#I'm pretty good at estimating a fic's length actually

[shine-reblogs]

Well, I resent that, I am capable of writing one shots! Even my chaptered fics are shorter than 30k words by a half!

*sweeps their yet unpublished, in-progress, so-far 130k words fic under the rug*

Like, seriously, how dare you

me: okay, this time i’m gonna write a short fic

me: …30k words is short, right

[raccoonfallsharder]

Two totally unrelated questions to each other, but what media introduced you to gotg? Movies or comics? And how do you know how many chapers your fanfiction will have? Honestly I’m just curious it seems impressive to me that you have it planned out like this 👉👈

hey sugarcube, thank you for this delightful ask ♡♡ you're so fuckin sweet honestly.

question one! how i was introduced to gotg:

i was vaguely aware of gotg through some comics but it was the first movie that really made me more interested. honestly, in the ensemble comics, a lot of the guardians characters bored me. (this hasn't changed. i will skip any frame feature richard rider; he's so damn boring. and frankly i feel similarly about pete....sorry!). but i loved rocket in the comics and when the first movie came out i was like, yes, just like the comics, it's the fuckin raccoon and the tree who make this really worth watching.

then the comics started producing more rocket-and-groot-focused arcs and i got super-into it. the second and third movies also got me more interested in the other guardians-characters (love drax, love the gamora-nebula sistership, love yondu, love mantis, love all their energy together). so while i was aware of gotg from comics, it honestly feels like a combination of the two that eventually won me over.

question two! how i know the length of my stories:

i don't lol. sorrrrryyyyy ♡♡

but if it's helpful, there are a few things that sort of guide me. first of all, generally speaking, i won't start really writing a story until i know how it ends. hell, sometimes i start at the end. knowing where i'm going keeps me motivated.

i also have a tendency to see things really holistically (i have a sequencing disorder, which is also why i have a bajillion typos all the time), so the more i think about anything (but especially stories and people), the more i see how all the pieces fit together. sometimes with writing, that's a pretty clear/simple trajectory, which for me results in one-shots or triple-shots. but the stories that are longer and require more character-growth end up being more uncertain.

cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :･꧂is a good example. it starts with rocket and pearl colliding on the arete and culminates in a happily-ever-after. for me, an HEA means they need to resolve things with each other, find a family, and figure out what to do about wyndham. the more i think about how that would work, the more major plot-points i develop (currently about eight distinct "events") and the more incidents of interpersonal conflict, empathy, and bonding i imagine (too many to dissect right now). once i actually start mapping that out, there's usually about one chapter for every major event and/or incident.

that said, i originally thought cicatrix .⋆☁︎ :･꧂could be resolved in about 25 chapters (lol). so obviously, things have changed as i've started realizing how more and more things fit together. even now, i just drafted chapter 23 and realized it might need to be split into two because it's long - which might mean i end up with even more than the forty chapters i currently had planned. at the end of the day, for my longer fics, it's really more about estimating than knowing anything for real.

but that's writing, i think. nobody knows anything until it's done - and even then, there's room to change. it's all an exercise in accepting ambiguity i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ♡♡

[chainofclovers]

2, 10, 21 for the "yet another writing ask" questions ❤️

Hi friend! Thank you!

2. Anything that you’d like to write but feel like you’re unable to?

I feel like there's a ton of stuff that fits in that category, but maybe a lot of it is actually stuff that appeals to me when I read but that doesn't actually appeal to me as a writer. (Such as fics entirely based on missing scenes from earlier seasons of a show, fics with major canon divergence, etc.) It's weird because I love reading what other people imagine, but canonical details get really cemented in my brain.

Probably the thing I truly would love to write but "can't" would be a really long, intricately-plotted AU. My list of stuff to write includes @kittensittin's vision of a full series retelling of Ted Lasso that starts with Ted/Rupert divorcing and Rebecca/Michelle still married (with Ted hiring Rebecca to coach, and with a Ted/Rebecca ending). After people went wild thinking through all these different potential details, I felt so inspired, but the thought of actually sitting down to write it feels daunting and nearing impossible.

