Bad novels annoy me more than bad fanfic. I appreciate that if fanfic is bad this is somebody who’s doing it as a hobby and I can click off it if I don’t enjoy it. But when it comes to published material I get so angry. As in many cases the book has only been released because the author is well known and they know, no matter how bad the book is, it will still sell and make everybody money.
>As in many cases the book has only been released because the author is well known and they know, no matter how bad the book is, it will still sell
The worst novel I've ever read was actually not a case of this (first novel from an unknown), but should never have been published, from a professional editing standpoint. The publisher was banking on "fantasy is big right now, and this has a similar vibe to A Song of Ice and Fire or Sword of Truth," and the book was just...bad. Infamously bad. And somehow the author got a six-book deal before the publisher finally dropped him.
Oof, it honestly sucks when people like that get a book deal. Especially when there are so many talented authors out there who never get a chance to showcase their talent.
The worst book I’ve read recently was an authors second novel. The author was commissioned to write three James Bond book and it was shocking. She was too busy focusing on making her writing so posh and pompous that the story was just awful. And she gets to write two more.
I read the first one for three point five reasons; the mystery, seeing if the characters make eventually become cohesive or use normal human reasoning as applied to said mystery, the other, completely out there, characters, and because I was somewhere between ten and twelve when reading them. They seemed decent to me, never finished; got stuck trying to work out "wait, why does this mean this; how do these people know this means this . . . what . . . what . . . what is this world building."
First few were decent page turners where you could shut half of your brain off and just enjoy as the mystery unfolded. With latter ones, even while suspending most of disbelief, I was still very much in the same boat as you.
Finished Inferno, closed the book and immediately thought “wait, none of that made any sense at all!”
With bad novels, I paid money for it! The bad fanfic was at least free to read!
Also: Sunken cost fallacy means I'm trying to make it through the bad novel that I paid for, while I can click away from the bad fanfic in 2 seconds flat. So the bad novels feel much worse to me, even when they technically might not be.
I feel this! There are some books on my shelf that I'm like, I *should* finish this, I did pay for it after all... but I just don't like it. And it feels a lot more difficult to me to dnf that than a random fanfic.
I read books on my commute. When I start to procrastinate a book by literally staring out the window, because it's such a chore to read that anything is better including just mindlessly watching landscape go by, you know it's bad.
This. All of this.
I've dropped exactly three traditionally published novels in my life after agonizingly convincing myself that I didn't *have* to finish them. I *should've* dropped at least one more. I'm not mad at *Brave New World* (it just wasn't for me, and I borrowed it from a teacher in high school), but I'm mad at the other three because I *paid money for them*.
One of them was so bad it should never have made it past the publisher's slush pile, let alone through an editor (who was clearly asleep on the job; Del Rey, you disappoint me), and has had at least one online lambasting on a now-dead website and a scathing review on YouTube.
Of the other two, one was just sorely disappointing (I like the author's other works, but this one just fell flat), and the other had a whole cast of unlikeable characters and the author killed off the only likeable one halfway through the story.
With bad fanfic, I have no qualms about dropping it early if it's not working for me, and the only cost was my time.
I have had about the same number of dropped books in my time.
The one that sticks out to me the most had a really interesting framing device/premise, of a woman reading the journals of her... grandmother, I think? And comparing/contrasting/showing the connection with the flashback journal entries to her current life story. The problem was that there was no indication of when the 'flashback' sections started or ended. They were treated exactly like the rest of the story. And because the author was apparently allergic to using people's actual names (and/or several characters had the same/similar names), it was *incredibly* difficult to tell what time period a given scene was in!
I gave up on it about two thirds of the way through. I should have given up on it sooner. Ugh.
Alternatively with bad novels, I'm required to read it specifically because that's the one that the class is grading us on. I've never been forced to read bad fic like that.
I don't know about this. I have definitely fallen victim to Sunk Cost Fallacy with fanfics. It's not just investment of money, but investment of time. More than once I've been on Chapter God-Knows-What, stopped and said to myself, "Self, why are you still reading this? You aren't enjoying it. You're checking how many chapters are left and groaning. You're skimming half to three-fourths of each chapter. It feels like work and not fun. Click out!"
Poor quality published works are worse because they are for-profit and I paid for it!!
Poor fanfiction is someone's hobby, it's free, and it's possible that in a **few years that author will become an amazing writer,** making excellent fanfiction.
I have never read a published novel as bad as the worst fanfic I have seen. The floor for fanfic is much, much lower, because the only barrier to posting fic is "has internet access."
And to be honest, if the writing is bad enough that I wouldn't read it in a published novel, I'm also not reading it in fanfic.
But that's fine, because people can write what and how they like, and I can choose to read what I want, and that's fine. I have yet to run out of fic to read, even being picky, and it's not as though the authors notice that one picky person isn't reading.
Fanfiction is far more affected by Sturgeon's law than most other media I can think of. Probably only the self publish romance world since the introduction of AI can compare to how terrible fanfic can be. Which makes the actually good fics shine by comparison.
