Of all my concerns about fanfic being published, quality fanfic being overlooked was not something I thought about at all. This is because, to be frank, most fanfiction isn't that good. I say this as someone who loves reading fanfiction and was genuinely moved by a lot of quality fanfic. Yes, there's a lot of excellent stuff out there, but the bulk of fanfiction is highly forgettable lowbrow to middlebrow stuff. Even if we disregard the mountain of slush that would not hold more than three seconds of any publishing gatekeeper's attention before being chucked--and that's ignoring a LOT of fanfic--even the remaining works that have some glimmer of publishable quality does not compare favorably to original published fiction.
Then there's the issue of length. Money's in the novels, so disregard the vignettes, one-shots, and incomplete longfics to focus exclusively on completed, somewhat novel-length stories. From a quick FFN filter for complete stories with 60K+ words (a generous count, because even 75K words make for a fairly short book), that's 1% of archived stories for both Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender. (1.4% for HP, 1% for ATLA. If anything this is an overcount, since more than a few of these could be drabble collections not suited for publication.) The quality gets a lot better within this 1% due to author skill and discipline, but even here the quality of the writing is just so-so for the majority of works. Obviously it's not possible to get the exact number of brilliant versus ho-hum works since the metric is too subjective, but I'll just go by Sturgeon's law and say 10% of this 1% is really good.
So that's the rough speculative number of fanfic that is a) a publishable length and b) very high quality: 0.1%. Plus, as lizbee has pointed out, this 0.1% is unlikely to be publishable without a thorough rewrite because really good stories also tend to be really specific and wedded to the setting.
Also, like you said there's the basic fact that commercial publishing isn't looking for quality books but saleable books.
In conclusion I find myself unable to care that the publishing industry, in the extremely rare cases where they pick up fanfic for publication, do not go out of their way to represent the 0.1% of very good fanfic which are a) unlikely to be published without grueling work and b) might be good but is dicey in terms of marketability. A fan effort to get really quality fanfic into the mass market would be interesting, but I'm not holding my breath about the commercial viability.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2012-10-11 12:28 pm (UTC)Then there's the issue of length. Money's in the novels, so disregard the vignettes, one-shots, and incomplete longfics to focus exclusively on completed, somewhat novel-length stories. From a quick FFN filter for complete stories with 60K+ words (a generous count, because even 75K words make for a fairly short book), that's 1% of archived stories for both Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender. (1.4% for HP, 1% for ATLA. If anything this is an overcount, since more than a few of these could be drabble collections not suited for publication.) The quality gets a lot better within this 1% due to author skill and discipline, but even here the quality of the writing is just so-so for the majority of works. Obviously it's not possible to get the exact number of brilliant versus ho-hum works since the metric is too subjective, but I'll just go by Sturgeon's law and say 10% of this 1% is really good.
So that's the rough speculative number of fanfic that is a) a publishable length and b) very high quality: 0.1%. Plus, as
Also, like you said there's the basic fact that commercial publishing isn't looking for quality books but saleable books.
In conclusion I find myself unable to care that the publishing industry, in the extremely rare cases where they pick up fanfic for publication, do not go out of their way to represent the 0.1% of very good fanfic which are a) unlikely to be published without grueling work and b) might be good but is dicey in terms of marketability. A fan effort to get really quality fanfic into the mass market would be interesting, but I'm not holding my breath about the commercial viability.