#I'm working on fanfiction not on getting canon reprinted

[4esthetic-dissonance]

I'm working on a fic and was like 'how in the hell do you make LINGUANG JUN the least bit redeemable?'. I mean, /Linguang jun/ who tossed a developmentally four year old Mobei Jun to a pack of humans? The kid could have died. And then I saw a translation of the extras. It describes lgj as mbj's 'young uncle', says that he 'wasn't that much older than him (mbj)'. And I just- its a hell of a lot different, a Scar type tossing his nephew to the proverbial wolves than it is for a maybe dumb, maybe petty, maybe developmentally five or six year old to shove their annoying technically-nephew-who-in-age-and-context-is-more-like-a-brother-than-lgj's-actual-brother into a situation that the text implies was more frightening than actually /dangerous/. And that- well I can work with that.

[duckprintspress]

Hi there, i'm not sure this is in your wheel house, and I hate to waste your time, but I had a question and wonder if you might be able to offer advice (no worries if you can't or don't want to). i write a lot of fan fiction, but also have lots of idea about non-fan fiction stories. when i've tried to write them, however, I find the idea of getting a whole story out to be sufficiently intimidating that i've never been able to do it (there are probably other reasons for this of course, too). i love the A03 capability of posting one chapter (which can be super short) at a time; it's a real impetus to keep going without having to complete an entire work up front, esp if the feedback along the way is encouraging. what is your take on getting an original fiction story out in a03, but then trying to get it published elsewhere afterwards (taking it down from a03 at that point if necessary)? is that something feasible to try to do?

or perhaps you have other recs? (I don't think my original stories (unlike my fan fic) is likely to be focused on LGBTQIA+ relationships or issues, and i'm straight, so i suspect it's not what your publishing house is focusing on)

thank you so much for even reading this message.

Howdy anon! So there's a few things brought up in this message, and I'll try to answer each.

First: yes, we love offering advice and getting asks! Srsly, you and everyone, don't hesitate to drop stuff like this in our inbox, I love answering them, and if I (hi, I'm @unforth, meatspace name Claire, pen name/editing name Nina, and I own the Press and run our social media accounts) don't know the answer, I can kick 'um to the DPP server and get more folks to weigh in!

Second: yeah, motivation is a constant challenge, and what works is always going to be different for everyone. Those comments each chapter can be all that keeps me going on a long fanfic sometimes (and even they're not enough sometimes, oops, shovels a bunch of unfinished wip under the carpet behind themself)

Specifically, you ask: what is your take on getting an original fiction story out in a03, but then trying to get it published elsewhere afterwards (taking it down from a03 at that point if necessary)?

So, works are absolutely converted from AO3 stories to published stories. I can think of a half-dozen examples off the top of my head (one of the most recent being Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk, which started as a Dean Winchester/Jimmy Novak fic). However, I'd point out that original fiction gets very VERY low engagement on AO3. Most of the conversions I know of are people taking fanfiction and either scrubbing the barcodes (as in, swapping character names and removing/replacing canon references) or completely rewriting it. If the feel you're struggling with is "I want to get fanfic-like engagement but on a completely original work" I think you'd struggle to get that on AO3; virtually no one I know who has posted original works on AO3 has gotten that engagement on those works.

Publishing it as original fiction that you don't substantially change for publication will also weaken your ability to get it published. It'll guarantee that you can only apply with it to places that allow/do reprints, because you've already "used" the First Worldwide Publication Rights that most publishers will want for an original thing - because you already published it. So even if you remove it, the cat is already out of the bag on "first," and that will limit your options - another reason to do it as fanfic that you then rewrite. It's relatively hard to find places that will publish works, especially long works, that the First rights are already off the table (though we're one example of a place that will, we've published things that are up on AO3, and allowed the unedited versions to remain on AO3 when we've done so. For example, several of @tryslora's stories. We've also allowed the opposite; there's at least one original work on AO3 that started as a DPP exclusive for Patreon, and when the rights reverted back to the author, they chose to post it to AO3 with our blessing).

Of course, you can bypass these issues by self-publishing. Then what you keep and what you change, whether you keep it on AO3 or remove it, etc., is up to you, because you're the boss. Self-pubbing puts a lot more of the work on your shoulders tho - editing, cover art, marketing, typesetting, etc., all of it becomes your responsibility.

But: yes, taking works from AO3 to original fic publishing is feasible and is a thing that happens all the time. Depending on how you're publishing it and/or how extensively you rewrite it, you may not even have to take it down, but it would depend. Certainly, for most trad pub/big publishing houses, they would expect you to take it down.

Re: your last point about working with us, we require exactly zero disclosures from our contributors about their sexual or gender orientation. Our only requirement is that authors have posted fanfiction on a public, accessible fanfiction website. To the best of my knowledge, the vast majority of the people we work with are LGBTQIA+, but I also know for sure we've worked with at least one person who was cis and het. There are probably more. It's honestly none of my business. We've also published plenty with no LGBTQIA+ component. The way we work, we accept authors, and once we've got the author, we publish what they want to write, we're not particularly interested in policing that. Things without LGBTQIA+ don't tend to sell as well, because of the interests of our customers, but we'll put it out anyway *shrug*. I'd guess around a quarter of our catalogue has no explicit LGBTQIA+ rep, maybe a bit less.

Anyway! Hi, I'm wordy. TL:DR is: you can absolutely try to motivate yourself to write original fic by publishing it to AO3, but engagement is likely to be low, and doing so will make it harder to publish. If you feel you need the motivation that posting chapter-by-chapter gets you, it'd be better to write it as fanfiction with the intention of rewriting it later, as this will improve engagement without doing as much damage to your ability to publish it later.

and if you wanted to write with us, you'd be welcome; we recruit authors through our anthologies, and I expect our next open call to be sometime over the late spring or summer. We only juuuust started talking potential themes a few days ago.

Hope this helps!

-unforth