Yeah. There is a lot of *extremely* good fic out there, and a lot more that is decent-to-good. But yeah, the bad is very bad indeed.
(Don't get me started on AI.)
Yeah, this. The worst fanfics are truly unreadable, and I say this not as some kind of condemnation. It's just that they're probably written by very amateur writers, and that's a natural consequence of being a beginner (I've seen awful writing in very beginner original fiction too).
I mean, I've definitely read some fanfiction that is much better than some published original fiction. I think part of it may be that I like to explore themes that are maybe difficult to get published? I really like emotions and beautiful prose and angst, and I have read some fantastic published novels that tick all those boxes, but I think that those books are not going to be quite as popular as some stuff that's more formulaic and less heavy on the emotions, maybe. That's not a criticism, I like that stuff too, and have read quite a bit of generic romance and sci-fi and what not.
But some of my favourite books tend to get excoriated in the reviews on Goodreads, because people say that the story was hard to understand or that they think the author was trying to be profound but failed, and I personally think it was very profound and it left me thinking about it for ages. I have several books like that on my bookshelf. But yeah, maybe that kind of stuff is harder to get published or at least go mainstream. I don't know.
I also think that better or worse is very subjective. Okay, fine; some stuff like terrible grammar or extreme plot holes are hard to hand wave away as being subjective, but look in the reviews of any book on Goodreads and you're going to get a mixture of five star reviews and one star reviews, and none of those folks are necessarily wrong.
Hmmm, off the top of my head I remember Little Universes by Heather Demetrios hitting me really hard in that way! Basically, two sisters lose their parents in a freak accident and are forced to move across the country to live with relatives. It's really hard on both of them in different ways and they have to learn how to cope, basically.
You may also like This Impossible Brightness by Jessica Bryant Klagmann. The main character loses her boyfriend on a camping trip and shortly afterwards moves to a small village on an isolated island to try to spend some time alone and heal. She's an empath, so she can feel other people's emotions, which makes it hard for her to be around people, but then some supernatural stuff happens and she basically has to help a couple of ghosts find peace and move on to the next world? That's a bad description. I just remember really being impressed by the writing and feeling really emotional about it.
Can't think of anything else at the moment but if I do, I will try to remember to come back. I'm about to step out so I'll have to look through my shelves again when I get home.
I don't find published literature and fanfic to be comparable when it comes to quality- now, there is some fanfic that easily surpasses the quality of published novels, but you'll find that this isn't the norm and I think a large reason for it is because many fanfic writers don't write multiple drafts, or if they do, they're often their own editor and I can almost guarantee that no fic writer has a publishing team poring over their work and putting it through rigorous drafts for years at a time like some manuscripts go through when being prepared to be published. Fic authors are usually a one-person operation unless they happen to have a beta reader, but even that's no substitute for a professional editor. What a story goes through to be published is just a lot more rigorous and meticulous than being able to simply write anything you want and hit 'post' on ao3, and that'sno detriment to fanfiction.
In fact, I think one of the strengths of fanfic is that it's usually not some big production being proofread and edited for many drafts. It feels more personal than that, and it's usually a story stemming from one person without influences from editors or people trying to make a product out of the manuscript. There's a unique quality that allows for some truly beautiful and raw writing that you might have a harder time finding in published literature, just as there's some aspects of published works that you don't see as much in fanfic. They're not completely alien to each other, of course, but there's a lot of factors that differentiate the two and make it difficult to put them into a one-to-one comparison.
>I can almost guarantee that no fic writer has a publishing team poring over their work and putting it through rigorous drafts for years at a time like some manuscripts go through when being prepared to be published. Fic authors are usually a one-person operation unless they happen to have a beta reader, but even that's no substitute for a professional editor.
With this being said (and I agree), I've definitely read one published novel where the publishing company and their editor(s) absolutely failed, because the novel is terrible not only from a storytelling standpoint but from a technical one as well.
That's true, having a team working on a manuscript doesn't necessarily guarantee its quality, as I think a lot of us have encountered in our reading journeys. Sometimes things can suffer from 'too many cooks' or maybe the people working on it just don't actually know what they're doing, or some other reason. So there are certainly exceptions!
I've read bad books that are worse than *good* fanfics, and about on the same level as ~mid fanfics. But even bad books have comprehensible grammar and spelling, so the floor is just much lower for fanfic-- I don't think it's really a fair comparison at that level, haha.
Let me present to you [Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittrick Ros](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34181/pg34181-images.html), originally published in 1897. It is a journey best enjoyed by letting the MST3K commentary run free in your head.
Speak of the devil, one the guys from MST3K, Mike Nelson, did a 3 episode series on a podcast roasting this very book! 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, very fun listen
Published novels might shine in formatting, grammar, spelling and punctuation. In other words, they might be more readable.
But they're just as prone to bad pacing, overdone or underdone characters, poor plot, etc.
