#do your homework before you cast aspersions on an entire fan culture pls

[discombobulatedshoe]

the biggest thing for me is the care factor. like the part where the book gives you a reason to care about the characters and what happens to them. in a fic, the care factor is in-built because other fans are coming to fic specifically because they already care very much. too often in fic-to-romance novel adaptations they don't spend enough time up front giving the reader a reason to care.

i think this is also partly a contributing factor to the jump cut effect. because it's in those moments between major events that you can put subtleties and nuance and quieter emotional beats that endear the characters and their relationship to the reader. (in fact, it's frequently these very moments that can spin off entire ships within fandoms). when we get to the big moments of a book, we should be going in to them already caring about the outcome of these major turning points. that's what gives those moments stakes. when you skip the care factor, these important moments feel soulless.

basically the affective reading experience of fic versus novels is just totally different. and i don't think publishers, authors and editors take that into account enough when turning a fic in to a traditionally published novel.

a fic is more like a continuation of a larger narrative -- or rather a continuation of a conversation about a larger narrative. because often fic is interacting with the discourses and culture of the fandom surrounding the source material, sometimes even more so than the source material itself. fic is inherently born out of fan communities, and the authorship and readership speak a common language with common references that are often only intelligible because of that shared community. not even just fandom-specific references like knowing popular head canons and characterisations, but also understandings of fic structures and archetypes and tropes (think coffee shop AUs, 5+1 fics, fix-it fics &c.) add to that AO3's tagging system and readers of fanfic actually go into the fic with a lot of established knowledge before they even get to the fic summary let alone the fic itself.

there's a lot of crossover with the romance genre (specifically around tropes) but it's still a totally different medium and community. part of the promise of a (good) romance novel, is that the author will give you a couple you care about and can root for, will craft a relationship journey with ups and downs that keeps you hooked, and will finally resolve the tension with a happy ending. but outside of that general promise, the specifics of setting implied by the subgenre (sci-fi, western, historical etc.), and whatever tropes are mentioned in the blurb and the marketing -- novel readers are going in with relatively little information about the story, characters and world. all of that has to be established in the text itself -- and frequently, in fic-to-novel adaptations, just isn't.

this is fix is much more involved than just Ctrl+F find and replacing all the character names, so it's probably why it's not done as much. especially if the publishers' perception of fic-to-novel adaptations when they sign them is that they're a fast and easy turn-around. they're very deeply not, or at least they shouldn't be if you want to do them well.

this comment on that vulture article about the "fanfic-to-romance novel pipeline" is very interesting and not something i've seen articulated...much to think about...