PSA: please appreciate your fanfic writers!!

jesseshimada:

It’s a late Thursday, just nearing midnight. You’re laying in bed, and you can’t sleep. You pull up the browser on your phone and go to your favourite fanfiction website. The fanfic you love so much has updated!! You read it; it’s an amazing update. After finishing that, you idly browse for new fics of your favourite ship. You read a few, and then you finally go to sleep. It’s a habit of yours, reading fanfiction late at night. It helps you sleep.

Fanfiction is always there for you to read – and it’s free!!

But do you ever wonder what goes into this wonderful world of free fanfiction that caters to your every desire and dream?

We are writers. We spend countless hours writing, erasing, rewriting, asking our friends to find the mistakes that we can’t see because we’re so tired of looking at our own words. The coffee we consume, the hours that we skip sleeping to write – all of this is for you and for your enjoyment.

We don’t get paid for any of this. We write, we post our works on public archive websites for people to read, and that’s it. All of our hard work is for the people, because we don’t make money off of what we do.

Do you know what you can do to help a writer? It’s always nice to leave kudos on someone’s work, but it’s even more kind and more personal to leave a comment. Did you enjoy what you read? TELL THE AUTHOR. We spend so much time writing what we do; it’s always so rewarding and amazing to see a new comment from someone, telling us that they appreciate our work and that they loved it.

If you read a fanfic, and then just close the tab, the writer is never going to know that you liked it. By not leaving comments, writers assume that all of these views + no comments = people read their fanfiction and didn’t enjoy it. That can seriously harm a writer’s motivation to continue to write. You might not think that it’s important, but for a writer, it’s really all we have.

I have a fic with hundreds of views, and yet only a few comments. There are some kudos on it, but without people telling me that they’ve enjoyed it, I can only assume that it’s not good enough. Maybe I should just stop writing. 

That is what it feels like.

So please, I beg of you guys, all of you readers out there: PLEASE TELL YOUR AUTHORS HOW MUCH YOU ENJOY THEIR WORK. Even just a simple “This is great; I love it!!” comment can be the difference between their motivation to continue, or their final decision to quit writing.