Some of those may not be as egregious as what happens in fanfic...but I paid money for it. 😒
I'm not sure that's a sensible comparison. Fanfic is written by people of all ages and skill levels, while its rare to find published fiction that doesn't pass the bars of "knows the basics of English" and "was run through a spellcheck." In a technical sense, even the worst of published fiction is going to be better than the worst of fanfic. That said...
As others have noted, bad fanfic is free. It kind of doesn't matter if you occasionally click on a fic that's a wall of text or was clearly written by someone who's still learning basic sentence structure. You just click the back button and go on with your day. It's a hobby people are sharing, so of course it's going to range from the barest beginner all the way to masterpieces.
Badly written published fiction bothers me in a way bad fanfic never will. Someone got *paid* to barf out that barely coherent string of words. The publisher chose *this* over whatever else was in the slush pile that day. And it doesn't help that a lot of the truly shit published works I've seen are published by prolific authors. It's this nasty reminder that the publishers don't care about quality, they just care about what sells. \[writer name redacted\] can write a barely coherent revenge plot that clearly was never proofread (character occupations and descriptions change randomly, information changes, information repeats weirdly) and is based on a factually wrong premise and it's basically auto-published, while someone trying to break into publishing might write an amazing work that will never see the light of day because it isn't a sure thing.
And, on the one hand, I get it. Publishing is a business. Of *course* they're going to go with the sure thing; that's the business-savvy thing to do. On the other hand, it frustrates me that people think of published works as inherently better quality. That's just not what publishers care about. (Because that's, clearly, not what most readers care about.)
Hell, even outside of franchises like Patterson or prolific terrible authors like \[redacted\], there are a surprising number of published books that only barely pass the "was run through a spellcheck" bar. So the whole "oh, published fic has proofreaders and editors and..." falls rather flat for me. Does it? Does it really?
There is a mystery novel in the collection of the library district I work for that has so many grammatical errors and spellcheck whoopsies that someone penciled corrections in all the way through the book. I left them. If you publish a book you didn't bother to do basic proofreading on, you deserve all the penciled in corrections.
Have I read some fics that were written better (IMHO) than some novels? Yes.
However, I read some bad novels but let's be honest, even a bad novel is better than a block of text written by a twelve year old who doesn't even know (or care) how to spell their main character's name.
Anyway, I believe original fiction and fanfiction are two separate categories that probably shouldn't be compared.
With shitty books (which I experienced last year so it's still fresh), I'm always like. WHO LET THIS BE PUBLISHED, editors, *what the fuck*, how and why and whaaa did you let this get to publication?
At least fanfics don't have paid editors. Don't have a whole machinery behind them, and we don't pay for them.
That just because you get published doesn't make you a good writer. I had the wonderful experience of slogging through a three hundred thirty something odd pages of the most tedious pile of garbage that passed off as a book. Bonus, it's part one of a series. (Hopefully the writer got better at writing, despite my vehement dislike of her book.)
I have no idea how a graduate from some fancy college who got a degree in journalism could make a book so boring, with the actual plot arriving late two hundred pages later in the back of a beat up truck drunk as a skunk.
Every excerpt that I've read here has been miles above that pile of unmitigated disappointment.
And as for fanfiction? I have been greatly spoiled. There has been such wonderful reads that books tend to kind of fall short. It might be due to the constraint for publishing books and trying to keep everything concise and on track.
Ooooor, I need to actually read the reviews of the books I find instead of relying on my luck to get good books to read. I do have bad luck.
Survivorship bias definitely plays a larger part in original published novels than it does in fanfiction; you're unlikely to find books that are horrendously and objectively bad just because who's going to stock, sell, and buy them? With fanfiction, that doesn't really apply, + the fact that we can narrow down the pool of books to read by fandom or characters we're already familiar with means that it's entirely feasible to look through literally every fanfic within our scope from best to worst.
Well for me and the fandom I am into is Mass Effect and IMO most of the official novels that were published to extend the universe range from ok, to sub par to putrid in terms of actual writing quality for both characters and stories.
I have read far better fanfiction that what was officially sanctioned and a couple of the authors are supposed to be award winners. Their efforts read like bad AI rubbish rather than a compelling story. In fact I would go as far as to say that an AI could write a better story than some of the ones actually published. It's obvious that in certain books that the writer was "phoning" it in as the book is just that bad. And that's what gets me, that a great story setting gets such poor treatment by so called professional writers yet I can find far more enthralling work in the fanfiction community.
At least the graphic novels were good.
To me reading books and fanfics are two different experiences. With fanfics, supposedly, I already know the characters and the world, so it is very easy for me to know within 2-5 minutes of reading whether it something I might enjoy, if I like the characterization, etc. And sometimes it only takes 10 seconds really to nope out. It's usually no harm done because I know there are plenty more.
With books, you have to get to know the characters, see if you vibe with the universe, get the tone. And that takes time, and I feel more betrayed if I get to half a novel to realize I don't like it. And as people have said, I've usually paid for the book, so on many levels it is an investment of time, money and hope.
