only shared it in private communities.
Definitely. But to be fair, if it is possible, there will be people who will do it. This is something amazon should make against their TOS and actually enforce,
I would argue that fanfiction had rules and the sudden influx of TikTok romance novel readers who have discovered fanfiction has made it hard to keep those rules straight. As in, we had a "private" community that understood these basic things and they're being disrespected because this new group of people don't know the rules even exist.
I mean, sure, but just because someone *can* do something doesn't mean it's a good idea or a nice thing to do. You also can technically leave a vile but TOS-compliant hate comment on someone's fic, it's not illegal, doesn't mean you should though. Fandom etiquette is a thing; it may not be legally binding, but I don't see how "don't be an asshole to others in fandom spaces" is too much to ask of people.
Oh you're absolutely correct.
Personally I dont find the issue with this in concept, because if it's public then readers are within their right to add it to good reads, or their fucking letterbox (?) if they want. However it would be quite jarring to go from "published fiction that's gone through 3 years of editing alone, with a dozen people team of editors and beta readers VS a fanfiction written haphazardly on a starved 23 year old's bus ride to College. Sure it's a quality whiplash, but honestly, besides proper labelling on good reads, it's fine.
Putting fanfiction in databases like Goodreads means the algorithm will include it in recommendations. Fanfic authors are then much more likely to get unhappy reviews and ratings from people who were looking for published works (which has professional editing teams) but ended up getting recommendations for fanfiction (which, at best, has beta readers.) Yes, there are fanfics out there on par with published fiction, but those are not the norm, and most fan-written works will not compare favorably to published works if the reader isn’t looking for that.
I truly hate the people putting fics on Goodreads. Harry Potter fandom is horrible for this due to the insane influx of new readers who came from romance novels first
I'm begging the HP fandom at this point, please just leave Manacled alone. Stop binding it, adding it, selling it, just... stop. Poor author must have been living through a nightmare lately.
I saw a tiktok about that a few months back, wondering what all the fuss was about I read it. I read HP fics, but that was my first DM/HG fic. I thought it was good, but it doesn't feel like a story I'd consider eye-opening or life-changing in any way that would garner it that much acclaim. I don't mean this in a bad way. Maybe I'm just not that into 'dark' romance, which if iirc was what the vid said it was. What made it so popular? /gen
I'm honestly convinced it was just a lot of "romance readers discover fanfic." It's not exceptional as either fanfic or smutty/dark romance, but it's a whole influx of people who are so *shocked* that fanfic can be good that they're praising it like it's god's gift to fandom.
This is exactly what happened. It escaped containment and now people think it’s somehow the only good fanfic ever written because it’s the only one they’ve read.
A lot of romance novel readers had never encountered a story with actual rape or dark themes before. It stuck with people. especially with how it's written, frankly most "dark romance" romance novels don't go that hard because they have to comply with Amazon and certain contries content restrictions. It's a freedom only fanfic and amateur has to explore topics that dark. Iv been on the internet long enough there weren't content warnings on fics and read some disturbing tragedies in the mid 2000s and manacled just comes off as more of the same. It's fine, it's just a dark fic tho.
For me the depth of the emotional anguish was just so well crafted that it genuinely fucked me up. Like, there would be a chapter where people casually talk about how they anally rape their female slaves at a NYE party and the writing felt so realistic that as a woman I felt disturbed to the marrow of my bones because in the context of how casually people justify murder and genocide these days it felt so chillingly realistic. Dehumanisation is the name of the game in the Roaring Twenties. The fact that the fanfic author pulled what is, beyond a doubt, one of the best plot twists I have ever seen AND made the romance believable with that dark of a backstory just amazed me. Also, usually most fanfics that would be as daring as to start entire chapters' worth of backstory in the MIDDLE of the fic would be shit quality. The timeline in Manacled is so complicated and yet, somehow, it works perfectly. I'm not even in the HP fandom and it completely blew me away. Your mileage may vary, of course. Shitting on Manacled is also a very popular pasttime on this sub.
[удалено]
This doesn't seem like a reasonable complaint about a comment responding to a question about what made a darkfic stand out. One could reasonably expect that the answer would be dark.
Idek I hated it. The characters were so wildly out or character I didn’t feel like I was reading HP fanfiction. Also the torture porn was clear and made me so uncomfortable. Also I guessed the twist that people sing praises about, about three chapters in which I do think impacted my enjoyment, but yeah I didn’t like it. I especially hated how they destroyed Harry’s character and Hermiones by extension.
I wasn't reading it that closely and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that it was AU to Deathly Hallows and Hermione wasn't just creating a false history in her head due to memory loss 😹 that really made it feel like original work with Harry Potter names inserted to gain popularity.