10. Top three favourite fic tropes.

There was only one bed

Marriage of convenience/fake dating

Friends with benefits/friends-to-lovers/catching feelings after having sex/

21. Can you accurately predict how long your fics are going to be? If you can, what’s your secret?

Not really! I think I'm pretty good at sensing whether a story idea would require something snippet length, a more full-feeling one shot, or a longer fic, and usually I end up with an end product that reflects what I initially guessed. I think a lot about structure and formatting, so the overall shape of how it'll be when published is part of my relatively early planning. But the actual word counts? I don't even have a ballpark estimate in my head. I don't even really think about it or try to predict! (Can you?)

[lowkeyed1]

Twenty questions for fic writers

thanks for the tag, @jaimebluesq

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 11 total! i've only been writing again since may. i'm afraid my fanfics from the dawn of (my) time are pretty much lost at this point but i can live with that, lol

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 108,407

3. What fandoms do you write for? just Willow (2022) so far, the show that has consumed me body and soul.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Velvet Fist, Iron Glove - my kit/graydon romp that supposes they had to go ahead and get married at the beginning of the series, and also graydon is harboring a secret (no, not that one. He's a trans man). It's gradually expanding into a greater tir asleen polycule fic with some bits of plot still to come, but kit/graydon is definitely the central relationship. 27 kudos

Thrown Like a Star - my graydon/boorman fic, the first one i started with in may, when i looked on ao3 for some fics about them and didn't find a damn thing. they start hooking up on the shattered sea, and that changes how things play out in canon, and post-series as well. 24 kudos

Zombie Crack: Night of the Living Dental Dam - a silly halloween ficlet about kit/jade and some halloween roleplay. 16 kudos

Funhouse Crack: Mirror Maze - another silly halloween ficlet about kit/jade, having their first date at a carnival. 13 kudos

Shattered Sea Crack: It Came From Beneath the Mud - yet another halloween ficlet, about the gang telling campfire stories on the shattered sea. 13 kudos

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? every single comment, pretty much. i love to talk with people about what they see in my stories, to hear about what stands out, what it makes them wonder. i get so many good ideas from that, too! and it means so much to me when people comment, of course i'm going to say something, even if they just say they liked it. the value of the encouragement cannot be measured!

6. What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? hmmm i don't really do angsty endings but to be fair i don't really do a lot of endings so far, i'm just eternally WIP. some of my halloween ficlets end with everyone dying but they're not really very serious to begin with so i don't know if that qualifies as angst, hehe.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? probably (Take You) Higher? my big WIPs are going to have happy endings but that's one that's actually finished. ends with two idiots falling in love and hopefully setting out for a brighter future than they were originally envisioning for themselves :)

8. Do you get hate on fics? not so far, but i'm writing pretty niche at this point.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? *looks at my list of works* *looks back at the camera* oh. maybe a bit? m/m, f/m, f/f, f/m/f, some fluffy vanilla, some light kink and bdsm, some omegaverse. LOVE first times. i really like going into detail in general.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? not so far, although i feel like willow would be a good crossover with xena. very similar feel to both shows, and i'm not just talking about the lesbians.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? i don't think so?

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? nope

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? did some great round robins back in the day, but nothing recent.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship? it's gotta be graydon/boorman. nothing has eaten up as much of my brainspace as this. i just love them too much.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? god. i do not know how i'm going to finish these things but i'm going to keep writing either way. they're getting finished or i'm going to be updating from the nursing home, bet.

16. What are your writing strengths? interior monologue & smut. i really love wallowing in feelings and sensations.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? planning. outlining. estimating the length of time or word count of any part of a story. petty jealousy of more popular writers, lol. wanting comments T_T

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? i would outsource that for sure.

