Fic Taxes: Death by a Thousand Tiny Clicks

Tonight, in my lack of spare time, when I really ought to be sleeping, I want to talk about the cost of being a fan. Ever since my raw newbie days of writing out of character and honing my said-bookisms, I've been paying through the nose for the privilege of reading and writing unsalable works of fan fiction. So have you all.

In fandom, we pay in time, not dollars. We fritter it away surfing the web and slogging through over-stuffed mailboxes. Then we turn around, make more web sites and send more multiple emails. I know, I know - you say you don't mind. You never counted the cost. You hardly felt it, because it was a thousand tiny clicks. The Internet is just that way, you thought. As a wise man once said,

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time. --Larry Wall

What does that nickel matter? you may ask. Well, every click counts. Every time you sign up for another list, it's a tax on you [click]. Every multiple email you have to delete [click] is a tax on you, not to mention the download time and the waste of bandwidth. Every site you have to visit, and visit, and visit, [click][click][click] to see if so-and-so, who doesn't post to such-and-such a list, has put a new fic up on her home page, is a tax on you. Every time you check, just one more time [click], to see whether a particular archive has been updated yet (and it takes a lot of checking for some archives), it's a tax on you.

And that's just the fic reading taxes. Consider the fic writing taxes: if you're a writer and, having put out all the effort mentioned above just to read a little fic, you still have the time to write some of your own, the publication process imposes its own heavy taxes. First, you have to post to your relevant lists. This can be done with one post (per part) [click], though people sometimes choose to post their fic individually to each of their lists [click][click][click]. Combine this with the time required to chop up a big fic into little pieces Yahoo or a news server can digest, and the margin of this article cannot hold the clicks required.

Yet the larger the fandom, the more likely the lists are to be fragmented and/or unmanageably populous - at least five large lists are devoted to Buffy/Spike, perhaps forty or fifty small lists have been devoted to Janeway/Chakotay. Lists put you in touch with the devout of fandom, but are not the best way to reach the wider reading public. For true accessibility, you must find your fandom's clearinghouse, if it has one (such as alt.startrek.creative, Gossamer or BFA) or settle for fanfiction.net, otherwise [click]. Or both [click][click], in the endless hunt for that endangered species, feedback.

This is the Internet, after all, so you, especially if you're a prolific author, eventually convert your fic to html [click] and put it up on a personal web site [click]. Depending on how you choose to do your conversions and site design, you can easily spend more time tweaking your web site [click] than tweaking your works. Fuming that your free web host is down again [no click], moving to another because it was down too often [many clicks], or paying for more dependable commercial service [$$$] are yet more costs of being a fan.

And no, it's not tax freedom day yet. There are still minion-taxes to be paid. In some fandoms (BtVS comes to mind), the readers take on the task of putting your fic on-line by archiving it for you in fly-by-night archives [click][click][click]. Saying yes (or no) is just another click [click]. If the fandom is particularly fragmented - no archives or too many lists - the minions may be forced to beg you for your newest story [click]. You have to email it to them whole-cloth [click] if it isn't on the web yet, or type your URL [click] for the hundredth time. The minions then go forth and pimp your fic, passing it around to those who can't bring themselves to join yet another fic list. If your fic is on a web page - yours or another's - you can take advertising into your own hands by submitting your stories [click] to link-based archives (in fandoms such as Trek where linking is the norm), and to contests [click], if they're popular in your sub-genre.

Click. Click. Click. Inefficiencies that would make a Borg blanch spread rapidly from older fandoms which should really know better to new, teenybopper fandoms who may never know any better. In short, if the oft-reviled Powers That Be had set out to make it as difficult and time-consuming as possible to read and post fanfiction, I doubt they could have come up with a better set of impediments than fandom has cobbled together on its own.

Not all taxes are inevitable, however. Fic must be posted to at least one semi-public forum [click] or it doesn't exist. After that, there's plenty of room for tax evasion. Don't fall into the trap of feeling guilty about evading fic taxes. Like governments, fandom has good taxes and bad taxes. Some taxes go to pay firemen to rush into burning buildings. Other taxes finance $1,000 toilet seats and $400 screwdrivers.

Some fic taxes go towards projects that benefit all fans, like centralized archives. Some time-consuming labors, like the never-ending task of maintaining a personal web site, benefit (or at least amuse) the author herself. Other clicks lead nowhere but to the post-delete-post-delete hamster wheel of fandom hell. Bad taxes are more cost than benefit.

Although each fandom has its own strengths and weaknesses, one click-pestilence infects them all: redundancy. From five Buffy/Spike lists (four more than anyone needs) are born twenty-five Buffy/Spike archives (far more than anyone reads), and no one can keep up. Just figuring out where a particular fandom's fic might or might not be found requires a heavy investment in time, clicks, asking around and wrestling with search engines - effort that would be better spent reading and writing fic. That's why we're here, isn't it? Isn't it?

There is a solution; there is a better way than following the other lemmings off the Yahoo cliff to fandom hell. You, too, can cut fic taxes in three easy steps.

Step one: Don't make things worse than they already are.

So you want to start yet another Buffy/Spike mailing list - *don't do it*. Many are the lists that have begun for no better reason than that someone wanted to be a list owner. That's no reason to waste people's bandwidth or their time. Even if your bestest friend and occasional beta reader starts the list herself, don't join. Don't post. Just walk away.

Step two: Spread the faith.

Ask the new Buffy/Spike list owner what makes her list different from an established Buffy/Spike list. Beg her not to do it. Tell your friends not to join. Add a note to your fic forbidding budding archivists from archiving it, and mention that BFA should be more than enough for everybody's archiving needs. Fandom is a culture shaped by words, beliefs, and attitudes - if enough people refuse to pay fic taxes, the masses will follow. They all put those legally meaningless disclaimers on their fic, don't they? Peer pressure is a powerful force - use it to your tax-evading benefit.

Step three: Change the web.

So you're on five Buffy/Spike lists - you were young when you joined, you didn't know that you were damning fandom with every click. Now, though, you can stand up tall and speak truth to redundancy. Send an email to all those lists, saying, "I'm subscribed to lists A, B, C, D, and E, and so are all of you. Let's simplify all our lives by joining list C and closing down the rest."

Better yet, join a centralized archive/list combination, like BFA or the alt.startrek.creative newsgroup, and leave the disorganized to tax one another for all eternity. If there is no such advanced technology in your fandom, gather minions and start one yourself. Don't wait for someone else to do it - cut those taxes yourself. Don't wait for attitudes to change - change them and tell the newbies what the new approach to fandom is going to be. (They're quite impressionable when they're young.)

Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you *are* the problem.

Links

• alt.startrek.creative (also at Google Groups)
• BfA: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: the Series Fan Fiction Archive
• The Gossamer Project (XF)

Jemima Pereira is a semi-retired Voyager fanfic writer and BtVS wanna-be who started the zendom list one evening when she really should have been finishing a fic. Like all well-intentioned mailing lists, it quickly grew out of control.