From what I understand, it isn’t even the real fandom doing this. It’s people coming in and trying to make a quick buck off something popular. They aren’t real fans. In the HP fandom communities I visit, most if not all fans I’ve seen commenting have also condemned these practices unless people bind it for their own personal libraries.
Why would binding it be an issue? If they're selling it for money then yeah that's illegal, but binding for a personal library isn't hurting anything. Im probably missing some context but wouldn't it be the same as people downloading epub or pdf's of their fav fics just in case they get deleted or orphaned?
The problem is it's being sold. I think I saw someone say they saw copies of it for sale on Etsy for $150+ USD, and that people were buying it. No it wasn't the fanfic author selling it either; just some rando who wants to make money off someone else's work
It’s going for way more than that. People are also just selling PDFs and merch of the fic too
Not only are people selling it on Etsy, someone even put it on Amazon.
Gross. They're gonna get fanfic authors targeted for lawsuits by doing that :/
Storygraph has its "not a book" feature which is a neat compromise imo. Users can create book pages and mark them as "not a book", which hides reviews / ratings and excludes them from recommendations. It lets people count fic toward their yearly challenges and have all their reading tracked in one place, but without treating fic the same as commercial books. I've seen both generic titles like "Fanfic by Various Authors", and specific fics. Other not-book media like fiction podcasts are tracked this way too.
ohhhh I love that! another reason to switch to storygraph!
oh, I never thought to add podcasts with that
Pretty much all of goodreads is run by unpaid "Librarians", trusted users who have permission to edit metadata and add stuff that isn't listed on Amazon to the database. I'm not sure if non-librarians can access, but the discussion is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/874633-fanfiction TL;DR: Fanfiction is allowed on goodreads if it's novel-length and complete, based on the manual we all have to follow. So takedown requests won't do anything. I have no opinion on this myself, I'm just posting to highlight Goodread's official policy on the matter.
Thank you for this knowledge, I had no idea what Goodread's policy was (or their internal structure either apparently), this is good to know 😊
Goodreads "librarians" were created back when goodreads was a small, independent website. These days it's owned by Amazon. And yet, Amazon depends on unpaid users to fix problems in their book database. You know, Amazon, the company that sells books, and should really have employees for this. Sarcasm: Sorry, do I sound bitter? I don't know why I would be at all bitter about years of people's unpaid work getting sucked into Amazon, or the fact that Amazon would like us to continue doing that work for free. There are a lot of reasons not to love Goodreads. The fact it lists your fanfics against your will is only one of them.
Well. I'll now hate them in your honour as well 🫡
Amazon also bought out a really good online bookstore called bookdepository....and then shortyly after it closed own. :'( It was really good if you wanted books from other countries.
Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t really know how the internal structure worked. I was gonna complain that it would just be so much easier if they’d require a valid isbn before an entry could be made 😅 but looks like that’s purposefully not in the cards lol
Yeah but that would exclude a LOT of small writers who are trying to publish. You have to pay for an ISBN and getting one is a huge obstacle. I used to work for a major bookstore chain and having to explain to local writers that, despite our claims of being friendly to local writers, we couldn't have a book event until they'd gotten one was.... Really fun. So much fun. All the fun. As for why? It was because corporate didn't want to bother with any book so small that it didn't already have one, as it made stock tracking and selling impossible subs you can't simply scan the books in or out.
Yeah no I totally get that. It’s just one of those either or’s, I guess. Either you can allow all “self published” stuff or none. Manually drawing a line somewhere is too much manual work for a site without a paid full-time staff.
Oh absolutely. On some level, I'd almost be flattered if my stuff got added but I literally don't have a beta reader for anything and I've caught some truly HORRIFIC typos in my already published works. So if someone came into them expecting pro editing, they would severely let down 😂
Seriously! Finding my stuff on goodreads or somewhere similar sits in this weird nether-space between “dream come true” and “literal nightmare” 🤣🤣🤣 Typos aside I think anyone looking for a legit novel and finding my junk would be mostly confused about “why is this book just the same hyper-specific, self-indulgent scene over and over again? Shouldn’t there be a plot?” 😅😭
Oh Lord. Mine would be all "ummm... Why the characters constantly getting knocked up/adopting kids?" I write about family dynamics, found family and rough sex smut lol. That's literally it.
