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

[seperis]

This is probably the coolest thing to come out of my post. And yeah, if it didn't have such huge upfront (and dangerous) costs, it might be more popular.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I think in many fields there are plenty of people interested as a hobby, and read about it etc., but you can't really do much of anything in those fields as a hobbyist.

Like you can be interested in particle physics as a hobby certainly, but it's not like you could build yourself an accelerator or any other relevant experimental setup in your garden shed (and probably a good thing too or we'd end up in a comic book universe of tinkering supervillains developing death rays...*G*), so you can't actually do particle physics actively as a hobby.

So it is only fairly accessible occupations that have a larger number of hobbyists than professionals that essentially produce similar things. But the more and the more expensive stuff you need, the faster the number of people trying it for fun drops I suspect. One only has to look at the number of vidders vs the number of fanwriters (and how the number of vidders has increased once digital video editing became common place).

[minxy]

For the record, there are sites on the web that give instructions on how to make your own, small, particle accelerator in the privacy of your own city block. It's just, you need a really long hallway.

whut?

(The costs are pretty ridiculous, though.)

Oh, also, I'm convinced a friend of mine would cop to hobby mining, but she called herself a rock hound, and rarely chipped away at underground mines (they were mostly quarries, etc, I think.)

[lobelia321]

how to make your own, small, particle accelerator in the privacy of your own city block.

I bet Rodney McKay could do it. :-)

[feanna]

If it's possible to build a mini-Stargate in a basement (SG-1) then Rodney can do this no problem!

[seperis]

this makes me so happy you have no idea.

[bristow]

Forget a particle accelerator, the average hobbyist could just opt for their own nuclear reactor in the basement and cut down on the utility bills. My mother researched the whole "can the average joe build a nuclear reactor" for the US Government in the early 1960s (like 63-65) while working at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and proved 50 years, pre-internet, that anyone with a undergraduate understanding of nuclear physics could not only figure HOW to build a nuclear bomb but could easily procure everything they needed from available technical components - that's how fast the technology invented for the atomic bomb was a key part of consumer electronics. Only thing that was moderately hard to get was uranium and even that wasn't that hard. I always giggle when I remember Rodney's childhood reactor...

[majoline]

Um, I actually have a death ray? The prices aren't that bad? Especially if you wait for a sale at the right time of the year or get some of the used parts they occasionally have?

http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=27_82

The best thing about United Nuclear is their incredibly reasonable prices for being all hand-made, in house components. Proud supplier and completely above board.

Plus: everything the hobby nuclear physicist needs as well.

[seperis]

Oh my God.

If Child finds out about this? End of the world scenario today.

[majoline]

LOL But it's science! How can you deny science?

[concinnity]

Sweet baby cheese on a cracker, this is *amazing*. I needed this information with my morning coffee, I really, really, did.

[mecurtin]

damn. I just wasted a bunch of time trying to find a "a death ray would be nice" panel at girlgeniusonline.com so I could make you an icon. I may have to get the flying monkeys to do it ...

[dysprositos]

Is this (top right) the panel you were thinking of?

[mecurtin]

No, I thought there was another one ... like, someone gives her a ring, and she mumbles "why are they always giving me jewelry? What's wrong with nice death ray?"

... or something?

[out_there]

I don't know if it counts, but there are groups in melbourne who explore underground drains and caves as a hobby, proving that people do all sorts of weird stuff for fun.