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cdybedahlOn my B7 mailing list, there occasionally crops up a debate on paper fanzines versus online story collections. On one side there are (primarily) the people who have been fans for a long time, since long before the Internet became common among ordinary people. On the other side are the people who barely remember a time before the Web. For Group A, their first and primary fandom contact tends to have been paper 'zines. For the second, it tends to have been (and be) the net.
Disregarding almost all of the usual arguments, there is one thing that Group A claims that I agree with: on the average, the quality of the stories in a zine is much higher than in a story archive on the web. In the zine, someone chose the story, edited it and then had it printed. In a web archive, the archivist for the most part barely has the time to have a look at the layout. You can easily find stories on the web that are full of horrible spelling and atrocious grammar, and while beta-reading is nice and usually helps a lot it's not quite the same thing as proper editing.
Since I don't particularly like paper zines (they cost too much, I have to order them blind and it takes far, far too long for them to arrive), I would like to bring the advantages of the zines to the web. Many have tried to do that. None, that I know of, have succeeded. That is, I suspect, because they have all depended on a handful of people to do a lot of work in a short period of time. In anything but the shortest run, that's not going to work. So what's needed is a way to trick a lot of people into doing some work each.
The obvious way (to me, at least) to try to do that is a "matchmaker" website. A place where you could go not only to read stories, but also to upload your own writings for editing or to edit the stories of others. The site itself wouldn't do much more than to store the stories, present them to readers (allowing them so select on different criteria, of course), present them as available for editing, and mediate contact between the writer and a volunteer editor. Once pleased with the story, the editor would be able to put a "stamp of approval" on the story. So, in theory, you would be able to ask the site to show you stories approved by an editor you like and get a bunch of stories that you are almost sure to enjoy. Not to mention that people who don't write could contribute to fandom anyway, and that writers could learn to write better.
But. All this is just a pipe dream unless more people than I think that it sounds like a good idea. Ergo, a question:
[Poll #93786]
Disregarding almost all of the usual arguments, there is one thing that Group A claims that I agree with: on the average, the quality of the stories in a zine is much higher than in a story archive on the web. In the zine, someone chose the story, edited it and then had it printed. In a web archive, the archivist for the most part barely has the time to have a look at the layout. You can easily find stories on the web that are full of horrible spelling and atrocious grammar, and while beta-reading is nice and usually helps a lot it's not quite the same thing as proper editing.
Since I don't particularly like paper zines (they cost too much, I have to order them blind and it takes far, far too long for them to arrive), I would like to bring the advantages of the zines to the web. Many have tried to do that. None, that I know of, have succeeded. That is, I suspect, because they have all depended on a handful of people to do a lot of work in a short period of time. In anything but the shortest run, that's not going to work. So what's needed is a way to trick a lot of people into doing some work each.
The obvious way (to me, at least) to try to do that is a "matchmaker" website. A place where you could go not only to read stories, but also to upload your own writings for editing or to edit the stories of others. The site itself wouldn't do much more than to store the stories, present them to readers (allowing them so select on different criteria, of course), present them as available for editing, and mediate contact between the writer and a volunteer editor. Once pleased with the story, the editor would be able to put a "stamp of approval" on the story. So, in theory, you would be able to ask the site to show you stories approved by an editor you like and get a bunch of stories that you are almost sure to enjoy. Not to mention that people who don't write could contribute to fandom anyway, and that writers could learn to write better.
But. All this is just a pipe dream unless more people than I think that it sounds like a good idea. Ergo, a question:
[Poll #93786]
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-20 08:57 am (UTC)This is a very interesting idea. I haven't made up my mind which box to tick yet, because I can foresee some organisational issues.
Firstly is the issue of editor quality. I suppose in a sense this doesn't matter if what you're primarily presenting is a 'rec list' system, where editors stamp stories they like. Then bad editor would eventually have their stamps ignored. However, it would be discouraging for writers to spend time having disagreements with bad editors. In addition, new readers would have to spend time learning which editors to avoid, which would degrade the usefulness of the site -- they might as well spend the time learning which authors they like, as on any other archive site.
Will stories be able to be stamped by multiple editors? This would seem to be necessary if editor name is going to be a main search criteria for readers. However, stories can't keep being perpetually reedited to the satisfaction of every editor, as editors can always find something they would wish an author to change. Then the stamping becomes not so much an editor service as a review service.
There seems to be an assumption of a basic level of competence in submissions to the archive. However, you only have to go to ff.net to see that there are writers and stories which will never achieve a publishable quality -- by keeping these stories, you would move away from the goal of bringing paper zine quality to a web site. Would editors be able to give a stamp of disapproval to stories that aren't finally edited to their satisfaction, to distinguish them from stories which simply haven't yet found an editor? In a paper zine, an editor always has the ultimate choice of rejecting the story, which keeps quality high. Is the intention for editors to be able to delete 'hopeless' stories from the archive?
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 04:15 am (UTC)Editor quality is an issue, but not one I can really see how to solve. At all. Even in the professional publishing business, an editor's reputation is what you have to go on, really. I've seen enough utter crap professionally published... And I think that learning which editors have a taste you like (or just learning how their tastes differ from your own) is useful enough. An editor can "produce" far more over a given period of time than any but the most insanely productive writers.
The way I see it, a writer will upload a story and mark it as available for editing. One or more editors will offer to edit, and the writer will accept at most one of the offers. The editor and writer will then work on the story until the editor and writer are pleased with it and marks it as finished, the writer gives up and withdraws it or the editor gives up and marks it as rejected (at which point it becomes possible for other editors to offer to edit). After it is published, other editors can put a "Good enough for me" stamp on it, should they so like.
The possibility of rejection/disapproval must be there, or the site is pointless.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-20 09:31 am (UTC)Plus how edited are we talking here? Is this a line-by-line deep textual edit, or a 'comments and criticism' thing? If some editors give 12-page treatises on a submitted story, and others write 4 lines about what worked and what didn't, that's a wide swathe of style that might make writers object. And many online readers/writers don't have the staying power to be a line editor for a long time.
It sounds like the basis for a good idea, a sort of more hands-on ffnet, but the stringent rules required to make it as quality-inherent as a print zine make me a bit wary. I'll wait for clarification before voting as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 04:21 am (UTC)We're talking edited to the point where both editor and writer agree that the story is good enough to release with their names on it. The editing process is very much a cooperative process, with a lot of communication between editor and writer. It'll probably start at large-scale problems ("What does this scene have to do with the plot?") and proceed downwards to grammar and spelling problems. At least that's how it's been when I've had stories edited for paper publication (which has happened all of three times).
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-20 12:58 pm (UTC)The open access part of the site is a searchable story archive. Stories are reviewed by site members for inclusion in the archive.
Members of the site have access to a list of beta-readers, discussion forums, story challenges... there's a resource database being built up by members (e.g. canonical information about characters, information on things like mediaeval medicine, etc. etc.). Members also review stories for acceptance (or not) in the archive.
Perhaps worth taking a look?
Una
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 04:23 am (UTC)And I had no idea that you read here :-) Want a code so you can get a proper account?
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 05:00 am (UTC)Una
(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 05:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-01-21 10:09 am (UTC)Una