19. First fandom you wrote for? xena! writing m/m slash in another one of the most notorious lesbian fandoms. my niche i guess, haha... ha.... hehe?

20. Favorite fic you've written? i'm going to sound so annoying when i say this maybe but i love them all. i write exactly what i want to see and i love to reread them. but thrown like a star is my favorite, because it's the one that got me writing again after a long hiatus, and it's the love story i was dying to see.

Tagging: @bisexualshakespeare @bifuriouswaterbender @rotaryshakes @woobifiedvillain @queen-of-meows @aurorawest @mareebird @cenobitic-anchorite @peterbenjaminparkour @storyspinner91 @blackdalek and anyone else who'd like to join in :D

[galacticlamps]

💘🌈🤍 for the fic writer asks? :)

💘Is there any posted fic you want to rework/re-edit/re-write?

Not especially? Little mistakes I'll fix whenever I notice them, even if it's on something that's been up for a long time already - and for anything I'd want to do a major overhaul on, I'm enough of a '2 cakes!' person to be down with writing a new fic on a similar concept, rather than rework one that already exists. Sidebar: that's actually how Shards of Memories & Fragments of Glass and Interrupted initially began, as kinda inverse/incompatible approaches to a similar moment - and I wasn't even frustrated with those, so I can only imagine how much more willing I'd be to write both ideas again if I thought it would be a massive improvement on a story.

((The fics of mine I like the least are also the ones I think about & re-read the least, so maybe there's something in one of them that I would be annoyed by enough to want to re-write, but it just isn't really on my mind? I suppose I look at Reckless and wonder why so little happens in 10k words, or I look at Oh, So Right and wonder if I shouldn't've held off and let that grow into something larger that incorporated more of my headcanons on the subject (I have a lot, but that fic was never meant to be the vehicle for them) - but it's not like I've ruled out doing that some day, so there's no real harm in it already existing as-is. Honestly I think my whole 5+1 series is pretty unbalanced - some like In the Kitchen feel better suited to being a chapter than a whole fic of its own, whereas others feel more like their own independent stories - and I think if I set out to do something like that again, I'd aim for more consistency, but it's not like I want to rewrite those actual fics just so they'd fit together better. If I recall correctly, On the Spot is probably fairly silly, but it's meant to be and there are about a million different versions of proposal & get together fics I have in my head - that one's far from being my favorite version but it doesn't hurt to've gotten one of them out of my system at least.))

🌈is there a fic that you worked *really fucking hard on* that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

See, the thing I struggle with the most is length, and to some extent it really affects everything I write - because it's not as if I'm just anti-long fics, it's that I have a problem with consistently under-estimating what the word count on just about any wip will become. And then I worry if I'm pulling focus & distracting from what I actually want the story to be about with unnecessary word vomit - so I tend to do a lot of second guessing, shortening & looking for things to cut before I post anything, and sometimes I get waaaay too concerned about that, for relatively little payoff. In that regard, it would be much simpler to list the fics I miraculously didn't struggle with lol

But to talk specifics - there's a bit of anti-gravity business in Small Hours in a Wide Universe that I super stressed about narrating, and I sincerely hope no one would ever know - in that case, the problem was that I could see the actions very clearly in my mind & wanted to make sure I articulated it well enough that the reader could too, but the extra dimensions & scifi environment gave me a kind of limited vocabulary to describe movement with specificity. Since I know what it's supposed to look like though I'm not a good judge of if the description I ultimately wrote works well or if it's obvious reading it that I struggled there.

Your Life Begins By Leaving was another that I guess I had trouble with? It spent much longer than usual in my 'on deck' pile, but I wasn't working on it so consistently that it required major trouble to become stalled - again, I was just worried about sort of focus & mood and if I was overshadowing certain things with less necessary bits.

(there are 3 wips in particular that I would love love love to've posted & be able to answer this about one day, because those are truly the ones I've struggled the most with - but right now the only reason no one would know is because they literally don't exist in anyone's minds but my own lol)

🤍what’s one fic of yours you think people didn’t “get”?

