#i do sometimes manage to publicize my improvements! reporting typos and sending people epubs and suchlike. but not reliably.

[moonlit-tulip]

A thing that it took me a long time to realize, but which nonetheless does seem to be true: the fans of a given work will often have far more collective ability to notice and implement potential improvements to it than the original creators do. Not because they're necessarily more invested in it, or have a better understanding of it, but because they've got far more time on their hands in which to perform the polishing process, and far more people able to help.

This expresses itself probably most obviously in fan-patches for video games. When developers are working on building a game, they most likely have a release deadline, perhaps (if it's a relatively recent game) followed by a few years of maintenance work on it before they move on. When fans get into a game, though, they can keep on working on developing patches for it forever; thus the generally-very-long-lived fan-patch-development process that one sees for many old games.

But it's by no means limited to game fan-patches. It applies to translations: fan-translations can keep on being iteratively polished and improved upon for years, as seen in e.g. the anime fansubbing scene and the lineages of progressively-better-scrubbed translations one can find within it. It applies to typesetting and spellchecking and other such presentational structures in books, as one can see in, for instance, the difference between the Project Gutenberg rendition of a book and the Standard Ebooks rendition of that same book. It applies to the various fan-upscaling projects which have been performed on old low-res animated TV shows over the years. Et cetera.

There's a point here, beyond just "look at all the cool projects fans of things have done over the years". That point is: this isn't only a thing which Someone Else can do. It's not just a thing that Very Dedicated Superfans can do while everyone else watches. It's a thing that anyone who gets deep enough into a work to see a fixable flaw or potential improvement can do. If the official version of a work has a flaw you catch while reading / playing / etc., and the author has any sort of error-report button, send a report! If a fanmade rendition (translation / alternate format / etc.) has a flaw that you know how to edit out, edit it out and then post your own marginally-improved version for others to benefit from! If there's some way to improve ease-of-access to a work which you want to implement for your own purposes—a userstyle to make a webnovel's site more comfortable to read on, say—post it publicly, so the fandom can collectively benefit from it too! No grand super-fandom required; just small bits of iterative improvement, propagating outward and slowly accumulating into an ever-greater product.