How to find good fic in a fandom you haven't read (much of) before

[dysprositos]

This is a post which started as a comment in response to this post ('Topic: How do you find goodfic') by
brownbetty. It's probably under Dreamwidth's maximum comment length, but as I suspect it's longer than the original post, it seems politer to post it here.

Anyway, this is my super-exhaustive guide to all the ways I have ever used to find good fanfiction in a fandom I was unfamiliar with.

Step 1. Find a story you like in the fandom. If you really don't know where to start, and no one else you read seems to be in the fandom:

A. See if TV Tropes has a Fanfic Recommendations page for the fandom.
B. Browse through the Archive of Our Own or Fanfiction.net.
C. Check if it's a Yuletide fandom and read all stories written for it until you find one you like.
D. See if the fandom has a storyfinders community or a newbieguide post, or is one of theFourthVine's "Fandoms I Have Loved".
E. Google or search through delicious for "[fandom] fanfic", "[fandom] fic recs", "[character]/[character] slash/het", "[fandom] big bang", &c.
F. Look through Metafandom's delicious for posts tagged with the fandom, since meta on a fandom often includes links to stories the meta writer likes.
G. If you have a Dreamwidth account, do a content (Site and Journal) search for "[fandom] [[fan]fic[tion]] [rec[ommendation][s]]". (Not literally that string. Try "due south fic", "due south recs", "due south", and so on.)

Step 2. Is the story:

• on a fic or fandom community on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, or similar service?

A. Usually stories are posted (or cross-posted) by logged-in people with accounts on the relevant service. Follow them back to their journal and (if it's not empty and/or friendslocked) use the next process.
 

B. Read the other fic in your fandom on the community, using "[fan]fic[tion]", "[fandom]", and other tags as necessary.
C. Try the community profile for members lists and sister or parent communities. Follow these links back to their source for more stories and recs.

• on an author's LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, or a similar journal?

A. More fics by the author:

1. Look at the tags on the post. Click the one which is most fandom-and-fiction-specific. (So "spn fic" wins over either "fic" or "spn".) Read the fic you find there.

2. Look at the sidebar and user profile. If there's a link to a master list of fic, or a fic journal, archive account, or webpage which the author keeps more updated, follow the link and read in your fandom. In the latter two cases, follow the applicable processes below. There may also be journal-site communities dedicated to fic in the fandom of interest, possibly narrowed down to particular pairings, characters, or tropes, in which case, see the first process.

B. Recs by the author:

1. Check their sidebar and user profile to see if they have a separate recs journal, a delicious account, a private recs page, or a master recs post.
2. Look through their tags:

a. Under "r" for "rec[ommendation][s][: [fandom]]" and "reading[: fandom]"
b. Under "f" for "[fan]fic[tion] rec[ommendation][s][: [fandom]]"

c. Under the first letter of the fandom name for "[fandom] [[[fan]fic[tion]] rec[ommendation][s]]"
d. [If the author seems to prefer one particular pairing or character] Under the first letter of the pairing or character name the author likes
e. Under "p" for "pimp[ing[: fandom]]"

3. Check their friends or reading list; fans of a feather flock together. Either read, skim, or Ctrl+F for stories or recs in the fandom you're looking for.

• on a private site?

Go through the site to try to find other fic (obviously), recs pages, and (as a last resort) friends or writing associates of the author, who may also write in the fandom and possibly even write well. Try to find out if the author has an archive account, or is on a journaling site, and apply the other processes as applicable.

• on a panfandom archive (Archive of Our Own or Fanfiction.net)?

A. More fics by the author:

1. Click the author's name. This should produce a (possibly multipage) list of fics written by the author, in descending order by last update date.

a. At the Archive of Our Own, you can limit the results by fandom as well as by author.
b. At Fanfiction.net, you can sort the results in alphabetical order by fandom by clicking "Category". Scroll down to your fandom and see what else the author has written. (You do have to keep doing this every time you come back to the page.) If the author writes a lot of crossovers, and in particular if they did so before FFN instituted its Crossovers category, you should also try Ctrl+F-ing for the fandom name, abbreviation(s), and character(s) you're interested in. Also note that crossovers with Buffy: the Vampire Slayer are or used to be in a category called "Buffy X-overs".

