Star Trek and FanLib: Not exactly groundbreaking

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

In a long-winded response to the question of what FanLib offers fic writers that they can't get for less hassle elsewhere, Chris Williams said this:

We have many more special fan events coming. You'll see us shortly announce and launch: a fan event with a major media company around one of the most popular fandoms, a collaborative feature film screenplay and movie, a partnership with a major talent management company to identify star writers from the FanLib.com community and create opportunities for them.

Emphasis mine.

My guess is that this is startrek.fanlib.com, some kind of fic "event" as FanLib keeps telling us they've done previously. However, this seems to be just more proof that they're completely out of step with fandom.

This is not new ground for Star Trek. It's the only show I know of that actually welcomed fan-written scripts at any time. (Admittedly, Ron Moore described the bulk of these submissions in rather poor terms, but he was probably right in doing so. We all know that most of the fic in the world is not of stellar quality, so it would stand to reason that a good chunk of these submissions would be less-than-professional.) At any rate, Star Trek and fan involvement is not a new thing. There are some who say that at one time, Paramount actively courted the editors of the big 'zines because those fans were such a huge influence on the community, and it was a way to take the temperature of the fandom, and sometimes direct it. (While I trust my source on this one, you may certainly feel free not to; at this point it's third- or fourth-hand information.)

Speaking as someone who's not into Star Trek in any of its incarnations, it's my understanding that Star Trek is not exactly a seriously active fandom in terms of fic anymore. I have one friend who was in the fandom during the Voyager era in the mid-nineties, when she says it was slowly dying. Another friend has participated in Enterprise fic collaborations, and by the time she stopped, she said it was incredibly frustrating that she and others had put a lot this work into stories that very few people were reading.

So: yes, Star Trek is a Big Deal in fandom – for its history if nothing more – but is it really that big when it comes to fic? Or is this another example of FanLib's preconceived notions about fandom not lining up with reality?

(Please correct me if I'm wrong about the state of Star Trek fandom today; I freely admit that this is not based on extensive research. But the fic I see coming across my own friends list rarely has anything to do with Star Trek, when I do have Star Trek fans on my friends list.)

Comments

[killersharky.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I thought it was going to be Harry Potter, whose movie and promotional rights are owned by Warner Bros., and they would use this as a way to promote the movie this summer. If they did it as a contest with restrictions -- no smut or writing based on a certain scene -- it would easily fit into their whole "coloring within the lines" without pissing of JK Rowling.

That being said, I've been meaning to ask this for a few days. They did a few contests already where fans were able to win things from the fandom based on their writing -- autographed scripts and such among others. So shat if the fandom you write for does a contest through FanLib? Would you write something? Would you want to get recognition from The Powers That Be or be able to win prizes donated by them? Or would you decide not to because it's FanLib?

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

It could very well be Harry Potter, but FanLib's definitely got something up their sleeves for Star Trek as well. My question is why bother when the fic side of the fandom has been declining for years?

Speaking for myself alone – no, I wouldn't participate in a contest sponsored by these folks. Probably wouldn't participate in a contest sponsored by anyone connected to the franchise creators/owners, so maybe I'm not the best person to ask. (My excuse is that I have friends who would probably kick me for jumping into a contest like that instead of working on that original novel sitting on my hard drive.)

[aerynvala.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't participate in any contest, via Fanlib or otherwise. Showtime did a fanfiction contest on their site for their version of Queer As Folk. The prompts weren't bad exactly, and really that had to be the least restrictive contest possible given the show. But it just wasn't something that appealed to me. And I really don't want/need validation from TPTB, for anything.

[kazaera.livejournal.com]

If they did it as a contest with restrictions -- no smut or writing based on a certain scene -- it would easily fit into their whole "coloring within the lines" without pissing of JK Rowling.

...you know, although I'd hate such a thing on principle and refuse to participate (to answer your question - no, because it's FanLib), I think the temptation to find loopholes would be hard to resist. You know, try to find the most non-mainstream, objectionable and downright squicky thing you can possibly write that's not forbidden by the guidelines. (Of course, they'll probably write something like "no obscene or vulgar material", which is so vague as to be able to apply to anything. Although I think you might have a case for a sweet, cute and fluffy incest fic...). It probably wouldn't help things, but... they want coloring within the lines? We'll show them what we can do within those lines. :D

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*snicker*

Yeah, I saw that.

I am not currently active in Trek fandom, so I do not know what's out there. I see more Janeway/Seven of Nine fic than anything else, but that's on a multi-fandom female slash comm I watch.

