Originally posted by John Lambert:
I have to agree with those who do not see this as likely to directly include "Lois and Clark" anytime soon, even if it might be fun. I would expect them to include "Smallville" much sooner, although even that is probably unlikely.
Wouldn't be so sure about that. Smallville is in top 20 of categories with most written stories on ff.net, not to mention the huge fan following its got separately...
This is an interesting topic. On the one hand, I'm a broke college student who sure as heck wouldn't mind picking up a few extra bucks for something that I already spend a lot of my time doing. On the other hand... I'm a broke college student. I don't have time and I'm not gonna be able to pay for any stories, so how would anyone else be? Besides, there are many, many different reasons why this plan is no good. Firstly, how would you know you're getting a good story? If you look at ff.net, you get thousands of stories thrown at you, mostly by new writers (which is not the bad part) and they have two sentence summaries that give you no concept of what their writing style will be like (that's the bad part). I've taken a gamble on many a story where the spelling and grammar is just so bad that I can't stick through it-- and I'll usually try to brave them out for a while, out of courtesy. But sometimes, it's just too bad. Would there be some sort of publishing/editing to prevent that? Which in turn would limit the field of writing, and make writing fanfic into something more along the lines of writing an original piece of work, with more competition and less results. This might discourage some people from writing or participating at all in the fandoms, when all it takes a lot of the time is a little guidance and practice. And who knows what impact this would have on the community! Too many implications, too much copyright involved... welcome to the last capitalist takeover of society. Even our likes and dislikes get to be sold for profit.
But then again, I'm a terrible pessimist.
I'll have to read that article later. I'm curious as to how far this is really gonna go...
<---- me
