i've been thinking about this a lot lately so i wanted to put it out somewhere into the world. i think there's a relationship between the amount of fanfiction available for a fandom and the level of interaction or attention that you can expect from that fandom. i haven't written enough fanfiction for other smaller fandoms or bigger fandoms to be able to say this with absolute certainty but i do notice a trend between the amount of engagement i get in the harry potter fandom versus other fandoms that i've written for, most notably, the grishaverse. and i'm sure there's plenty of factors that could explain this but i think one of them is supply.

to me it seems that it's a lot more difficult to get any sort of notoriety or attention or interaction in the hp fandom when it comes to fanfiction in large part, at least i think, because of the amount of content there is. i obviously haven't been on every single fanfiction archive that houses harry potter fanfiction, but i can say with a fair bit of certainty that of the big ones that i've seen, harry potter usually has the most, if not some of the most, fanfiction published under its category. the sheer volume of work under harry potter is mind-blowing, most fandoms, even if you combine the fiction produced for it across multiple platforms, will not come even close to competing with the amount of harry potter fiction there is on a single site.

and i think a result of this is that a lot of readers of harry potter fiction aren't really concerned with interacting with a piece of work whether it be through comments/reviews or kudos or reblogs on tumblr because there is just so much out there and they know that people are going to continue to produce more and more work for harry potter regardless of whether or not they engage with the work they read or with the author. and if you didn't get a chance to become well-known in the early to mid 2010s when i feel like fandom was a lot more active and people were reading it more in general (at least that's how it seems to me but i also disappear a lot so i'm possibly not a good judge on this aspect), then you'd have a really hard time achieving that now organically.

and while i know that being well-known is not something that all fanfiction writers aim for, if engagement from readers and the amount of reviews or kudos etc that you receive is important to you, then we kind of have to acknowledge that being well-known makes it easier to achieve that.

anyway, i didn't really notice this up until maybe the past year. i just kind of put it down to the fact that i'm simply not as good of a writer as other fanfiction writers, and that's ok, it's not something that bothers me, it's just a fact of life. practice makes perfect for improvement but sometimes no matter how much you practice you plateau while other people are able to go farther. and i definitely wouldn't be making this claim 5 or 6 years ago because i have enough self awareness to recognize that the stuff i was producing back then was simply not up to par with what other writers were producing.

i say this because i've recently written a few works for the grishaverse and the response i get from other grisha fans is, i dare to say, wildly different (in a good way) from the response i get from the harry potter fandom. and while it could be down to my improvement as a writer, i don't think my writing has changed all that much in the past two years (because i disappear too often to be able to get any writing done). i would say everything i've written in the past 2 or 3 years is all equally good and yet the response between the two fandoms is vastly different. and while this is also due to the fact that right now the grishaverse is probably at its peak popularity because of the show, i also think it has to do with the size of the fandom, or at the very least, the amount of available work that there is for it.

people love to leave comments and kudos or reblogs, even when you're writing an already popular ship and risking your stuff being buried under a mountain of other work out there. i've never had the pleasure of interacting with readers as much as i have over the past few months. i really had no idea what to do with it because it was so unexpected. because there's so much less fic available for it, people seem to be a lot more eager to leave encouragement or feedback because they know that it motivates writers to provide them with more content for their favourite character or favourite ship. not to say that if a writer gets absolutely zero feedback on their writing they'll stop writing for that fandom, but it certainly is a very big incentive. and i feel like with a big fandom that's not there as much because people know that there is always more content coming regardless of if they interact with the work they read or not. or they think that if they don't interact with it, someone else will because it's such a big fandom and the result ends up being that....no one interacts with the written work. and i'll admit, i've been guilty of that kind of behaviour even if it was unconscious. i'm much more inclined to leave feedback or engage with work from a smaller fandom because i know there's not as many people and i want the author to feel good and know that i enjoyed their story.

obviously there's way more factors that impact engagement with your work like the characters you write about, the popularity of that ship or genre etc but i feel like that's for another time otherwise this will turn into a 10 page essay. i don't even know where i was going with this to be honest, it was just an observation i made and wanted to share. but if you want to take away anything from this i guess if you're having trouble getting people to read your work or leave you reviews, it might not be a reflection of your ability as a writer, it might just be the amount of other fiction out there.