I was a Trekkie (at the time I insisted on being called a Trekker, hee), a fan of TOS for years by myelf then joined an Outpost in the late seventies (western Washington), but didn't know about fic or slash (I refused to see SW because I was Pure and Faithful). (When I did see SW I didn't like it, so no biggie.)

I bought a tv just to watch TNG. I finally gave up on VOY about season four, and never even watched the "latest" series (bleah). My feeling is that the franchise has lost the relevance it once had (my favorite series was DS:9)--and this sort of media schtick is some attempt to generate something in terms of fanac.

Hard to take seriously, though I'd love to hear what any current fan writers might say!

[freifraufischer.livejournal.com]

So I'll cop to being Melyanna's friend who was active during the Voyager era and I knew several of the people courted by Paramount during the 1980s movie era. Before the age of the next generation televisions series (small n and g there), the editors of major zines (some of which I subscribed to right before the internet ate such things, and some of which I wrote before the internet ate my urge to spend so much time writing hard copy) were the only way to influence the mass of ultraloyal fans. One has to remember the history of Star Trek and that it was fans and ficing in particular that supported the series from it's cancelation through the early movie era.

My understanding was that most of that ended with the death of The Great Bird, though his widow continued to be active in limited parts of the fandom. I was active in Trek fandom mostly in fics and PBM (note, not PBeM) from around 1991-1997, dropping off right at the end of the shift from paper to internet fandom. At that time Star Trek was still taking spec scripts from fans, but even among active fans the consensus was that most of these were poorly written--a fact backed up by Ron Moore in interviews--and done more as a good will gesture to fans than any real search for scripts.

Now this may have just been the areas of Trek fandom I was in, and it was and still is a massive fandom on many levels but I was directly into fic in that fandom... that as the franchise itself was slowly dying off during the Voyager era, so were most of the big fic focused fandoms. Looking back I think what happened was that you had a combination of reasons. The franchise was growing stale and for the first time at least in the era of television scifi facing real competition from other shows that were much more savy about the internet (beginning with Babylon 5), and the Star Trek fic model that had worked basically continuously for 25 years with many of the same people didn't translate as easily as one might think to the early age of the internet.

Which is basically my long winded way to back Mel up. Star Trek powers that be have always been the exception and not the rule when it comes to how IP holders view fanfic.

[dr-jekyl.livejournal.com]

As a former member, I would say that you're right about Trek fandom being in decline. I suspect there are quite a number of reasons for it, from demographic shifts and fandom migration to the lack of new content and new series fatigue, but I'm not going to go into it here. Instead, what I do find very interesting is about this competition that Trek already has a long running and very successful fanfic competition, Strange New Worlds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Strange_New_Worlds). Winners of this contest, it must be noted, get published and paid at a rate of 10 cents a word, plus bonus prize money for the place getters. Indeed, a number of winners have gone on to write novels for the Trek line. It makes me wonder if Paramount and Simon & Schuster intend to phase this contest out.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

from the S&S website:

Ten years ago Pocket Books offered Star Trek fans a unique opportunity. Long before the Internet, Star Trek fans had written their own stories, which they then shared among friends and family. Now, the fans were offered a chance to become a part of the Star Trek mythos. A contest sponsored by Pocket Books would publish and pay for the best stories submitted by non-professional writers. And over the course of a decade, hundreds of pounds of submissions poured in. Many of the writers who submitted to Strange New Worlds went on to become professional writers.

As of 2007, we will be discontinuing the publication of Strange New Worlds.

so maybe that's why?

[dr-jekyl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hadn't heard about that! Makes the timing even more suspicious. It also makes me wonder what sort of contest they're going to pitch. There isn't a new series on the horizon yet so no spec scripts for that. I can't really see TPTB letting fans write large chunks of the movie, though I could see a contest for writing a a single scene. Fanfic, certainly, is most likely, but I can't see a "win a t-shirt!" or even a "you'll get your work published" contest going down too well after what SNW has done to legitimise TrekFic and TPTB's history of buying unsolicited scripts.

It also must be said that former Pocket Books editor John Ordover understood fandom and fic writers. He participated in fandom as much as his position would allow, visiting message boards and answering questions and made no bones about it when his staff writers did the same. If they don't have someone like him at the helm of this one, it might also fall through.