I don't think this is really a case of people not 'getting' it as much as people just not caring about it as much as I do, and that's understandable - of everything I've posted, Wedding Colors is probably the most Gen & deals the least in romantic pairings - which a) is already a less popular subject in fanfic, and b) possibly even actively disappoints people by sounding like it would be more overtly romantic, given the title. But that's what I wanted to write, and I did, and I even tagged it as 'one day i decided i needed a Two/Jamie wedding fic that was actually about Zoe and this is that,' so I was kinda as upfront as I could be. (I do find it funny though, because when I'm writing things that are more exclusively Two/Jamie focused, I'll often wonder if I've done a poor job of contriving some reason for the other companions to be absent - sometimes I even feel bad writing them out, bc I think there's a great importance in a healthy romantic relationship also being part of healthy dynamics among any kind of friend group or found family, so I don't want to feel like I'm sidelining everyone because I don't think they're relevant - and yet if we're going by statistics, a fic that does heavily involve those other people & their perspectives on the romance IS in fact less appealing than ones without them, apparently)

The only other one that even slightly comes to mind is Bath Salts & Bruises, but again, saying people don't get it sounds unnecessarily harsh. I did mention once that its stats are pretty unique - if you rank my fics by hits, it's in the top half, by kudos it's in the bottom half, by bookmarks the bottom 4, and by comment threads dead last - which would seem to paint a picture of attracting more attention than it did interest or appreciation - whereas personally, it's a kind of favorite! I'm rather proud of the particular angle I took on their relationship in that one, it's one I believe in headcanon-wise (which I don't always - sometimes I just write things I could see happening because a story seems fun, and not because it's reflective of my more consistent beliefs about the characters) and for something I was a little nervous to write about, I was pretty satisfied with how I executed it too. But again, I don't think this is truly a case of anyone not getting something and more of just varied tastes, and it for sure has some stuff that objectively works against it. It's near the end of a series that took me months to write, versus the beginning installments that you'd expect to receive more attention. Most installments in that series are missing scenes during or after tv episodes - this one's set after a Big Finish audio, and to make matters worse, one that's part of a box set in a relatively unpopular range. Like the wedding one, it might also be a kind of false advertising too - it's a bath scene, the characters are nude for most of it and touching each other and even thinking about sex more directly than usual in most of my stuff - and yet it's not at all steamy or spicy or whatever you want to call it, and nothing ever comes of those thoughts, which could be a let down in terms of expectations/disappointment. And then there's also the fact that this is, I think, the most blatantly ace I've ever written Jamie - which could in itself annoy or even just fail to appeal to people who don't agree with that take - but he's also pretty clearly not uninterested in potentially sleeping with the Doctor. That combination makes perfect sense to me because it overlaps with some of my own experiences as an ace person, but could easily serve to confuse people who've spent less time considering asexuality, while at the same time even alienating other people who are more familiar with its nuances, but whose experiences or perception of the character are at odds with that particular detail.

So I've no reason to believe anyone hates it or is actually super confused by it, but it certainly doesn't appeal to others as much as it does to me (and that's fine, nobody at all could read it ever & I'd still be quite glad I wrote it!)

[chacusha]

I probably should give an update on the fic I'm working on, and might as well do it by reblogging this post. Basically, when I started giving my full focus to this particular fic in April, it had a bit over 6k words in it: the first two chapters, more or less complete, and then quite a few snippets from later in the fic already written up.

I'm writing this for an event (Unconventional Courtship) that has a vague June deadline (I have until 14 June to sign up for a posting date 1-30 June, and there's also amnesty posting on 1-7 July for people who signed up but missed their posting date).

I made a sketchy outline in order to estimate how many chapters this fic would require in total and came up with 12 chapters total at a bare minimum, assuming my chapter plan panned out.

