Tuesday, May 21, 2013

On Fanfiction and Fictionpress

If you are a teen writer, you've probably come across both Fictionpress and Fanfiction. But if you haven't had a first hand experience of either of them, well, this post is mainly about them.

First of all, the two sites are sisters. Fictionpress deals with original fiction while Fanfiction with, well, fan fiction. Both of the sites have pretty much the exact same layout and rules, and also an option for other users to review on your story.

What you've got to remember though is that there are no rules for posting anything. So, as a result, a lot of the stories posted are bad (more so on Fanfiction than not) and the sites are sort of dying right now. You don't get a whole lot of reviewers unless you post on the popular threads. For Fanfiction, almost all of the stories and traffic belong to the top, most popular franchises like Percy Jackson and the Olympians. If you write something else, you probably won't get that many readers.

And some of the stories are good, but a whole lot of them are too short, filled with cliches, and ridden with grammatical errors. Kind of like books from the self publishing industry where there's no one to regulate them.

You can also ask for Beta Readers, but do realize that many of them might simply not respond or be too busy to respond. You might want to try a short story or two, but do remember that most stories don't get too many reviews anyway.

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