I entirely agree that it is and should remain an author's choice to put their story on the Archive. However, the amount or lack of feedback received from archived stories is completely irrelevant to my own reasoning as to why I submit stories.
I send my stories to the Archive - and Annesplace - because:
- a lot of people prefer to read stories in one piece, and for them the Archive is better.
- there are, after all, many readers who never come to the message boards - and we'll never know how many there are of those, since most of them are lurkers. However, every so often I'll get an email from someone I've never heard of before who's just read one of my stories on the Archive, and that's a lovely experience.
- I like to think of the Archive as the place to find my - or other authors' - 'collected works', so to speak. It's like going to a really, really good library and finding everything your favourite author has ever written, all there in one place. You can find their latest work on the message boards, but what if you want to see what they wrote earlier?
- and sometimes - as you said yourself, Carol - the Archive version may well be the truly 'final' version, in that changes may have been made between the version originally posted on the boards and the version uploaded. So archiving can offer an opportunity to make revisions, and readers can be directed there to see the changes.
Anyway, for all those reasons, I hope people will continue to choose to send their stories to the Archive. It's so handy to have it as a genuine one-stop-shop for Lois and Clark fanfic, unlike in some other fandoms where readers have to search around in several different archives and websites to find what's out there. We have a unique and wonderful resource, and we should treasure it.
Wendy