2. The profile of the author may link to other sites used by the author, some of which may be more comprehensive than others. Follow these links and use the relevant process.

B. Recs (sort of) by the author:

1. In FFN, try the "Favorite Stories" tab. (If the author has a lot of these, you may have to sort by Category here as well.) Also check out the "Favorite Authors" tab. If, in your meanderings around FFN, the same stories keep getting recced over and over by good authors and they don't seem to be obviously badfic (e.g., My Immortal), they're often worth giving a shot.
2. At Archive of Our Own, "Bookmarks" gives you stories the author has bookmarked, and "Recs Only" yields, well, recs. I don't know how to sort or limit this page by fandom, though. Ctrl+F is your friend.

• on a single-fandom (including a character- or pairing-focused) archive, or an archive of hand-selected stories in multiple fandoms?

These, like private sites, are pretty idiosyncratic, but some useful features the archive may have are: multiple stories by the same author, recs by the author, recs by the archive administrator(s), a search function, links to other archives. If it's an archive of hand-selected stories, try reading the other stories in the archive in the fandom.
 

Step 3. None of the leads from step 2 panned out! Now what?!

A. Try to find the author on other sites, even though they didn't link to any other sites in a readily accessible place. Try Googling (or searching searchable archives and journal sites) the author's username and obvious variations thereof. Also try Googling the story title or a unique phrase from the story.
B. If the story header or master post links to other stories--"inspired by", "remix of", "remixed as"--try those stories.
C. Does the story header list valuable betas, with links? Try going to their sites and looking for recs or for other stories they've betaed for.
D. Look at the comments (on a journal post) and reviews. Follow the makers of thoughtful comments or reviews back to their lair(s), and of course if another story is recommended or discussed positively in the comments, follow links or Google the title and/or author(s) to read it.
E. Google for recs lists or "what I'm reading" posts that include the story you enjoyed or its author.
F. E-mail, PM, or otherwise contact the author (using only publicly available contact information, because no matter how much you liked the story and no matter how desperate you are for fic of a similar quality, hiring a private detective to find out who the person is so you can contact them is creepy and possibly illegal) and beg for recs.
G. Write the fic you want to read in the world.
H. Bookmark, as a set of bookmarks, all possible searches recommended above and elsewhere, and set these pages to open every new session. F5 repeatedly. Weep bitter tears of fannish unfulfillment into your beverage every time you go to a con, and scare everyone away. Cry yourself to sleep at night, cradling printouts of the one good fic you did find to your chest to comfort yourself.
I. Pick a new fandom.

For more methods, check out the comments to the original post! 

Comments

[brownbetty]

Maybe the cut is not working because you've opened a tag you haven't closed, at “step one”?

Also, wow, you're scarily competent at this. How many authors have you contacted for recs? That's where my fear of personal contact would rear up and prevent me from progressing.

[dysprositos]

I should have said this guide includes every method I've ever used to find good fic... Step 3's F, G, and H are the ones I haven't tried. (Well, technically I've tried G.) I'm not sure if I've tried C yet, either. Everything else, though... yeah, sometimes I get desperate. (OTOH, I haven't tried every single thing here for any one fandom, either, so it's not quite as bad as it looks. Although now that I have it all written out for future reference, I probably will! The steps I left out are "sit there staring at the screen, pondering other possible methods of attack", which used to take up ~80% of my search time.)

[dysprositos]

Maybe the cut is not working because you've opened a tag you haven't closed, at “step one”?

You convinced me to look at the HTML... it appears that DW thought that the end-div tag at the end of step one was in fact its attempt at closing the cut, when it was supposed to end the indenting, and so it helpfully replaced it with an extra end-cut tag, which left the tag you noticed floating about unfinished (except that DW also helpfully replaced its original end-cut tag with an end-div--I had noticed that, but not the other). So you pretty much got the problem! Thanks! :D

[livrelibre]

[here from brownbetty's post] I just have to say that this is impressive, useful and amusing!