this is where i say, cool

[seperis]

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

[shelf]

The sapphire mine looks like fun.

The guy who mowed my lawn (when I lived in a place that had a lawn) took off a month every year to go gold prospecting. Not quite mining, as I don't think there was any digging or canaries involved, but a similar idea.

[sapote]

I think the key here is defining mining - there aren't many hobby shaft miners*, but there are lots of hobby surface miners.

--
*of course, there are lots of people who make a hobby of crawling through caves - some of them manmade or man-expanded in earlier, more pickaxe-happy times - but every spelunker I've ever met is kind of YOU CHIP AT THE CAVE I CHIP AT YOUR FACE intense about cave ecology, and I get the impression that a lot of cave sites are federally protected?

Alaskan here

[sholio]

*laughs* Yeah, I was just going to say something along those lines ... I came down to this thead thinking about shaft mining and going, "Hobby miners! Holy crap!" and then realized that you guys were talking about going out on weekends and sluicing some gravel -- everybody here in Alaska does that. *g* I've done it just for fun. I know about a dozen people who own mining claims and go out on weekends, including neighbors and co-workers and even my in-laws.

In fact, my father-in-law keeps trying to find gold on our land -- we own eleven acres in a former gold-mining district ... of course, almost everywhere in Alaska is a former gold-mining district when it gets right down to it. We had to tell him to stop because he was digging big holes in the woods and I was afraid the dogs, or me, were going to fall in. Also I had nervous fantasies of coming home to find that he'd strip-mined an acre or two with the backhoe which we also own.