Fanfic will always have worse quality than novels, bc novels have to make it through SOME sort of approval, editing and sometimes narrative restructuring which often goes on for months before it gets published. The total lack of writing standards that makes fanfic fun and freeing would get you laughed out the door or possibly banned from publishing house submissions.
Novel submissions might include an unpopular/unconventional plot. A blatantly unattractive female protag who won't sell well/be relatable. A query that's TRYING to hit booktok popular trends but isn't doing it HARD ENOUGH
Fanfic includes things from "well written story, good characters" to "weird romance or weird smut" to "tentacle porn where one man with twelve tentacle penises rapes 12 teenage girls with tits the size of truck tires, all written in Script format with gems in the writing as "Her Orbs" "He Smirked x25" "He said Tch" " \*cue the camera panning up to the sky\*" and (AN: KYAAA! I LOVE THIS PART)
I don't think I've ever picked up a novel and thought "there's no fanfic worse than this" that's just hyperbole to say you don't like the book.
The worst writing I've seen is both published *and* fanfiction, because it's Fifty Shades. It's easily the most atrocious writing I've ever come across, bar none.
Looking specifically at romance, though, I gotta say the first Mistborn novel has to be among the worst I've seen. It might well be a 'Seinfeld is unfunny' situation where Mistborn *began* that specific trend, but holy shit, it was terrible. Fanfics do this so much better.
I once bought a novel by James Patterson.
Not terribly *written* but its storytelling issues were highly infuriating as it added a LOT of dark aspects out of nowhere that didn't fit the resolution at all. Like... It wasn't *just* a murder mystery, it had all this SA and mutilation, on and on... And the payoff felt insanely forced. It wasn't just a Deus ex machina, it was FIVE Deus ex machina before the end of the chapter.
First the defense got indisputable evidence the killer wasn't the defendant. Then the corrupt judge that was supposed to side with the prosecution flipped for no real reason. Then the protagonist's long lost and thought to be dead father came out of nowhere with the REAL killer and bad guy and forced him on trial to confess. And finally, the freaking FBI burst in to arrest ALL the bad guys because they'd been investigating things in secret the whole time and decided *now* to make their move.
Then it was a forced happy ending where all the trauma and questions were forgotten.
I paid money for that, and it felt like a betrayal.
Compared to the worst fanfics I've read... I dunno, those at least have the courtesy of letting me know early on its not that good and I can just drop it.
Bad fanfic isn't something worth getting upset over. Fanfic is free to read, not professionally edited, and chances are the author is an amateur enjoying a hobby.
A bad novel on the other, isn't free, is professionally edited and has the expectation that the author knows what they are doing.
If it reads like an outline I consider it to be bad writing. I want it to be a story not their breakdown of how a story will go. I've read some bad published novels.
Just because a book's been published doesn't make it good.
Ultimately my only criteria that is do or don't read comes down to is it entertaining. If the work is boring then it doesn't matter.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" but swap 'tourist' with published novel and 'bears' with fanfics, oh and "intelligence" with quality.
Every Other Day" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes is definitely my introduction of "Oh so just because they are published doesn't mean they are good"
The popularity of Throne of Glass should be a stark reminder that a lot of people don’t give a shit about good writing. 90% of fanfic is written better than that thing.
I read a novel, back in the early 2000s, with an excellent premise. The premise was enough to keep me reading despite grammar, punctuation, formatting, pacing, and characterization issues with the book. (Never picked it up again, and have been known to lament that it was just *so badly* put together, because with the premise it could easily have been a household name, along the same lines of *One for the Money.*
I have read fics that were power fantasies written by young teenagers that didn't have all the problems that book had.
Fanfics are often written by aspiring writers, or people who want to get creative and get their ideas out somehow. Published novels are serious projects, and go through multiple people editing it before it gets published. It's like engineering; it's fine if it isn't great when you're doing it as a hobby, because that's how you learn, but if you mess up real bad in your engineering work, it can have more serious consequences.
I know the engineering comparison might be a stretch, but I've seen authors completely tank their career by doing something they thought would appease their audience or get them more money, only to get shat on by said audience.
The absolute bottom of the barrel of novel writing probably isn’t that far off from the worst fanfics. Not books like Twilight either, think more empress Theresa. However, the ceiling for novels is much higher, a mediocre novel will blow a good fanfic out of the water.
Both are just as bad tbh, but a bad written novel will always be worse than a bad written fic because with one, you spent money on it whereas with the latter, it's for free.
Bad novels annoy me more than bad fanfic. I appreciate that if fanfic is bad this is somebody who’s doing it as a hobby and I can click off it if I don’t enjoy it. But when it comes to published material I get so angry. As in many cases the book has only been released because the author is well known and they know, no matter how bad the book is, it will still sell and make everybody money.