Finally, Trek fen, on average, tend to be older fen. Even someone like me, who came in with DS9 and Voyager, can have been active in fandom for a decade or more. Certainly, the ones who're still active in fandom are, at a cautious estimate, at least in their mid 20's to early 30's. And yet, FanLib strikes me as something aimed at the younger set and the newer fandoms whose participants don't have the sense of history Trek fans do, nor the sense of caution from years of watching people being C&D'd or being dicked around with by various sets of TPTB.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hadn't heard about that! Makes the timing even more suspicious. It also makes me wonder what sort of contest they're going to pitch. There isn't a new series on the horizon yet so no spec scripts for that.

i don't know that i'd use "suspicious", in that it implies a nefariousness that i don't really think is there. i doubt there was anything spontaneous about the ST collaboration. Fanlib didn't launch, i believe, until they *knew* they had creative partners on board to some degree or another.

and please don't get me wrong. i'm not a fan [heh] of Fanlib, but not because i think they're teh ev0l, but rather that i think they're being intentionally obtuse to serve their purposes, and they just did this all very, very badly. that plus teh arrogance equals Bad Business People, No Dunut.

[dr-jekyl.livejournal.com]

A poor choice of words on my part, perhaps. I agree.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

:::leaves you cookies:::

Simon & Schuster - Author Rights Grab

[taverymate.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd be more inclined to believe that it has to do with Simon & Schuster's net attempts at an authors' rights grab - and the fact that the Strange New Worlds contracts include a minimum sales requirements for a work to be considered in print.

kirby_crow mentioned Simon & Schuster's new policy in regards to FanLib's possible corporate partnerships in a post here:
http://telesilla.livejournal.com/555817.html?replyto=4441641&style=mine

The Author's Guild warning excerpt:
Simon & Schuster has changed its standard contract language in an attempt to retain exclusive control of books even after they have gone out of print. Until now, Simon & Schuster, like all other major trade publishers, has followed the traditional practice in which rights to a work revert to the author if the book falls out of print or if its sales are low.

The publisher is signaling that it will no longer include minimum sales requirements for a work to be considered in print. Simon & Schuster is apparently seeking nothing less than an exclusive grant of rights in perpetuity. Effectively, the publisher would co-own your copyright.

The new contract would allow Simon & Schuster to consider a book in print, and under its exclusive control, so long as it’s available in any form, including through its own in-house database -- even if no copies are available to be ordered by traditional bookstores.

Complete warning is here: http://www.edrants.com/?p=6127

Re: Simon & Schuster - Author Rights Grab

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

niiiiiice.

to be fair, though, it's not just S&S doing that, although i agree with your point re the contest. publishers in general are trying to fight the 'revert back to the author' part of the contract when sales no longer warrant a printing; the publishers want to keep the rights by shifting the books to print on demand status.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

This is not new ground for Star Trek. It's the only show I know of that actually welcomed fan-written scripts at any time.

Dead Zone did it. not sure if they still do or not.

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

Wasn't aware of that one. But as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of fan-written scripts go in the trash unopened or are returned to the sender. As freifraufischer noted above, Star Trek PTB have been the exception to the rule about interaction with and contribution from fans.

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

yeah, totally. Dead Zone is the only other one that i know of, and it was the Pillars, [father and son from ST] so that could be why.

[lavenderfrost.livejournal.com]

This brings to mind some meta-y thoughts about my own personal fandom history, but that's for another post. ^^;;

Essentially? Yeah. I'd say Star Trek is the dinosaur fandom - more or less extinct. We love to look back and see the way things were and what it meant for our fandoms today, but almost nobody is down with the canon anymore.

[lavenderfrost.livejournal.com]

Edit - I meant to say "current canon" up there. Obviously, there will always be people with love for Kirk and Spock, perplexing though it is. Same applies to Picard and co.

I just meant that even the most hardcore Trek fans I've talked to aren't active anymore and think Enterprise is absolute drivel. ^^;;

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about the state of the Trek fandom, but I do know using fans to write for them is something they've done for years. When FanLib first appeared on our radar, telesilla used Trek as an example of fanfiction writers being taken advantage of.

Here's her post.

http://telesilla.livejournal.com/553920.html?format=light

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Hey, Enterprise fandom weighing in here, a bit late. I run the archive for it, the Warp 5 Complex (http://fiction.entstcommunity.org/).