I then counted how many weeks there were from the beginning of April to the end of May, the main work period before we started getting into scary Posting Territory, and I counted... 9 weeks. So even at a very ambitious (for me) "1 chapter per week" pace, I would still not be finished drafting by the beginning of June -- and I needed to budget quite a bit of time for editing too.

In any case, I decided to just go for that "1 chapter per week" goal and see how it went. Each of the chapters pretty consistently came out to about 2k words. So I could kind of make a secondary goal which was to write at least 2k words per week in case my chapter plans/lengths changed (which (spoiler alert) they did...) and tracking by chapter started to become messy.

The good news is that I... have largely kept to this schedule? I currently have 12 chapters finished, and 24k words written, which is slightly ahead of schedule in terms of chapters (+10 chapters in 9 weeks) and BANG on schedule in terms of words (+18k words in 9 weeks). This discrepancy is because some of those chapter are shorter (~1k) chapters that did not exist when I was making my outline. T_T

So yeah, the BAD news is that my chapter outline is currently sitting at an estimated 15.5 chapters (chapter 16 being a short coda) instead of 12 chapters. In terms of where I am in the story using my original chapter outline, I have just finished what used to be "chapter 8" was in my original outline. So still 3.5 (possibly more) more chapters to go and we are already in posting period land. <:D

But the good news is that those 3.5 chapters are exactly the ones I estimated would be the easiest for me to write (they are relationship drama, my favorite thing to write for Quodo, and a significant amount has already been written in the form of snippets). I was actually secretly hoping to hit the end of the (old) "chapter 8" by the end of May, because chapters 3-8 were the tricky ones where my idea of what would happen in them was "???" but I already know exactly what happens in the remaining chapters (old chapters 9-12; now chapters 13-16) and knew it would be a coast from this point. BUT BUT they DO still need to be written AND ALSO I still need to do editing! Serious editing!!

Also, during May, I actually fell behind significantly due to travel and getting sick, and so the last three weeks of May have featured me writing at a pace fast enough to hit my weekly goal and then a little more to make up the deficit. And as of this weekend, I am fully caught up, so yeah, that's been great.

So yeah, this writing experience has been really weird for me. It's hard for me to describe my progress because I am simultaneously slightly behind schedule, ahead of schedule, and also right on schedule. In order to achieve all this, I've basically been doing daily sprints all throughout April and May, which has been both hectic and extremely effective.

I did not have high hopes of finishing this project on time, but it was always a *possibility*, and after all the work I've done, I'm basically at the same place: it IS possible I can throw this together in time for a late June or early July posting date, but the jury is still out on that one. I don't have a clear "you have to throw the towel in" OR "yep, this is in the bag" signal, so I guess it's still an uncertain forward charge for me.

Anyway, since I have to make a final decision by 14 June, I think I am going to make one last writing push this week and if I have easily finished drafting by 14 June and am ready to start edits, then I will sign up.

Whew, that was really long, sorry!

Quo-do the Thing! - Check-in #1 (June 1-7)

Here it is -- our first check-in! This check-in is optional, for people who need external accountability in order to get things done. If you fit this category, then it is required. ;) For everyone else, though, you can skip it without issue.

📋 Check-in form 📋

The check-in form is open from now until the end of June 7th (whenever that is for you). Also, sign-ups are still open if you would like to join the event! The AO3 collection is also open for posting, if you have already finished a work that fits this event.

Helpful links: Sign-up form | AO3 collection | Event info

Below the cut is a reminder of what you said you'd like to have done by June, for those who have signed up. If you marked that you are using Tumblr to follow this event, I have @'ed you -- I hope it's okay.

chacusha:

Quodo UCII: Goal: The whole thing, basically. Can I do 2-3 chapters in April, and 3+ chapters in May? Is that feasible??

colorcoded:

Smutty Quodo art: Goal: Rough digital sketch

@mossmx:

QuodoCook: Goal: figuring out the storytelling, finished gathering references in a PureRef file (characters+proportions, DS9 room, DS9 cooking accessories, DS9/Ferengi food), decided which "props" to have in the scene and finalizeing the poses.

