OTW Fannews: Fanfiction and Publishing
- An article in Publishing Perspectives looked at what fanfiction could teach the publishing industry. "The way the best fanfiction relates to its source content, its questioning, at times analytical, and often philosophical and political interrogation of the certainties and assertions of the original Text could be seen as analogous to the rewriting of the settled narrative of publishing by tech startups. Those startups come not from publishing but often from engineering, computer science, and mathematical backgrounds, shaking up the staid world of the publishing industry, adding 50 shades of sexiness (or nerdiness) to the old print-bound linear processes and outputs. A few years ago, the publishing industry was certain of its borders, convinced of its rights, sure of its power, definite about who the main characters were in their narrative, and what their respective roles were. The gaps that it didn’t see — the enormous possibilities of agile processes, digital bits and bytes, content as data, the high speed distribution over connections that the print world couldn’t even begin to imagine — were explored by the tech startups on the fringes. They put everything into question." ( Read more... )