Fresh off a sexy book party, GalleyCat has slash on the brain. For years now, obsessive, creative, and somewhat dirty-minded readers have been churning out slash fiction–recording forbidden sexual encounters between male characters in their favorite stories.
Earlier this week, author Annie Proulx fumed over Brokeback Mountain slash fiction, noting that her fans won’t stop mailing “ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites” of her original short story.
Last night, GalleyCat caught up with Bill Tancer–an online intelligence agent with a new book about how web statistics affect our daily lives. He had some tough love and shocking statistics for authors squeamish about fan fiction.
“There’s no way to stop people from interacting with your content. You can ignore or embrace it … to complain about it isn’t going to make it better. Fan fiction makes up 33 percent of all content revolving around books [on the web].”