Languages, updates and statistics on fanfics
Some people may wonder about the statistics in the world of online fanfics, but this work tries to elucidate this little-looked at aspect.
Faced with the variety of topics and genres on the web, I take the literary phenomenon of Harry Potter, who promoted the fanfic genre (created decades before J.K. Rowling's work appeared) and who is currently the greatest exponent in terms of the number of "amateur" works published in cyberspace.
For the following calculations, I take the site fanfiction.net, because it has a story search system, of a clearly effective and specialized level, according to genre, author, finished work, number of words, etc. Unlike other more popular sites but that do not have such a specialized search system to the extreme.
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Harry Potter Works as of September 24, 2014.
538450 - total works
275850 - complete works
That means that of the 100% of total works, only 51% are complete.
Of the 49% in progress (262600), 88% are abandoned works (231088).
So we conclude that only 12% of the works are regularly updated (35809).
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Now focusing on the stories in Spanish, we have the following:
538450 - total works
39800 - total works in english
Total works in Spanish represent 7% of total works in English (428600 = 79%) and other languages (109850 = 21%, including Spanish).
Total works in Spanish represent 36% of total works in other languages excluding English.
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Finally, let's take a closer look at the updates of the stories in Spanish.
39800 - total works in spanish
22850 - complete works in Spanish
That means that of the 100% of total works, only 57% are complete.
Of the 43% in progress (17114), 88% are abandoned works (15060).
So we conclude that only 12% of the works are regularly updated (2054).
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Final conclusions:
I was surprised that the percentage of abandoned stories in Spanish is the same as the overall percentage of abandoned stories in English and other languages excluding Spanish. This demystifies the rumor that Spanish speakers always leave their stories behind, unlike English speakers and other authors of other languages. We all sin for the same thing and in the same percentage.
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Personal suggestion of the author:
An 88% of abandoned stories in Spanish (and in English and other languages), is itself a serious problem that makes the fanfics genre condescendingly seen at best by outsiders. Apart from the low percentage of stories that are updated regularly, there is the problem that most of those stories are updated very slowly, not one chapter every month, but one chapter every six months or two years on average!
I think the problem lies in the fact that the authors get too excited when it comes to writing a fanfic, without having a proper planning of the global history that their story should have, that is, "they just jump into the pool".
My advice would be that as authors, you have to imagine two things: how your fanfic starts (which is surely what everyone does, otherwise they would never start writing it in the first place); and secondly, you have to imagine how your story ends.
If you can imagine how your story begins and ends, I assure you, 60% of the fanfic is already in the bag. I repeat, my cat advice is to imagine how your story begins and ends.
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