Let me give an example from my fandom, The X-Files (apologies if someone else's talked about this before, haven't read all the comments). We have a central archive called The Gossamer Project. Anyone who wants can submit their fic, and it will be uploaded; it's also uploaded automatically from our major centralized posting location (Ephemeral). While a lot of fic isn't up there, I'd say that the majority is, probably as much as 80% of the het and gen written during the series's run (less for the slash, as there were slash-specific archives, and also a lot of shipping wars), and at least 50% of what was written post-series.
What it means is that, I, Amal Q. Fangirl, can watch an episode, like it, and then go to Gossamer's sort by episode spoilers function, and get a whole page of fic that is set post that episode. If I find a story I like, I just click on the author's name, and I get taken to the page with all of her fic on the archive. It means if someone mentions in passing that they like work by such-and-such an author, I can go to Gossamer and see if her stuff's there. It means that, although our fandom was pretty hard-hit by the Geocities closure, much of our fic was already safe, because it was at Gossamer.
Archiving your fic is about giving it a bigger audience, preserving it for future generations of fans, etc, etc, etc. I mean, I'm one to talk, since I've never submitted to Gossamer (because it's archetecture really sucks, IMHO, and I'm a relatively new fan who's not so willing to give up things like HTML coding for my fic). The benefit of AO3 is that it's a ready-made archive for any fandom, and that people who write in more than one fandom can archive their fic there all in one place. (I haven't uploaded to AO3 yet, but will, probably, inshallah, at some point.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-03-18 05:37 pm (UTC)What it means is that, I, Amal Q. Fangirl, can watch an episode, like it, and then go to Gossamer's sort by episode spoilers function, and get a whole page of fic that is set post that episode. If I find a story I like, I just click on the author's name, and I get taken to the page with all of her fic on the archive. It means if someone mentions in passing that they like work by such-and-such an author, I can go to Gossamer and see if her stuff's there. It means that, although our fandom was pretty hard-hit by the Geocities closure, much of our fic was already safe, because it was at Gossamer.
Archiving your fic is about giving it a bigger audience, preserving it for future generations of fans, etc, etc, etc. I mean, I'm one to talk, since I've never submitted to Gossamer (because it's archetecture really sucks, IMHO, and I'm a relatively new fan who's not so willing to give up things like HTML coding for my fic). The benefit of AO3 is that it's a ready-made archive for any fandom, and that people who write in more than one fandom can archive their fic there all in one place. (I haven't uploaded to AO3 yet, but will, probably, inshallah, at some point.)