I have a theory

[arduinna]

(It isn't bunnies.)

I've been reading some of the posts about money and fandom that are making the rounds, and in the comments to fairestcat's post, people touch on the source of much of the weirdness in fandom re fanworks and money: old-school SFF fandom.

It's always been bizarre to me that fanartists could make money off their fanart, when fanfic writers were expected not to. (I should add here: I love the fannish gift economy, and thought it should encompass all fanworks, not just fic.) I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and eventually came up with what I think might be the answer. Or an answer, anyway.

So here's what I think happened: back in the day (mid-20th century), if you were an SFF fan going to conventions, there were three "paths" to participating. (Someone's going to come and argue that. I'm generalizing wildly here for simplicity. I know there were many ways to participate.) If you wrote fiction, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and go pro, and create content for people to talk about. If you drew art, you could submit it to magazines or book publishers, and also sell it directly to buyers at art shows at conventions, which were basically fandom's galleries.

If you didn't want to be a "pro" creating more content, but wanted to talk about fandom in general or the content that already existed, you contributed ("tribbed") to zines (APAzines, letterzines). Tribbers got copies, and other people could buy copies (of the letterzines) for the price of copying and mailing, basically. (Again, generalizing wildly, just to provide a sense of a common approach. Don't @ me *g*.)

Star Trek fandom branched off from SF fandom, and took a lot of SF fandom's terminology and culture with it, including zines. They were created along the old familiar lines: people who wanted to tribbed to zines, and got "paid" with a copy of the zine, and people who hadn't tribbed could buy it for cost and shipping. But in ST fandom and its descendants, zines were as likely to be full of fanfic and fan poetry as meta or analysis.

Artists could get their work out by tribbing to zines, or making zine covers, but art reproduction was harder than mimeographing or photocopying text, so artists also tended to show their work at conventions, which also got set up along the old familiar lines: an art show that allowed for sale or auction of the art.

And then that got embedded in the culture. Fanfic was part of the conversation, like meta, and you didn't pay for it beyond the cost of physically receiving a copy. Fanart that was in zines was also part of the conversation, and ditto.

Fanfic writers who wanted to be paid filed off the serial numbers and went pro if they could, just like in SF fandom. Fan artists didn't have as clear a path to a pro life, but could sell their art at cons. Even as fandom moved online, it was hard to show art, so art stayed outside the general conversation.

These days, art is a huge part of the conversation, and for the most part is free the way fanfic and meta are; you can browse around DA or tumblr (or you could, anyway, sigh) and see all sorts of visual takes on things. But because it was outside the conversation for so long, and treated as a sort of pro content, it's still much more acceptable in fannish culture to take art commissions, or sell art.

It's a bizarre difference in approach when you only see the existing conversation among all the creative forms of output. But I really think it goes back to those early days of creating something slightly different out of SF fandom's culture, and the translation just not being perfect.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

An interesting train of thought.

I always got the feeling that the reason why fanart sold, and fan writing didn't, was because art has always required a financial outlay of some kind in fancy pens or nice ink or good paper, and later in software and printing costs. Most fanartists couldn't expect to sell something scribbled in pencil on a piece of torn-off notebook paper at a convention or for a commission; it had to be of at least halfway-decent quality for the transaction to make financial sense. Even people who had the equipment already (professional artists, graphic designers) generally had to be compensated for the costs of the consumable products (paper, pigments, ink) or the fact that high-end software is damned expensive. Fan writing, by contrast, comes as typed pages or electronic files -- neither of which usually can command a "price" in the same regard.

Or something along those lines. Perhaps I'm mistaken. But this was how I always viewed the line between charging for fanart and writing fic/meta for free.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that with fanart, especially before digital printing became somewhat cheap, it was a unique item sold. I don't think the financial outlay for making the original for fanart is the real difference, but that if you get say a mimeographed or later xeroxed copy of a typed story the experience is pretty much the same as if you saw the final edit of the original.

You assemble the relevant bit in your head, whether the text is a crisp professionally typeset black or a slightly fuzzy just typed blue. However looking at a mimeographed or standard xeroxed version of a drawing is decidedly not the same as looking at even an ink drawing made with b/w reproduction in mind.

Even b/w good image reproduction is non-trivial (otherwise there wouldn't have developed whole art styles and techniques around the limitations) and it only gets exponentially worse and expensive as soon as color gets involved. And that was far more true before color computer printers got both cheaper and better.

So (pre-digital) fanart is more like cottage fancrafts that way, like people selling a handmade Star Trek tricorder replica or such. Without serious reproduction know-how and financial outlay it is not going to be a mass produced competition to the official stuff.

[sholio]

Yeah, exactly, I always got that feeling at cons, that the handmade factor was a really big part of why it was viewed and treated differently. I think the comparison to handmade crafts is accurate. Whereas stories don't really work that way.

