Friday, September 14, 2012

An Experiment in Crowdsourcing

One of the most popular things I do on this blog is "Stories You Haven't Read (But Should Have)."  Which is nice, because it's also something which I really enjoy doing; bringing attention to fanfics that don't get enough attention.  There's only one problem: little-known fanfics are, by definition, little-known.  The odds of me having read a wonderful story that hasn't gotten the wide acclaim it deserves are pretty minuscule, after all.

So, I'm going to try enlisting some help.  If you know of a fanfic that unjustly missed its fifteen minutes of fame, I'd like you to tell me!  In a week or so, I'll do a SYHR(BSH) post, and I'm hoping that the collective readership of this blog will be able to point me towards a few gems that would otherwise never have made it onto my radar.

Here's the rules:

1.     E-mail a link to the story to me.  You can feel free to discuss your favorite underrated story in the comments as well, but if you want me to read it and post about it, send me an e-mail.  I don't care where the story is hosted, as long as you can link to it.

2.     The point of this exercise is to find little-known stories, so the front page of EqD and the FIMFiction feature bar probably aren't great places to look.

3.     Sending me a link is not a guarantee that I'll feature that story.  Obviously if I think the fanfic you sent me is terrible, I'll exclude it.  But if (and based on past experience, I fully expect this to be the case) I get far more recommendations than I can possibly read, let alone post, without dedicating my every waking hour to ponyfiction, then a lot of good stories might end up left out in the cold.  But fret not!  I'll hold onto those e-mails, and continue to use them in future SYHR(BSH)s.

4.     Short stories only, please.  I'm not going to put an arbitrary word count on it, but use common sense.  Yes, I realize there are little-known gems with six-figure word counts, but for practical purposes I'm going to have to restrict this to smaller works.

5.     If you know of more than one story that is desperately in need of attention, go ahead and tell me.  But please don't send twenty or thirty links; I am but one man, after all.

And that's it!  Hopefully this goes well--finding a wonderful story you'd never even heard of is one of life's great pleasures, if you ask me, whether it's fanfic or not.  I can be e-mailed here; thank you in advance!

3 comments:

  1. Word count? ;_; You're crushing me. I don't think The Somewhere Cycle is what you'd call 'short'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nor is my 3 million word mpreg/vore/self-insert/donkey/self-mutilation/French harlot clopfic. :(

      CURSE YOU!

      Wait, what?

      Delete
  2. Just an update: I've gotten over a dozen responses so far, woo-hoo! I'm replying to people's e-mails as I read the stories, so if you haven't heard from me yet, don't take that as a sign that I hate you or something.

    Also, if you've got more recommendations for little-known fanfics, by all means keep sending them in! Even if I can't post everything on Friday, there's no such thing as too many underrated stories. Fuel for future posts is good.

    ReplyDelete