@rulesofacquisition:

Doctor Odo and the No Good Very Bad Physical: Goal: 1200 words

Weaver:

Earring: Goal: Maybe 1 chapter

@yvanka:

Anniversary date: (No June check-in goals written.)

Quark bi bi bi vid: Goal: Adding all the footage to the file

Feel free to check in using the form or by replying to/reblogging this post or just wherever works for you. If you haven't gotten started or you're not quite where you wanted to be, feel free to get a little work in before checking in!

[livlepretre]

ok i am LOVING your take on season 4 and i'm so excited to see where this goes cuz honestly season 4 was like... a bit of a trainwreck?? the beginning of the end really? but it definitely had potential so now i'm really looking forward to seeing you make s4 just like narratively more coherent and everything. but also uh... didn't u say SWBS was only gonna be like 30 chapters? i'm guessing not anymore 😂 anyway i just wanted to say this fic is turning out to be way more exciting and action-y than i anticipated from your original description of it as a christmas/baby fic but i am HERE FOR IT 💜

bahahaha did I say 30 chapters? Sounds like me. I still laugh at myself for thinking that FE would run about 20,000 words. A lot of that misestimation comes from my early struggles as a writer-- I used to have tremendous difficulty writing many words-- maybe there was a strength to the economy I used to have, but it often felt like a struggle to convey what I wanted to say as deeply as I wanted to say it back when I was a less experienced writer. Like, SWBS is now the length of ATFBBTF, which is wild, because SWBS still feels like a lark to me, a random side project that I’m working on as a bit of wish fulfillment, and ATFBBTF was a major project that took me 4 years to complete. Just. WHAT. 

I’m really pleased that you’re so enjoying the way I’m twisting the plot in SWBS. I agree that season 4, while it was the last season I think was good, the train was sort of already on fire and hurtling down the tracks, so to speak. I’m not planning to get through the entirety of season 4 or anything-- just touch on the parts that can build up the emotional arcs I’m building in SWBS. We’re definitely near the end of the fic-- I would estimate 10 or so more chapters? It’s a little hard for me to estimate because, in an effort to make this fic a pretty much stress-free writing experience (gentle writing, like that post I reblogged last week), I just sort of write until I hit a stopping point somewhere between 1500 and 2500 words and then I post; I know what I want to happen in this fic, but the actual chapter breaks aren’t all that planned. I just sort of go, yep! seems like a good place to stop for today! 

and ajdaflkdjakljfalk honestly I love action and plot and the opportunity to make characters do things and obviously I just couldn’t resist? yet again? 

[oakandgumtrees]

Testing it out: four examples

Example 1: A very small fandom (The Martian - Andy Weir: 537 works)

With 537 works in the fandom, each 10% chunk has about 54 fics in it.

[I couldn't work out how to do tables in tumblr and retyping everything made me want to cry, so these don't have image descriptions, I'm very sorry. It's a table with a list of ranges and a list of median word counts. The numbers go up.]

You can see that the median for the 80-90% bracket is double the length of the median for the 70-80% bracket. This is where I decided I was going to need smaller brackets for the next bit.

Once again, the median doubled between the 92-94% bracket and the 94-96%.

At this point, I was down to the 20 longest works, so I manually copied out each one's word count and added them up.

Adding everything together, we get an estimated 2,046,000 words across the shorter 96% of fics, and a total of 1,952,000 words for the longest 4% of works.

Yes, the top 4% genuinely did have almost half the estimated word count.

But does this happen in a larger fandom?

Example 2: A moderately small fandom (Star Trek - Discovery: 5,880 works)

Again, 10% brackets worked well for the bottom 90%, with the median of the 80-90% bracket being 6232 words.

I used 2% brackets from 90-98% (the highest bracket had a median of 32,362 words), but that still left me with another 118 fics to check. Too many to do manually.

