this is where i say, cool

Related to the entire Unfunny Prowriter making vague whining sounds about fanfic that we all celebrated in song and rhyme and whatnot, but much more interesting.

From comments, sapote3:

It took me a couple of days to source this, but I think it's pretty accurate. According to the US Department of Labor, there are about 43,000 people who make their living through writing (including screenwriting, ads, movies, etc), but only about 8,000 that make a living writing for newspapers, periodicals, books, and directories (all combined). According to the Writer's Directory 2010, there are about 23,000 writers in the world who have published at least one book in English, including nonfiction works. The Directory of American Writers and Poets (again, including nonfiction) lists about 8,000 names. According to Wikipedia, fanfiction.net has two million users, and I don't even know how big lj fandom is - lj searches top out at 2,000 people. Heck, there as many active Dreamwidth accounts as there are writers who have published any book in English ever - 23,000ish.

So while my numbers are vague, I think the idea that we're a smaller population then prowriters is pretty laughable. - link to comment

Can I say "Welcome to Thunderdome." in portentous tones now and be culturally relevant or is that too melodramatic? Because come the fuck on. My log alone for the last two years numbers above one thousand authors and I only read in four fandoms actively. AO3--which is in beta--has 6946 authors to date.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, yeah. This is not an improbable conclusion.

Note: non-English speaking work is not represented, though now I would be interested if we could even get world-wide statistics in publishing both English and non-English works. I guess individually pulling from each country's equivalent department would do it if it were public information, with a variable for translated works (I once read Basic Instinct--yes, Basic Instinct--in Finnish). Especially since from what I can tell, I think several of the non-English language fanfic communities are extremely robust and growing fairly rapidly.

PS Do we count non-published doujin? And someone give me the right spelling on that one, google and wiki were not helpful.

I am posting so I won't buy boots, okay? Okay.

ETA: Okay, off-topic, but there's an awesome discussion on hobby mining here. Hobby mining! Tell me that is not awesome.

Comments

[concinnity]

I haven't been following along, but someone actually thought there were fewer fanfic writers than profic writers? *boggles* Like, fanfic writers are a small, vocal mob coming after them with pitchforks? Uh, I can point to over a million fanfic stories, and I'm barely in fandom.

Also, as far as I can tell, the stories in English are a drop in the bucket. The Russians are a wordy bunch, for example. Lots of novel-length stories. :D

*boots* *sighs*

[seperis]

I was thinking of Japan, too, especially in the manga-related, and Spanish has to have a fairly active community.

[everysecondtuesday]

The Russians are a wordy bunch, for example. Lots of novel-length stories.
Apparently I need to learn Russian.

[everysecondtuesday]

Do we count non-published doujin? And someone give me the right spelling on that one, google and wiki were not helpful.
It's "doujin" for short or "doujinshi" (if you're, you know, writing it out in romaji). The u indicates a lengthened "o" sound. Also, doujinshi tends to refer to published work, in my experience--just not professionally published work. So you can get fannish doujinshi, but you can also get doujinshi that's written in an original 'verse with original characters. There are a lot of doujinshi artists and writers who publish online as well as on paper for distribution at K-Books and similar, though, and I've always been kind of confused if it refers these days also to people who publish online alone.

My point, though: I would totally count a lot of doujinshi. No one wants to know how towering the stacks were in my dorm room during my year in Tokyo. (I was afraid there would be an earthquake and I would be crushed in my sleep because my desk was right next to my bed, but I couldn't stop.)

I am posting so I won't buy boots, okay? Okay.
I am still not over those boots, just so you know.

[zulu]

Hah, that is certainly very true. Thanks for the pointer!

[ratcreature]

The trade union for authors in Germany has about 3600 members according to wikipedia, but that includes journalists and translators, who are organized in the same union.

[reginagiraffe]

Physical or mental, there's *always* going to be more non-professional anything than professional ones. Artists, [pick your sport] players, poker players, book critics, dancers, chess players.

Only the top slice of any group are going to be good/lucky enough to actually make money at it.

KK is an idiot.

[liviapenn]

Yeah, this is what I was going to say. Cooks, musicians, photographers, costume-makers, people who make websites-- of course there is a much bigger pool of amateurs at all these things than pros. There's probably more thousands more people who brew their own beer at home than there are guys making a living owning breweries. The vast mass of humanity doesn't just sit around and passively wait for a Real Professional to provide *everything* in their lives in a handy prepackaged box. Everybody has *something* that they do for themselves that they *could* pay someone else to do for them; that's kind of what a hobby is, barring things like sports.

[ratcreature]

I'm actually not sure that is true for all things, as there are a number of activities that are almost always done professionally if you need it done, but are rare as a hobby occupation (unlike various artistic endeavors where it is more the reverse). Like for example things like making machinery and other non-decorative metal work. Sure some do this kind of thing as a hobby and DIY thing, but my guess is the majority of these people have learned it as a job or at least a related trade (I mean, my grandfather did this as a hobby after he retired, but his work had been along similar lines). However the investment for metalworking gear is relatively high (getting worse the more precision you want), the space requirements (at least a large garage) are large too, and most people don't feel a need for machinery that they couldn't just buy (and much cheaper), so it's not all that popular as a hobby, but a ton of people work in the industry that makes metal into specialized machine parts and ultimately machines.