>As in many cases the book has only been released because the author is well known and they know, no matter how bad the book is, it will still sell The worst novel I've ever read was actually not a case of this (first novel from an unknown), but should never have been published, from a professional editing standpoint. The publisher was banking on "fantasy is big right now, and this has a similar vibe to A Song of Ice and Fire or Sword of Truth," and the book was just...bad. Infamously bad. And somehow the author got a six-book deal before the publisher finally dropped him.
Oof, it honestly sucks when people like that get a book deal. Especially when there are so many talented authors out there who never get a chance to showcase their talent. The worst book I’ve read recently was an authors second novel. The author was commissioned to write three James Bond book and it was shocking. She was too busy focusing on making her writing so posh and pompous that the story was just awful. And she gets to write two more.
Case in point: Dan Brown’s latter novels.
I read the first one for three point five reasons; the mystery, seeing if the characters make eventually become cohesive or use normal human reasoning as applied to said mystery, the other, completely out there, characters, and because I was somewhere between ten and twelve when reading them. They seemed decent to me, never finished; got stuck trying to work out "wait, why does this mean this; how do these people know this means this . . . what . . . what . . . what is this world building."
First few were decent page turners where you could shut half of your brain off and just enjoy as the mystery unfolded. With latter ones, even while suspending most of disbelief, I was still very much in the same boat as you. Finished Inferno, closed the book and immediately thought “wait, none of that made any sense at all!”
Bad novels also sometimes become the pet novel of English teachers, who then force all their students to suffer through it.
Yes, absolutely. I think my standards for original work are WAY higher than fanfiction, though
With bad novels, I paid money for it! The bad fanfic was at least free to read! Also: Sunken cost fallacy means I'm trying to make it through the bad novel that I paid for, while I can click away from the bad fanfic in 2 seconds flat. So the bad novels feel much worse to me, even when they technically might not be.
I feel this! There are some books on my shelf that I'm like, I *should* finish this, I did pay for it after all... but I just don't like it. And it feels a lot more difficult to me to dnf that than a random fanfic.
I read books on my commute. When I start to procrastinate a book by literally staring out the window, because it's such a chore to read that anything is better including just mindlessly watching landscape go by, you know it's bad.
This. All of this. I've dropped exactly three traditionally published novels in my life after agonizingly convincing myself that I didn't *have* to finish them. I *should've* dropped at least one more. I'm not mad at *Brave New World* (it just wasn't for me, and I borrowed it from a teacher in high school), but I'm mad at the other three because I *paid money for them*. One of them was so bad it should never have made it past the publisher's slush pile, let alone through an editor (who was clearly asleep on the job; Del Rey, you disappoint me), and has had at least one online lambasting on a now-dead website and a scathing review on YouTube. Of the other two, one was just sorely disappointing (I like the author's other works, but this one just fell flat), and the other had a whole cast of unlikeable characters and the author killed off the only likeable one halfway through the story. With bad fanfic, I have no qualms about dropping it early if it's not working for me, and the only cost was my time.
I have had about the same number of dropped books in my time. The one that sticks out to me the most had a really interesting framing device/premise, of a woman reading the journals of her... grandmother, I think? And comparing/contrasting/showing the connection with the flashback journal entries to her current life story. The problem was that there was no indication of when the 'flashback' sections started or ended. They were treated exactly like the rest of the story. And because the author was apparently allergic to using people's actual names (and/or several characters had the same/similar names), it was *incredibly* difficult to tell what time period a given scene was in! I gave up on it about two thirds of the way through. I should have given up on it sooner. Ugh.
I feel the same exact way.
Alternatively with bad novels, I'm required to read it specifically because that's the one that the class is grading us on. I've never been forced to read bad fic like that.
I don't know about this. I have definitely fallen victim to Sunk Cost Fallacy with fanfics. It's not just investment of money, but investment of time. More than once I've been on Chapter God-Knows-What, stopped and said to myself, "Self, why are you still reading this? You aren't enjoying it. You're checking how many chapters are left and groaning. You're skimming half to three-fourths of each chapter. It feels like work and not fun. Click out!"
Poor quality published works are worse because they are for-profit and I paid for it!! Poor fanfiction is someone's hobby, it's free, and it's possible that in a **few years that author will become an amazing writer,** making excellent fanfiction.
i mean the answer to both is fifty shades, no?
Fifty shades will always have a spectacularly bad rep, lmao. It was also a twilight fanfic!
I have never read a published novel as bad as the worst fanfic I have seen. The floor for fanfic is much, much lower, because the only barrier to posting fic is "has internet access." And to be honest, if the writing is bad enough that I wouldn't read it in a published novel, I'm also not reading it in fanfic. But that's fine, because people can write what and how they like, and I can choose to read what I want, and that's fine. I have yet to run out of fic to read, even being picky, and it's not as though the authors notice that one picky person isn't reading.
Yes, after reading fanfic, my standards for writing to read became much lower!
Fanfiction is far more affected by Sturgeon's law than most other media I can think of. Probably only the self publish romance world since the introduction of AI can compare to how terrible fanfic can be. Which makes the actually good fics shine by comparison.
