Fanfic is a completely different medium from traditionally-published work, with a different audience and different expectations

Most obviously, fanfic needs original fiction to exist. Fanfic doesn’t need to do the work of worldbuilding or plotting; it can take what’s there and dive into what the original work left unexplored

Many fics require familiarity with the source material to understand—and for some, you need to be fluent in decades of fandom lore

Fanfic is powerful! Almost all the depth and narrative nuance in the Harry Potter fandom comes from fanfic challenging that world’s strict rules!

Fanfic is simply doing different work than an original work, and the two worlds are mostly apples and oranges in terms of business models

But original authors can learn a LOT from fanfic—specifically, the importance of writing EMOTION. Fanfic is full of emotion, wish fulfillment, joy. Similar to a romance novel!

MFA programs often discourage internal monologue, intense feeling, as “amateur” and believe emotion should be conveyed subtlety.

Writing emotion is too “female”—to the point where any AFAB author writing a queer man with intense emotions can be accused of fetishization (because men with Deep Lurid Feelings don’t exist!)

But it SELLS. Sure, some former English majors will spent hours puzzling over some obtuse literary character‘s cocked eyebrow, but the biggest commercial success books HIT OUR EMOTION BUTTONS

The hard part is when commercial publishing doesn't value queer work like fanfic does. Queer books are consistently treated as niche products--publishers assume they won't sell and withhold support accordingly.

The existence of Ao3 should prove that tropey, emotional, entertaining queer romances have a MASSIVE potential audience. But every time a queer romance does well it's treated like a fluke, making it real hard for queer romance writers to earn a living!

The problem isn't fanfic and original work fighting over the same slice of pie, but an industry that refuses to give queer work its due.

Anyway I've got two ANGSTY queer romances coming out--MAY THE BEST MAN WIN, a YA about a trans boy challenging his ex for HC King ( https://bit.ly/2QhX2aR  / preorder: https://bit.ly/332bedO ) and SILK FIRE, an adult fantasy about a vengeful bi courtesan: https://bit.ly/2SovnWu