I had to ponder an answer to this one for a while, and this is what I’ve decided to say.
This message, to me, reeks of “well you should be grateful you’re even getting this”. And you know what? I am grateful for each one of those reblogs (which, I’ll admit, a majority are from me either reblogging myself to hit different time zones or responding to comments), I am grateful for everyone who decided to click that reblog button and leave some kind of feedback. I’m grateful for the people who just reblogged it. But this exact “you should be grateful” attitude is wherein the problem lies.
I’ve been writing fic since I was 13. I’m almost 28 now. I know how it goes, and I’ll admit I am fairly new to posting fic to Tumblr. However. I do recall a time here where the ratio between likes and reblogs was drastically reversed. Where reblogs outnumbered likes 3:1.
What’s changed? Readers and their attitudes towards authors. I’ve been called out as ungrateful for deciding not to respond to asks wondering when the next chapter was coming out. I was told I should be happy people are asking because they like the story.
I got shit when I decided to stop making tag lists because the effort was not worth the payoff. Less than half the people on those lists never interacted with the story, but they still enjoyed the free content and saw the need to ask about the next update. How is that fair?
I had someone demand I should make a character a certain way in order to make the story more realistic, and when I declined and asked people to stop demanding things of me, that same person saw fit to send me a nasty follow-up email, claiming they’d “requested” it despite that word not even being in the original ask. I was compared to other authors on the site, I was called rude, I was called a bitch. It was wholly unfair to receive such messages but I had a wonderful outpouring of support from my friends and fellow authors.
The environment here is incredibly toxic, and it needs to change before every fic writer decides to leave. Then all readers will have to complain about is the lack of fic writers. Guess what? You can’t have it both ways. We’re people, but we’re not being treated like people. We’re being treated like machines who don’t have lives outside of writing or outside of Tumblr.
We’re being patronized, insulted, accused, and bullied because what we’re writing either isn’t what people want or it’s because they want more, more, more without giving back to the author in the form of reblogs or nice comments.
So while I’m absolutely grateful for the support I’m receiving, I’m also asking for a little more understanding about what it means to be a writer on Tumblr.