If you really want to dig in, the manual is here: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Librarian-Manual-Table-of-Contents However, note that as far as I know, Amazon isn't accepting new librarian applications, isn't giving existing Librarians any new tools to work with, the lead moderator has been gone for years, when we fix up a book, if our data differs from existing data on Amazon it just gets overwritten, etc. These days I just use my powers to update cover art or series info for my author friends who don't want to be on goodreads. So please don't expect goodreads "librarians" to be able to do anything much at all if you want policy change. We're just a bunch of unpaid users with a bit of extra power that Amazon doesn't much care about.
Oh wow, that's genuinely my nightmare.
This was a big issue for me in 2016. I had a very popular SPN fic but I hated that people kept putting it on a website it wasn’t meant for. At the time, Goodreads responded well to my reports that people were putting fanfiction on their site. Not sure if they care anymore.
I really don’t want fanfic to become commercialized and ruined. It’s one of the last refuges we have
i feel the same way :( it feels like my last safe space is being taken and like i'm being edged out of my own community. it's such a bummer.
Right?? And last thing we need is for corps to step in or start charging or for fanfics to be banned since it’s a grey area
Yeap. I get so worried a lot of authors will go the Anne Rice route and just ban sites from hosting their fandom works because people are trying to profit off it.
Right ? And like last thing I need is corporations starting to join and charge people to read or ruining it
Oh gosh that’s a scary thought😱 makes me glad to be in a (relatively) small fandom
I have a pretty popular Drarry fic and just checked Goodreads, and yup, it's up there (along with another one of my fics 🤦♀️) Guess I'm gonna be emailing them later.
Just checked and found my fic on there, too...ugh.
It's apparently allowed on Goodreads but it's very annoying and I wish people wouldn't. If a fic writer wants to add their own work, I mean good for them I guess. But there's no reason a reader needs to do this without the author's permission. I'd be very salty if that happened to me.
I considered for a minute putting my fanfics on Goodreads, but it might mess up my chances for trad publishing plus I want to keep them separated. Completely agree you should not be adding any author’s work to GR. If they want it there they’ll add it.
I suppose sometimes it's good to have no popular fics.
I hope there's some take-down procedures for pages on Goodreads. Doesn't look like my fics are on there, so that's good. **Update**: Why was this downvoted? I mean, seriously, there should be procedures to take down Goodreads pages. If there isn't, that's messed up.
Wild to me that this is even a thing! And if people want an easy to alter spreadsheet, Bookriot do an annual reading challenge and make a free tracker available every year using Google sheets. It’s a great base to work with and very customisable.
This. I feel like most people who put them up there are being nasty and want to shit on them and have others who aren't looking for fanfic/think it's ridiculous do the same. I follow a Lupin/Hermione shipper and someone put her incomplete fic up there just to rate it a 1 star.
one of my friends who found their fic has a 2 star rating 😭 it's just so unnecessarily cruel. we aren't creating a product that needs to be rated!
This is so true. Sorry for your friend. Luckily for me, my fic is not that popular, but I would die.
Some of mine are on there and I’m not happy about it. I wish people hadn’t added them.
I'm not clear on the opposition to goodreads. It's not a bookstore, right? It's just a place to list recs? And people make fic recs offsite all the time, like on tumblr. Is it because people can leave reviews on goodreads or something else?
its a place to rate and talk about book, officially published works, which had the expectation of works that were edited and published in some capacity. Compare that to fanfic, which is a labor of love done for free and doesn't have to be edited at all or even finished. Plus people on goodreads tend to rate harshly, some even to the point of taking off a star or a half star (on a 0 to 5 stars rating) and of course reviews can be used very very subjectively just to hate on a work or to lift one up. Which a very very stark contrast to fanfiction, esp on ao3 where the prevailing culture is 'don't like don't read' and 'don't leave constructive criticism unless the author asks for it'. There's lots of post here on reddit debating this feedback culture, but imo it boils down to people sharing their free work hoping to connect to fellow fans and not looking to be criticised or shot down - because that way we get no new fanfic. There's also the issue that reccing fic on mainstream book sites such as goodreads only brings in readers who don't know and may not care about fandom culture. Def a larger risk of assholes. With the amount of work that goes into writing and finishing a long work, which are generally the only works being recced on goodreads, its perfectly understandable that the author makes the mental calculation of risk to reward and comes up firmly in the negative. That's why people don't want their fics on goodreads.
Yeah, I'm of the unpopular opinion that if you post something to the public, then the public can comment upon it wherever they choose
Wow. People do this?! That is so fucked up. I hate it. I really wish these types of people would f off and leave fandom in peace. Along with the 'filing off the serial numbers' authors who are also ruining fandom because they're too lazy to write separate original work from their fan work. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant influx of the types of people adding fics to goodreads due to those authors since it's kinda the same energy.
