so! the infamous Read by the Author tag - by Elany

[bluedreaming]

This was shared by Elany/Elany on 20 June 2024 and posted here with permission. I thought it was interesting!

So! The infamous Read by the Author tag, right.

I got curious about whether the state of that tag is really as bad as it seems, so I got some numbers from the past, well, technically past 20 years but past 2006-07 there's no works with that tag and even before then some were very likely backdated. Still, I'm including those also because 2015 marks an interesting shift.

tl;dr it's bad you guys lmao

longer version (with numbers!)

There's 1,268 fics in that tag, of which only 683 or 53,8% are actually podfic.

Half of all works in the tag are mistagged.

Interestingly enough, of those 1,2k nearly half (584 or 46%) have been posted in the past year alone, but of those only 39% have been tagged correctly, which is far below the average.

That does seem to be in line with the trends in the past few years, the year before that had only 66 or 33% of works in the tag being podfic, of combined 196 works, but after that the percentage slowly starts climbing

• with 89/165 or 54% in 2021/22
• and 96/173 or 55% in 2020/21

which is. I mean. That's a whole 15-20% decrease in a single year.

oof

As we move out of 2020s, the first thing that happens is that the number of works just plummets. It goes from

• 173 in 20/21
• to 67 in 19/20
• to 13 in 18/19

and that's the highest it gets after that.

Interestingly enough, for the next four years, from 2015 to 2020, between 65 and 80% of works tagged with Read by the Author are actually podfic, and it's not a steady decline either. e.g. it's 70% in 19/20, but only 64% in 16/17. Of course there's also only 8 works with the tag in 16/17, so the difference betweem 65% and 80% is basically just one fic.

But then from 2015 onwards? (or backwards, I suppose.) Either way, between 2007 and 2015 every single work in the tag is a podfic.

Again, I feel like a lot of these might've been backdated which makes the use of these sort of stream of consciousness tags less likely, rather than actually in any way proving that the tag used to be used correctly and now it's not. If anything, all of this shows that it's always been misused to an extent, but also that it has, objectively, gotten progressively worse. 33% is a miserable statistic and 39% isn't much better.

😩

But! Silver lining! More authors are narrating their works now than possibly ever before! Or at least ever before on ao3.

haha

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Side note: I (bluedreaming) tagged this metadata as it's post metadata; hopefully that makes sense!
This post is also linked to from amplificathon.

Comments

[mific]

So when you say they're mistagged, what do you mean? That some people think if they've read their own fic they should use this tag?

[satsuma]

not op but just looking at the tag I’d say its often not clear what the author means—the tag is just used with no context on something which is not/does not contain a podfic. However some do seem to be using read as a shorthand for “beta read”, aka, the author self-beta’ed the fic as in this set of tags: «Not Beta Read, Actually kinda beta read?, Read by the Author» so I presume that’s the general source of the confusion

[peasina]

Oh man >.< That's terrible! Interesting stats, thank you for sharing!

[bluedreaming]

Not OP, but I did share this here 😂
Yes, what satsuma said! It’s possible that they mean it was self-edited contrasting with the “not beta-read” flavour of tags. Another possibility (more recent) is the chatty style tags - someone might just type in “author” and pick from the auto-suggested list, maybe adding other non-canonical tags as well. (Perhaps like “read by the author” “instead of sleeping” etc.)

[bluedreaming]

That’s good to know about the wrangling. Since they’re working on no fandom tags again, maybe it’ll happen in the next five years now 😭

[bluedreaming]

I was glad Elany was okay with me sharing it here; I thought it would be good to record in some way!

[bluedreaming]

Yup, pretty much! Thank you 💕

[kitsuneheart]

The number of times this tag is paired with something like "Author is sleep deprived" or "author apologizes for nothing" also irks me.

[bluedreaming]

Is it possible to use those tags to filter out non-podfic? Or perhaps they’re not filterable 🤔