[dragoness_e]

There's another key difference: it's been legally established that art of a character based on a written description (i.e., a book character) does not infringe copyrights. (Specific example I remember: fanart of Harry Potter based on the book cover or movie depictions might be infringing; fanart of Harry Potter based on J.K. Rowling's written description would not be infringing). Wikimedia Commons has some useful pointers and distinctions in their rules on fan art: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Fan_art

Since old-school SFF fandom was heavily based on SFF literature, and a lot of art I've seen at SFF conventions was more generic (dragons, elves, space ships, aliens, starscapes...) and not specific enough to be infringing, that may be why there's a "presumption of innocence" of fanart.

[sholio]

I think it's also worth pointing out that there were a number of different branches of fandom operating at the same time, with various rules. For example, I came into fandom via ... well, a couple of paths, but one of the main ones was comics/comicon fandom in the end of the 90s and the first few years of the 00's, and at that time, in that fandom, fanart was well accepted as a perfectly okay art form (people made it, people sold it, loads of creators did character sketches of Marvel and DC characters at cons), whereas fanfic was very definitely not. I co-modded a fairly active comics board, where a lot of pros and aspiring pros hung out, and we ended up banning any mention of fanfic because it was such a divisive topic and tended invariably to lead to fights when it was brought up. (I kept my fanfic on the down-low; I didn't keep it a complete secret that I wrote it sometimes, but I definitely didn't talk about it or link the identity that I used for the boards - same as my professional writing identity - with my fic.) There was a strong sense in comics fandom at the time that fanfic was a path to being a pro/semipro (most comics artists started out drawing Marvel/DC characters for fun or doing con sketches for cash, and many people hanging around Artist's Alley were hoping to eventually draw in the big leagues) whereas fanfic was something that would actively hinder you if people found out you'd written it or were still writing it, certainly not something you could put in a portfolio and walk up to a publisher's booth to show off, the way fanart was.

There was also a belief - and I'm not judging it for accuracy, I'm just repeating it because I heard it a lot from people at cons - that drawing one copy of someone else's character was entirely legal as long as you didn't reproduce it, whether it was commissioned or sold or whatever. As opposed to fanfic, which was generally considered (by creators, at the time) to constitute an unauthorized derivative work which was therefore illegal or at the very least occupying a legal/moral gray area as long as you kept it out of sight and didn't go putting it out there into competition with the original work.

People in the fanartist/comic-con fandom community were very active online, they just were very separate from fanfic fandom, including people who wrote fanfic for comics. It was really interesting for me being in fanfic-fandom at the same time, because I was also in anime fandom during this time, writing fic and posting it on ff.net and talking about it on an anime mailing list that I ran, and it was sort of this ... whole other world, I guess, very separate from the comics message boards and the small-press cons I was going to for the art and comics fandom side. I was always careful to keep the two from crossing.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this historical viewpoint--it makes sense (not that I agree with the assumptions therein)

[princessofgeeks]

This is fascinating and I've wondered about it myself. I will be following the thread with interest.

[marthawells]

I think that's a good point.

On a tangent, art was one of the things I really missed when online fandom first started up. I started reading SW fanzines probably in 1980 or so, right before The Empire Strikes Back came out, and the gorgeous art work (sometimes with color covers) was a huge draw. (Artists were paid for their art in copies, just like the writers.)

When I did fanfic websites in the late 90s-early 2000s, we were able to host art, but hardly any artists ever wanted their art put online, because there was such a cottage industry of ebay vendors stealing fan art from fan sites and sometimes zines and using it on products. (Shirts, magnets, pillows, stamps, anything you can think of.) I think that may have led to more artists selling their fan art at cons and online, with the idea that it was going to be sold anyway and at least if the artist did it first that might lessen the chance of the art being stolen.

(Looking back on it, it feels like there was a ton of stealing in fandom at that time. Dealers would buy zines, take them apart and copy them, and sell them at their tables at cons and get away with it unless the editor or one of the contributors happened to see it. People copied entire web sites, including stories and fan-written episode guides and art, and put them up on their own hosting service and claimed them as their own. (They didn't make any money from stealing web sites, they just wanted a site of their own so they took one.) It was all kind of bizarre.)

[cyprinella]

there was such a cottage industry of ebay vendors stealing fan art from fan sites and sometimes zines and using it on products.

Honestly there still is, with the huge proliferation of print on demand product sites (zazzle, cafe press, etc.). I've even heard of people who have successful original designs on those POD sites get stolen and show up on Amazon!

[marthawells]

Yes, I've heard about that. It's a huge problem there.

[tozka]

Hello! May I link this post over at thisweekmeta, as part of a round-up on the recent responses to fandom + money?

[arduinna]

Oh, sure! And you can add me to the list of "all my public posts are linkable" folks. :)

[tozka]

Thank you! :D Will do.

[silveradept]

Art has always been the weird one in the family of fans, and yes, there's different rules and norms around it and always has been. I talked a little about it in my own post, but it sort of came down to the ease in which art can show itself off as having a process and a technique and a style, where fic is fic, regardless of what typeface you put it in, and that helped to establish art as Different.

Thanks for the history of convention participation, too. There's a lot that I don't know, not having been there, if that makes sense.