Six years ago my friend and I were standing nervously on a brand new train heading out over the water towards points unknown. The newness of the line itself was making us second guess the directions we had been given the same way anything unusual and not quiet high profile inevitably will. My friend was slightly more nervous than I was, mainly because they were her directions, that is she had looked them up and translated them, so any wacky adventures that resulted from us getting lost were her fault.
“I think we’re on the right train,” I said as she nervously fidgeted.
“What do you mean?”
I pointed up the car to a cluster of girls dressed in standard Japanese school girl uniforms and towing (each one of them) black rolling suitcases behind them. This was an odd scene for three reasons: 1) it was Saturday and they could theoretically wear whatever they pleased, 2) it was Saturday morning at that … so it’s not like they were coming from Saturday cramschool, 3) this train was heading in completely the wrong direction for the airport … in fact there were no schools, houses, or businesses of any kind where this train was ultimately headed.
And yet when we got to the last station, sure enough, the school girls were still with us. Outside on the long promenades of the convention center there were hundreds more (some not in uniform) but all of them with black rolling suitcases.
While I was going to school in Japan I learned a lot about publishing that flies directly in the face of the American publishing house business model. The event my friend and I were attending was one of many we would attend. It was a doujinshi convention, Osaka Comic City, a one day free-for-all where fan artists and fanfic writers set up tables to sell their stuff. Yes that’s right, sell. The don’t pay licensing fees, the don’t have permission from the creator to do it, the whole thing would give the American industry absolute nightmares and yet the Japanese don’t seem all that concerned about it.
Why? Probably because in addition to filling up their black rolling suitcase with fan produced porn starring their favorite characters, people at Comic City also buy a shitload of official merchandise: books, toys, games, apparel, calendars.
The American industry looks at fanworks and sees only someone else making money off of their work without giving them a cut. The Japanese look at the same activity and see it as someone else riling up the community around one of their products, getting everyone excited and their wallets open, and then throwing them in an environment where the community literally encourages as much spending as possible. The portion that goes into the pockets of the fans after the expenses they’ve had to cover upfront is tiny compared to the $$ that goes to the original publisher while doing virtually nothing.
These fan communities are able to form because basically everything in Japan is released first in serial form: comics, novels, TV shows. American publishing has gotten away from this under the false belief that if you don’t give people a complete product right away that they will be less interested in buying it.
But readers, especially fiction readers, are not passive receivers of information … they think about it, they try to predict the way the story is going, they identify which characters they like, which characters they don’t like and who would have hot hot sex together if given the opportunity. Then in between each droplet of official content, there develops a whole universe of unofficial content that keeps the reader engaged and interested in the story. When you publish a book in complete, final form, the reader becomes interested, but fantasies and theories are underdeveloped in favor of turning the page. Strong ones will come back when the book is done, but most works of literature at least try to be stand-alone … meaning that by the time you’re in the position to sit down and write a fanfic exploring mysteries of character X a lot of the loose ends may have been tied up already, a lot of secrets already revealed and maybe those mysteries already solved for you.
At fluffy-seme we publish webserials because we believe the secret to making a profit off of digital publishing is not charging for content but creating engaging creative communities, and the serial form offers readers the opportunity to fantasize, reinterpret, remix the work as the story develops.
And yes … we like the porn too 
Admin, President and all around person in-charge of fluffy-seme. Doesn't like writing bios, but likes writing pretty much everything else. Can be reached at seme@fluffy-seme.net 