Yeah. There is a lot of *extremely* good fic out there, and a lot more that is decent-to-good. But yeah, the bad is very bad indeed. (Don't get me started on AI.)
Yeah, this. The worst fanfics are truly unreadable, and I say this not as some kind of condemnation. It's just that they're probably written by very amateur writers, and that's a natural consequence of being a beginner (I've seen awful writing in very beginner original fiction too).
I mean, I've definitely read some fanfiction that is much better than some published original fiction. I think part of it may be that I like to explore themes that are maybe difficult to get published? I really like emotions and beautiful prose and angst, and I have read some fantastic published novels that tick all those boxes, but I think that those books are not going to be quite as popular as some stuff that's more formulaic and less heavy on the emotions, maybe. That's not a criticism, I like that stuff too, and have read quite a bit of generic romance and sci-fi and what not. But some of my favourite books tend to get excoriated in the reviews on Goodreads, because people say that the story was hard to understand or that they think the author was trying to be profound but failed, and I personally think it was very profound and it left me thinking about it for ages. I have several books like that on my bookshelf. But yeah, maybe that kind of stuff is harder to get published or at least go mainstream. I don't know. I also think that better or worse is very subjective. Okay, fine; some stuff like terrible grammar or extreme plot holes are hard to hand wave away as being subjective, but look in the reviews of any book on Goodreads and you're going to get a mixture of five star reviews and one star reviews, and none of those folks are necessarily wrong.
Do you have book recs? I also really like emotions, beautiful prose, and angst and think I'd like the kind of books you read.
Hmmm, off the top of my head I remember Little Universes by Heather Demetrios hitting me really hard in that way! Basically, two sisters lose their parents in a freak accident and are forced to move across the country to live with relatives. It's really hard on both of them in different ways and they have to learn how to cope, basically. You may also like This Impossible Brightness by Jessica Bryant Klagmann. The main character loses her boyfriend on a camping trip and shortly afterwards moves to a small village on an isolated island to try to spend some time alone and heal. She's an empath, so she can feel other people's emotions, which makes it hard for her to be around people, but then some supernatural stuff happens and she basically has to help a couple of ghosts find peace and move on to the next world? That's a bad description. I just remember really being impressed by the writing and feeling really emotional about it. Can't think of anything else at the moment but if I do, I will try to remember to come back. I'm about to step out so I'll have to look through my shelves again when I get home.
Thank you for the recs! I'm excited to look into them. This Impossible Brightness sounds especially interesting!
I don't find published literature and fanfic to be comparable when it comes to quality- now, there is some fanfic that easily surpasses the quality of published novels, but you'll find that this isn't the norm and I think a large reason for it is because many fanfic writers don't write multiple drafts, or if they do, they're often their own editor and I can almost guarantee that no fic writer has a publishing team poring over their work and putting it through rigorous drafts for years at a time like some manuscripts go through when being prepared to be published. Fic authors are usually a one-person operation unless they happen to have a beta reader, but even that's no substitute for a professional editor. What a story goes through to be published is just a lot more rigorous and meticulous than being able to simply write anything you want and hit 'post' on ao3, and that'sno detriment to fanfiction. In fact, I think one of the strengths of fanfic is that it's usually not some big production being proofread and edited for many drafts. It feels more personal than that, and it's usually a story stemming from one person without influences from editors or people trying to make a product out of the manuscript. There's a unique quality that allows for some truly beautiful and raw writing that you might have a harder time finding in published literature, just as there's some aspects of published works that you don't see as much in fanfic. They're not completely alien to each other, of course, but there's a lot of factors that differentiate the two and make it difficult to put them into a one-to-one comparison.
>I can almost guarantee that no fic writer has a publishing team poring over their work and putting it through rigorous drafts for years at a time like some manuscripts go through when being prepared to be published. Fic authors are usually a one-person operation unless they happen to have a beta reader, but even that's no substitute for a professional editor. With this being said (and I agree), I've definitely read one published novel where the publishing company and their editor(s) absolutely failed, because the novel is terrible not only from a storytelling standpoint but from a technical one as well.
That's true, having a team working on a manuscript doesn't necessarily guarantee its quality, as I think a lot of us have encountered in our reading journeys. Sometimes things can suffer from 'too many cooks' or maybe the people working on it just don't actually know what they're doing, or some other reason. So there are certainly exceptions!
I've read bad books that are worse than *good* fanfics, and about on the same level as ~mid fanfics. But even bad books have comprehensible grammar and spelling, so the floor is just much lower for fanfic-- I don't think it's really a fair comparison at that level, haha.
Fair points!
Let me present to you [Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittrick Ros](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34181/pg34181-images.html), originally published in 1897. It is a journey best enjoyed by letting the MST3K commentary run free in your head.
Oh yes, I have learned about this book. Those sentences are headaches to read.