Curious why you include the serial numbers filling authors in with this? Just because people find out the origins and it brings more attention to fanfic?
Yeah, it's brought a huge surge of people who aren't *fans* to fandoms where a lot of authors have done it. So they've been flooded with people that don't actually know anything about the source material or care about the source fandom at all. It's very much 'give me free erotica and romance novels on demand and I'll just pretend it's not a fanfic' vibes and they tend to be very rude and entitled to fan creators. Especially in the context of this thread, that's the big thing I've noticed. I fully admit I'm a little salty from being an oldschool Reylo once upon a time, who gave up on the fandom due to a combination of not loving the third movie (which of course has nothing to do with those people, just acknowledging it's not like, all their fault or anything!), and feeling a bit pushed out of the fandom by this surge after it became one of the primary fandoms that fell victim to this. I also have a few issues with the whole filing off the serial numbers thing in general more from the author's side as it feels like exploiting free fandom labor, but that's less relevant to this specific thread.
LOL, sorry, not sorry... you're literally dealing with generations of Internet uses who have been enculturated, programmed, and mentally conditioned to provide feedback and reviews on anything that relates to any dimension of their lives.... it's incredibly Pavlovian. I don't visit Goodreads, whatever the frak it is, but you can't really stem the tide of people desperate for validation through every conceivable venue, attempting to garner notice from anyone... no matter how annoying it is that they engage in such activity.
I love it when I stumble across fanfiction on Goodreads. If a friend (or just someone I follow) has a curated list of 500 books and 3 fanfics, those fanfics stand out as something I should try. I want to find fanfiction that can actually compete with books in terms of quality. Rating fanfic alongside books makes sense if that’s your goal.
Why not look for recs in the fandom? I feel like that would have a better chance of being recced some well written fic rather than hoping that people on goodreads also read fic.. ask for your friends ao3 bookmarks? I know that fic rec posts are very rare today but if no one makes such post on their blog nothing will change..
The list of 500 books provides context for the rest of the recommendations. If I read 30 of the same books, and had similar feelings about 20 of them, then I have a reason to trust the other recommendations on the list. And frankly, the ratio of "99% books, 1% fanfic" also leads me to trust that person's recommendations more.
.......I have to use Goodreads a lot as a librarian and I can honestly say I have somehow yet to come across Fics on there
I hate the idea of fics on goodreads,at the very least only the authors should be able to put them on there.
One of my fics is on there. I thought it was neat. 🤷♂️ It was clearly someone who loved the fic, and I would be far too embarrassed to set up my own Goodreads author page and add my own fics there. It would feel too self-promotional. But I understand people's reasons for not wanting their fics there.
Someone put my fics on something called skoob and I’m afraid now with these comments about people finding it and think it’s a real book
I didn't know about that. It's awful
Do not put fics on Goodreads!!! Why? Just fucking review it on social media like people.
counterpoint: once you share something publicly and openly online you can't police how people choose to talk about it. If you want to control the discourse around your fic, you need to keep it to a private community, because posting things publicly means you are releasing a certain amount of control over it. As an example, i am currently working on a fiction peripheral project (not fiction, but related) and because i'm not ready for people to make general impressions and want to keep discors around it tightly controlled and managed, i have only shared it in private communities.
That’s fine but fanfiction really has no place on goodreads.
Definitely. But to be fair, if it is possible, there will be people who will do it. This is something amazon should make against their TOS and actually enforce,
I mean, fanfiction websites - ao3 even! - used to be a private community. Def not as mainstream as today.
I would argue that fanfiction had rules and the sudden influx of TikTok romance novel readers who have discovered fanfiction has made it hard to keep those rules straight. As in, we had a "private" community that understood these basic things and they're being disrespected because this new group of people don't know the rules even exist.
I mean, sure, but just because someone *can* do something doesn't mean it's a good idea or a nice thing to do. You also can technically leave a vile but TOS-compliant hate comment on someone's fic, it's not illegal, doesn't mean you should though. Fandom etiquette is a thing; it may not be legally binding, but I don't see how "don't be an asshole to others in fandom spaces" is too much to ask of people.
Oh you're absolutely correct. Personally I dont find the issue with this in concept, because if it's public then readers are within their right to add it to good reads, or their fucking letterbox (?) if they want. However it would be quite jarring to go from "published fiction that's gone through 3 years of editing alone, with a dozen people team of editors and beta readers VS a fanfiction written haphazardly on a starved 23 year old's bus ride to College. Sure it's a quality whiplash, but honestly, besides proper labelling on good reads, it's fine.
Very brave for posting this cuz it's a very unpopular opinion on this sub. Totally agree tho
Whats good reads