Then there are occupations that are just not possible in most countries non-professionally. Miners for come to mind. I guess you can have some Klondike gold-rush situations where non-miners try at mining, but a lot of people work professionally as miners, and I have never heard any significant number does this as a hobby.

[coraa]

That is cool.

And it's one of the things I think about when someone says, dismissively, that they don't care if they put off the fanfic writers because fanfic writers are a small but vocal special interest group, and they don't care if that small but vocal group is pissy and doesn't buy their books. I wonder if they know how many people there really are in ficwriting/ficreading communities.

[seperis]

Communities, plural, which is what makes it kind of hysterical. I mean, there are tons of communities.

[abbylee]

I think it does generally "small but vocal minority of readers", but I also think it's a silly argument to make. It kind of makes me think of professional sports folks purposely pissing off fantasty team players. Of course your super passionate fans are going to be a small minority of all fans. But they're also the ones who are *invested*, so they're worth listening to, even if you end up deciding to go another way.

(Seriously, listening to folks talk sports and trades and all that is not that different from meta on media.)

[eight_demands]

This is great to know - thank you so much for posting this info and trying to dispel this myth.

[seperis]

I keep boggling at two million--that's a lot of people.

[majoline]

Your icon enthralls me. It blinks. Very shiny.

[innocentsmith]

I would be frankly amazed if there weren't well over 23,000 writers on The Pit. And then there's the related question of how many people read fic, whether or not they write it. Have a look at the Alexa stats for ff.net - those are some not inconsiderable numbers, especially if you look at the average time spent on site, which is way, way higher than practically any other site I can think of.

[seperis]

This. And there's a lot spread over mailing lists and messageboards and journaling sites.

Thanks for the link! I was staring at alexa in awe for that. Wow.

[lobelia321]

I love this quote! How fantastic!

And here I thought I was part of a sekrit subversive niche phenomenon....

[ascetic_hedony]

We have a local club of rockhounds/lapidiarists. They maintain workshops for cutting, polishing and carving stone, usually semiprecious, and also run jewellery making workshops.

Every month or so, they organise trips to find more rocks. Western Australia has some pretty decent findings (although very strict laws around what you can take from where).
It's not quite hobby mining, though it has some similarities.

[solar-cat.livejournal.com]

Doujin is correct. (The whole word is doujinshi.)

I would also note that fandom_counts has 34,040 members, and that comm was created in an effort to show how many fannish people were on LJ (during... Strikethrough? I can't actually remember now. XD ).

[seperis.livejournal.com]

thank you!

Oh man, I forgot about fandom_counts. Even given RP journals added, that is a lot.

[fyrdrakken]

I don't think that's the kind of argument the so-called "pro writers" are going to really respond to -- on the one hand, I think they'd be more likely to take pride in being one of the rare lucky talented ones who achieve publication (and continue to use that as evidence for their own specialness), and on the other, twenty or thirty or forty thousand still isn't a really scary amount when compared to the book-buying public as a whole. If they don't get that fanfic amounts to free advertising for their published works, I don't see them as being really scared by the prospect of fannish boycotts of their books.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

For the purposes of that post and the latest brouhaha, this particular argument was relevant in terms of numbers. That's why it's an interesting statistic to have around.

[kuhekabir.livejournal.com]

i would be sooo cool to get a number that included all the languages...wow...

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping somewhere we can get a full count for that.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

I was sitting with a fellow writer at a book event, oh about a year ago. We had a total of three people and of that three, one was just a friend who stopped by to say hello. I would say it's terribly disheartening but, really, typical. Moving on. He and I had a LOT OF TIME to chat, and he and another mystery writer did an analysis (by putting together some stats on con attendence, communities, etc.) and he figured that we were all competing for the same, roughly, 20,000 active readers. You'd think mystery would be bigger than that, but I agreed with his assessment. There are not that many readers, but they buy a lot of books.

Along the same lines, I was in a Borders last night for my writer's group. We try to get together twice a month for a rousing critique session, but it's been a little sporadic lately, so I hadn't been in this store for a couple of months. Nothing on the shelves. Nothing. They are paring back inventory like you wouldn't believe. They've gutted their mystery inventory (weeps) and arranged tables and whatnot to conceal that they probably cut their inventory by, oh, a good 30%.

[cyprinella]

I am honestly surprised the Borders is still up and running.

[spaggel.livejournal.com]

Makes me wish I still had my "My fandom just fucked your boyfriend and wrote bad slash about it" icon.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Appropriate icon would be so appropriate right now.

[sapote3.livejournal.com]

... eep.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I liked your comment!

[wildestranger.livejournal.com]

Not that the rest of your post isn't fascinating, but I find myself immensely curious about why/how did you read Basic Instinct in Finnish?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I was an exchange student and I felt really edgy to check that out of the library to help improve my Finnish. Hilarity ensues.