It's a pretty small fandom, and I know more about the slash than the het, but since the show went off the air, we've pretty much been in stasis, with some new stuff being written, but it's not on fire, like SGA or SPN. We got a new infusion of German fans when the show began airing in Germany, and we just got a new infusion of American fans when SciFi picked the show up. Several people still write actively in it, and submissions are sent to the fic archive pretty regularly. ENT fandom doesn't have a big presence on LJ. It's mostly still through newsgroups. I created a couple communities in case people wanted to move over, but they don't see a lot of action.

We ran two virtual seasons, with feedback continuing to gradually diminish, but site hits indicate that we got lots of readers who didn't leave comments. I see this more as a netiquette thing, with people not really knowing much about fandom coming in and reading, and failing to leave comments because they didn't know that they should. A third season, VS7, may or may not occur, depending on the whim of those who run it (ahem!) and their capacity for the pain that goes with it.

From the lists I'm on that are linked to the really big all-ST archive, TOS is still a really big fandom, VOY next, then DS9, and finally ENT, with ENT really, really trailing behind. But as a whole, ST is still out there, but perhaps with less of a LJ presence, which is concealing how big it is.

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

Amen, Kylie. May I add numbers? Over 4000 stories for ENT on the Warp 5 Complex alone, over a six year period. And those are just the ones that ran on the Yahoo groups IIRC.

Small fandom, yes. Excellent writing? You bet yer ass. Few kerfluffles, we coexist for the most part, and 'drivel' as labeled above or not, we're here. Period. Get over it.

Trek as a whole is quiet at the moment. But JJ Abrams is making the next movie, so there's still interest on the outside. And not making the move to the early age of the internet? Trekiverse (http://www.trekiverse.org) has well over ten thousand archived fics from alt.startrek.creative, spanning fifteen years of fic writing. And I'll guarantee you not one was written with an 'lol, R&R, 1st story plz reed!' motivation.

Anyway, as to FanLib, they've mentioned several times they were doing something with Startrek.com, which sadly is so unconnected to anything fannish imho that they are running ads for CBS shows on their website. Considering they are OWNED by CBS, and that Les Moonves runs CBS Corporation, and his brother Jon Moonves is the legal counsel for FanLib (oy, talk about incestuous business relationships ooo, bunny! No, wait *sporks*)... well, red flags are waving all over the place.

Yeah. Goodness of their heart, that organization. To the tune of $3 million.

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Over 4000 stories for ENT on the Warp 5 Complex alone, over a six year period. And those are just the ones that ran on the Yahoo groups IIRC.

No, we did a bunch of acquisitions to get the het and gen. reedfem was pretty instrumental in a lot of that. I agree that the slash is from the list.

We also occasionally troll ff.net, and I watch ASCML to invite the few ENT authors I haven't heard of to post to W5C. We're at 3903 stories right now; we had more than 4000 at the old archive, before we moved to the new software, but some were duplicates, and some were multiparters that are now in one easy-to-read chaptered document. That's just under 4000 stories in the years since the show aired in 2002. Contrast this with Wraithbait, in the SGA fandom, which has 5332 stories since the show aired in 2004. However, we also don't have the total crap that goes with a huge fandom, which is nice, and yes, the writing is on the whole very good.

When I rec'd ENT fic for [Unknown site tag], I checked all the links of the old commentary and of the previously rec'd stories. All the fic archives except for two were DEAD, including the biggest het archive (Linguistics Database (http://judy.jteers.net/lingdata/fanfiction/), which took all the fic down during a URL name change and has been under construction since 3/2006). Of the rec'd stories, more than a third were broken links. I commented on those recs with new links and the authors updated a lot of them next time they rec'd. I invited LD to W5C but the person who ran it did not want to do that.

In short, old fandom = broken links and missing fic.

Re. FanLib, I figured they had to have some kind of relationship with The Man if they were offering up their little goodies. ST has little understanding of its fans, and FanLib has little understanding of the people it's attempting to exploit for gain. The only good that's going to come out of this is the discussion, and the awareness among fangirls that the content they generate may be perceived as valuable.

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

Unknown LJ tag = crack_van; I can't remember how to code a community.

[rileysaplank.livejournal.com]

I heard that (no actual proof though) that there was a fanfic writer that got taken on as a screenwriter for Xena because the producers were that impressed with her writing. No proof that this happened though as I'm not actively involved in the Xena fandom.

[ziina.livejournal.com]

It was Missy Good (http://www.merwolf.com/merpups/shrine/interviews/stats.htm), she has written two episodes of season six. More details on her site (http://www.merwolf.com/merpups/shrine/interviews/season6.htm)