At this point, I moved to 0.2% brackets, with approximately 12 fics each.

I was then left with the top 0.4% to count manually - just 24 works.

My estimated total for the 0-99.6% bracket was 25,164,000 words, and the actual total for the top 0.4% of fics was 4,504,000 words. 

And this is where I started to notice an interesting pattern. Because once again, the total for 0-96% (about 15 million words) was very similar to the total for the top 4% (about 14.7 million words). 

But two could be coincidence. Let’s scale up again.

Example 3: A larger fandom (Good Omens (TV): 50,418 fics)

(Note: This data is from before the release of Season 3.)

For this fandom, the 80-90% bracket got me up to a median of 8014 words, the 96-98% bracket got me up to a median of 34,371 words, and the 99.6-99.8% bracket got me up to a median of 140,825 words.

But that still left me with 101 fics to analyse, so I brought out even smaller chunks of 0.04%.

The top 0.04% (20 works) were counted manually. 

The estimated total (including that top 0.04%) was 295,223,000 words, of which 165.6 million were in the 0-96% range, and 130 million were in the 96-100% range. Not as close, but still pretty similar.

Would it hold for a mega-fandom?

Example 4: A mega-fandom (Marvel Cinematic Universe: 536,615 fics)

With the increase in scale, I yet again had to add a set of teeny tiny brackets - these ones covering just 0.005% of fandom’s fic each.

The final 0.005% (27 works), I calculated manually. 

Was this process a bit tedious? Yes. Was it MASSIVELY FASTER than any other method I could think of that would get me the same sensitivity? Also yes.

So, how many words of MCU fic are there on Ao3?

By my estimates, approximately 4,135,353,000. 

Four BILLION words.

(And, for the curious: the longest 4% of fics make up around 2.16 billion of it. Again, close to half!)

Part 3, coming soon!

Okay, but how many WORDS of fic are there? A proposed method for estimating total word count for a set of fics on Ao3

Some statistics are really easy to find on Ao3. Some are harder.

The word count of an individual work? Easy. The word count of a group of works? You have to add it up manually.

Or do you?

(Note: All statistics in this post are from data gathered on the 28th-29th July, 2023, and will be out of date in the specifics. My focus is on trends.)

If we only had an average

If we knew what the AVERAGE (or mean) word count for a group of works was , we could simply multiply by the number of works, and we'd have the total!

But we don't have the average.

We do, however, have the ability to sort a group of fics by word count, do some arithmetic to figure out what the middle item in that list is, and check that individual fic. (E.g. in a list of five fics, what is the word count of the third-longest work?)

This is the median - surely that's going to be close to the average, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Wordcount Georg is an outlier adn is difficult to count

You know that one MASSIVE fic? The one that's, like, half a million words, and a hundred chapters, and it's still going?

You thought of one straight away, didn't you?

Well, it turns out a LOT of fandoms have that fic. Or several of them.

But they're usually very few compared to a much LARGER number of very short works. Take the MCU fandom. When I checked, only 1% of MCU fics were over 100,000 words - and 25% were under 1000 words.

The median is usually close to the average when the distribution of a set of numbers looks like this:

But the distribution of the length of fics in most fandoms looks more like this:

In that sort of distribution, the median and the mean can be a LONG way apart.

A median can still tell you a lot about the most common kinds of fic. But it's going to completely miss all those super-long outliers, and if you want to find the TOTAL word count, you need those.

Counting things the cheating-cheater way

I would like to propose a method I've been calling 'multiple median estimation'.

Here's how it works:

Sort your fics by word count, then divide the list into chunks. Ten percent of the total number is often a good size.

Find the fic in the middle of each chunk to get the median word count for THAT set of fics.

When a chunk has a median SUBSTANTIALLY bigger than the previous chunk, break it up into smaller pieces, and repeat.

Once you have all your medians, multiply each one by the number of fics in that chunk, and add together to get your estimated total.

Let's see how that pans out across a few different fandoms...in part 2!