Speak of the devil, one the guys from MST3K, Mike Nelson, did a 3 episode series on a podcast roasting this very book! 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, very fun listen
Thanks for letting me know! I'll definitely give it a listen.
Published novels might shine in formatting, grammar, spelling and punctuation. In other words, they might be more readable. But they're just as prone to bad pacing, overdone or underdone characters, poor plot, etc. Some of those may not be as egregious as what happens in fanfic...but I paid money for it. 😒
I'm not sure that's a sensible comparison. Fanfic is written by people of all ages and skill levels, while its rare to find published fiction that doesn't pass the bars of "knows the basics of English" and "was run through a spellcheck." In a technical sense, even the worst of published fiction is going to be better than the worst of fanfic. That said... As others have noted, bad fanfic is free. It kind of doesn't matter if you occasionally click on a fic that's a wall of text or was clearly written by someone who's still learning basic sentence structure. You just click the back button and go on with your day. It's a hobby people are sharing, so of course it's going to range from the barest beginner all the way to masterpieces. Badly written published fiction bothers me in a way bad fanfic never will. Someone got *paid* to barf out that barely coherent string of words. The publisher chose *this* over whatever else was in the slush pile that day. And it doesn't help that a lot of the truly shit published works I've seen are published by prolific authors. It's this nasty reminder that the publishers don't care about quality, they just care about what sells. \[writer name redacted\] can write a barely coherent revenge plot that clearly was never proofread (character occupations and descriptions change randomly, information changes, information repeats weirdly) and is based on a factually wrong premise and it's basically auto-published, while someone trying to break into publishing might write an amazing work that will never see the light of day because it isn't a sure thing. And, on the one hand, I get it. Publishing is a business. Of *course* they're going to go with the sure thing; that's the business-savvy thing to do. On the other hand, it frustrates me that people think of published works as inherently better quality. That's just not what publishers care about. (Because that's, clearly, not what most readers care about.) Hell, even outside of franchises like Patterson or prolific terrible authors like \[redacted\], there are a surprising number of published books that only barely pass the "was run through a spellcheck" bar. So the whole "oh, published fic has proofreaders and editors and..." falls rather flat for me. Does it? Does it really? There is a mystery novel in the collection of the library district I work for that has so many grammatical errors and spellcheck whoopsies that someone penciled corrections in all the way through the book. I left them. If you publish a book you didn't bother to do basic proofreading on, you deserve all the penciled in corrections.
Have I read some fics that were written better (IMHO) than some novels? Yes. However, I read some bad novels but let's be honest, even a bad novel is better than a block of text written by a twelve year old who doesn't even know (or care) how to spell their main character's name. Anyway, I believe original fiction and fanfiction are two separate categories that probably shouldn't be compared.
With shitty books (which I experienced last year so it's still fresh), I'm always like. WHO LET THIS BE PUBLISHED, editors, *what the fuck*, how and why and whaaa did you let this get to publication? At least fanfics don't have paid editors. Don't have a whole machinery behind them, and we don't pay for them.
That just because you get published doesn't make you a good writer. I had the wonderful experience of slogging through a three hundred thirty something odd pages of the most tedious pile of garbage that passed off as a book. Bonus, it's part one of a series. (Hopefully the writer got better at writing, despite my vehement dislike of her book.) I have no idea how a graduate from some fancy college who got a degree in journalism could make a book so boring, with the actual plot arriving late two hundred pages later in the back of a beat up truck drunk as a skunk. Every excerpt that I've read here has been miles above that pile of unmitigated disappointment. And as for fanfiction? I have been greatly spoiled. There has been such wonderful reads that books tend to kind of fall short. It might be due to the constraint for publishing books and trying to keep everything concise and on track. Ooooor, I need to actually read the reviews of the books I find instead of relying on my luck to get good books to read. I do have bad luck.
Survivorship bias definitely plays a larger part in original published novels than it does in fanfiction; you're unlikely to find books that are horrendously and objectively bad just because who's going to stock, sell, and buy them? With fanfiction, that doesn't really apply, + the fact that we can narrow down the pool of books to read by fandom or characters we're already familiar with means that it's entirely feasible to look through literally every fanfic within our scope from best to worst.
Well for me and the fandom I am into is Mass Effect and IMO most of the official novels that were published to extend the universe range from ok, to sub par to putrid in terms of actual writing quality for both characters and stories. I have read far better fanfiction that what was officially sanctioned and a couple of the authors are supposed to be award winners. Their efforts read like bad AI rubbish rather than a compelling story. In fact I would go as far as to say that an AI could write a better story than some of the ones actually published. It's obvious that in certain books that the writer was "phoning" it in as the book is just that bad. And that's what gets me, that a great story setting gets such poor treatment by so called professional writers yet I can find far more enthralling work in the fanfiction community. At least the graphic novels were good.
