• Various books and projects revolving around fandom are making the rounds of media sites. The Chicago Tribune interviewed the authors of Fangasm about their experiences in Supernatural fandom. When asked "What makes fandom worthy of academic study?" the authors responded that "Fandom is a way people express and work through a lot of their stuff. When I was a clinician, I used to practice narrative therapy, which helps people rewrite their life stories and make meaning out of them. People do the same thing through fandom, through writing fan fiction or making fan art or any of the creative pursuits that go into fandom." Plus there are "a lot of commonalities between how 'othered' groups in the 18th century were being talked about and how fan communities in the present time were being talked about...on some level what people in that fan community were doing then was not being valued as art or as something worthy of study."
• The Pacific Standard would certainly agree, calling fanfic The Next Great Literature in its discussion of the book Fic. "In 1850, William Makepeace Thackeray ...published Rebecca and Rowena, a satirical novel motivated by his dissatisfaction with the ending of another book: Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe...Thackeray didn’t know he was a shipper...because the term didn’t exist in the 19th century. It’s a relatively recent invention, coined not by literary scholars or critics but by members of the fan fiction community, a vast network of people—mostly amateurs, mostly women—who read and write stories using characters and settings created by professionals."
• Hypable also took a look at the book, discussing the various essays and the current environment into which the book has been released. "Readers should not be put off by the academic appearance of the collection. Although Jamison is a professor of literature, she utilises a more anecdotal style as she details the experiences within different fandoms, and chronicles various controversies within the fanfiction community."
• In the meantime, more people and entities are looking for ways to get fanfiction into bookstores and not just digital archives. The Geekiary wrote about one such effort, Big Bang Press, which is using Kickstarter to launch its company, with three planned novels. "Fan fiction is already a resistive act, but this is taking things to a whole new level. It’s an opportunity for stories featuring a diverse range of protagonists, including POC and queer characters. Stories that have been ignored because they is too much of a risk; stories that the mainstream media does not think are economically viable; the kind of stories that fandom has been demanding for decades."

What fandom books have you been reading? Write about them on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Although they're among the most visible fandoms in many cultures, sports fandoms are also often gendered in the media. Forbes took note of better-late-than-never marketing to women, while Yahoo's Breakout blog listed five "surprising" stats about fantasy sports leading with the fact that players are both younger and more female than generally portrayed.
• At Sports on Earth writer Colin McGowan wrote about learning to be a soccer fan. "In Alex Pappademas' 'I Suck at Football' column that ran last season at Grantland, he wrote about how his daughter understood the sport as 'the show where the men try to get the ball and then they fall down,' which is about as apt a description of football as you're going to find...It's not much more complicated than that, though it's as rich as any other sport. Being a fan isn't so much about understanding how the game works as much as it's telling yourself stories about the machinery. We assign meaning to teams and players, favor some styles over others, delight in or are crushed by swings of luck. The men kick the ball toward the goal and then fall down, and we have a lot to say about that."
• Writing about baseball, Richard Peterson speculates how being a fan of specific teams shapes a fan's personality. "I could tell what team they rooted for by observing their demeanor. The Cubs fans in the audience were easy to pick out because they were the ones who looked like they needed a hug. It was also easy to find the Cardinals fans because they were the ones sitting next to Cubs fans. They weren’t about to hug the fans of Chicago’s lovable losers, but they did want to make sure that Cubs fans knew what the fans of a winning team looked like."
• The Philadelphia CityPaper decided to investigate fanfiction about its hometown Flyers. "There are hundreds of stories and millions of words dedicated to imagined romances and trysts with the Flyers available for your perusal on Mibba, a creative-writing website boasting well over 10,000 stories." Yet even within this slice of fandom, writer Dan McQuade seemed to find it surprising that women were involved: "Most authors of Flyers fanfic identify themselves as young women, and this may be the one place on the Internet where this is actually true." He also might want to wander beyond Mibba before claiming that "this phenomenon doesn’t happen for baseball, basketball or football."

What sports fandom stories do you have to tell? Write about them on Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Digital Book World examined the motivations for including Kurt Vonnegut in the Kindle Worlds program and concluded that fanfiction = marketing. "The backlist works of iconic authors fundamentally need exposure and marketing. That’s how fans of one book choose to read others by the author, and how new readers discover the work. The marketing budgets of large, traditional publishers are overwhelmingly focused on their frontlist offerings, so the backlist is forced to 'sell itself.' This is not the practice of the movie, music or textbook business, but it is the practice of trade publishers."
• OTW legal staffer Rebecca Tushnet also addressed Kindle Worlds in an article on Airship Daily. “Amazon’s doing an experiment, and the good thing about not paying advances is there's not a huge amount of overheads,” she explains. Groups like OTW are pushing back at Amazon’s exploitation of their genre. “It’s just another business model representing another way of Mechanical Turk-ization the world of literature."
• Fast Company had an interview with Philip Patrick, director of business development and publisher of Kindle Worlds, who claimed Amazon wanted fanfic of properties that were already selling well on its site. Asked what "makes one author’s work more 'fan fic-able' than another?" he replied "Really it comes down to great storytelling, compelling characters, and vibrant geographies that writers are excited to explore. Some Worlds are more current or popular than others, of course, but there are many iconographic works and characters that Kindle Worlds writers are going to love, like Billy Pilgrim."
• A writer at the Huffington Post described what may be the new reader pattern: Finished Your Favorite Book/Show? Try Fan Fiction. "Despite stereotypes to the contrary, fan fictions can be quite entertaining and of very high quality. It is not uncommon for fan fictions to be better than their source material. Continuity and fluctuations in tone are less of an issue with fan fiction than you might imagine. Consider that your favorite TV Shows are written by a large, revolving group of writers. The multiwriter nature of TV Shows makes many works of fan fiction seem perfectly at home within the rest of a series. In many cases, the only difference between a fan fiction and a canonical manifestation of a fictional universe lies in its creators' willingness to pay for official rights to the brand."

What stories about fanfic and publishing do you know of? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.