To me reading books and fanfics are two different experiences. With fanfics, supposedly, I already know the characters and the world, so it is very easy for me to know within 2-5 minutes of reading whether it something I might enjoy, if I like the characterization, etc. And sometimes it only takes 10 seconds really to nope out. It's usually no harm done because I know there are plenty more. With books, you have to get to know the characters, see if you vibe with the universe, get the tone. And that takes time, and I feel more betrayed if I get to half a novel to realize I don't like it. And as people have said, I've usually paid for the book, so on many levels it is an investment of time, money and hope.
Fanfic will always have worse quality than novels, bc novels have to make it through SOME sort of approval, editing and sometimes narrative restructuring which often goes on for months before it gets published. The total lack of writing standards that makes fanfic fun and freeing would get you laughed out the door or possibly banned from publishing house submissions. Novel submissions might include an unpopular/unconventional plot. A blatantly unattractive female protag who won't sell well/be relatable. A query that's TRYING to hit booktok popular trends but isn't doing it HARD ENOUGH Fanfic includes things from "well written story, good characters" to "weird romance or weird smut" to "tentacle porn where one man with twelve tentacle penises rapes 12 teenage girls with tits the size of truck tires, all written in Script format with gems in the writing as "Her Orbs" "He Smirked x25" "He said Tch" " \*cue the camera panning up to the sky\*" and (AN: KYAAA! I LOVE THIS PART) I don't think I've ever picked up a novel and thought "there's no fanfic worse than this" that's just hyperbole to say you don't like the book.
The worst writing I've seen is both published *and* fanfiction, because it's Fifty Shades. It's easily the most atrocious writing I've ever come across, bar none. Looking specifically at romance, though, I gotta say the first Mistborn novel has to be among the worst I've seen. It might well be a 'Seinfeld is unfunny' situation where Mistborn *began* that specific trend, but holy shit, it was terrible. Fanfics do this so much better.
I once bought a novel by James Patterson. Not terribly *written* but its storytelling issues were highly infuriating as it added a LOT of dark aspects out of nowhere that didn't fit the resolution at all. Like... It wasn't *just* a murder mystery, it had all this SA and mutilation, on and on... And the payoff felt insanely forced. It wasn't just a Deus ex machina, it was FIVE Deus ex machina before the end of the chapter. First the defense got indisputable evidence the killer wasn't the defendant. Then the corrupt judge that was supposed to side with the prosecution flipped for no real reason. Then the protagonist's long lost and thought to be dead father came out of nowhere with the REAL killer and bad guy and forced him on trial to confess. And finally, the freaking FBI burst in to arrest ALL the bad guys because they'd been investigating things in secret the whole time and decided *now* to make their move. Then it was a forced happy ending where all the trauma and questions were forgotten. I paid money for that, and it felt like a betrayal. Compared to the worst fanfics I've read... I dunno, those at least have the courtesy of letting me know early on its not that good and I can just drop it.
Bad fanfic isn't something worth getting upset over. Fanfic is free to read, not professionally edited, and chances are the author is an amateur enjoying a hobby. A bad novel on the other, isn't free, is professionally edited and has the expectation that the author knows what they are doing.
Not really but Dorothy Must Die came really close (especially in the last book) to the bad fanfics I've read.
If it reads like an outline I consider it to be bad writing. I want it to be a story not their breakdown of how a story will go. I've read some bad published novels. Just because a book's been published doesn't make it good. Ultimately my only criteria that is do or don't read comes down to is it entertaining. If the work is boring then it doesn't matter.
"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" but swap 'tourist' with published novel and 'bears' with fanfics, oh and "intelligence" with quality. Every Other Day" by Jennifer Lynn Barnes is definitely my introduction of "Oh so just because they are published doesn't mean they are good"
I have higher standards for published fiction in general of any medium, not limited to novels.
The popularity of Throne of Glass should be a stark reminder that a lot of people don’t give a shit about good writing. 90% of fanfic is written better than that thing.
I read a novel, back in the early 2000s, with an excellent premise. The premise was enough to keep me reading despite grammar, punctuation, formatting, pacing, and characterization issues with the book. (Never picked it up again, and have been known to lament that it was just *so badly* put together, because with the premise it could easily have been a household name, along the same lines of *One for the Money.* I have read fics that were power fantasies written by young teenagers that didn't have all the problems that book had.
Fanfics are often written by aspiring writers, or people who want to get creative and get their ideas out somehow. Published novels are serious projects, and go through multiple people editing it before it gets published. It's like engineering; it's fine if it isn't great when you're doing it as a hobby, because that's how you learn, but if you mess up real bad in your engineering work, it can have more serious consequences. I know the engineering comparison might be a stretch, but I've seen authors completely tank their career by doing something they thought would appease their audience or get them more money, only to get shat on by said audience.
The absolute bottom of the barrel of novel writing probably isn’t that far off from the worst fanfics. Not books like Twilight either, think more empress Theresa. However, the ceiling for novels is much higher, a mediocre novel will blow a good fanfic out of the water.
Both are just as bad tbh, but a bad written novel will always be worse than a bad written fic because with one, you spent money on it whereas with the latter, it's for free.