This is an extra-scary time for – well, just about everyone, but particularly for the folks in our community who are financially precarious. We know that some in our community rely on sales of various types of fan crafts and merchandise as part of their normal income, and some need the extra income now because of hardships related to the COVID-19 crisis.
We also know that there are a lot of people in our community who want to help others out financially and would love a chance to get some new fandom stuff while stuck at home and bored – or to buy faraway friends a little pick-me-up!
In order to connect the latter folks with the former, we’ve set up a directory of fan creators who are relying on these sales for income right now. We’re calling it the Fandom Central Directory of Creators, or Fandom CDC. It includes people selling handcrafted items as well as those with print-on-demand stores like Redbubble or sites like Patreon – anyone who is using their fan creations to keep afloat.
If you’d like to sort or filter the spreadsheet by fandom, you can copy it to your own Gdrive, but be sure to check back every few days for an updated copy!
This is an exciting post to make! 2020 is a scary year, in many ways. But the auction has been a way for us to channel our fear and anxiety into creativity, community-building, and much-needed financial support for some really amazing organizations. (Two of them even reached out directly to thank everyone involved!)
We had more creators than ever before – 573! – step up to offer just under 750 fanworks in 298 fandoms. We had sixty fan laborers sign onto a brand-new project, joining the Regiment of Fan Laborers to support FTH authors – and 34 people donated to thank the ROFL for their work. We ran a crafts bazaar for the first time, helping nearly a dozen fan crafters connect with people who wanted to support the auction’s causes.
And guys, we broke a lot of records.
This was FTH’s biggest single year yet.
Our official total for the year...
Get ready for it...
Is...
And when you add in the contributions from our unofficial Fancrafts Bazaar, our total rises to...
$32,727!
That sparkly number also doesn’t include the extra pennies and dollars that so many of you donated to cover processing fees. We decided not to record those, but we appreciate them, and we know the recipient organizations do too.
That money you all raised is already being put to work by small organizations that are doing extraordinary work: providing life-saving food and water to refugees crossing the desert, creating safer environments for LGBTQ kids in K-12 schools, fighting for the rights of trans people, helping to elect Black women, working with communities to reverse pollution and protect wild spaces, educating the public about genocide in all its forms, creating a path out of hatred for members of white supremacist groups, advocating in court for immigrant children, helping disadvantaged voters make their voices heard, and so much more.
Over the past four years, you all have come together to raise
Let that sink in for a moment.
Transformative fan creators and the fellow fans who love their creations have come together from hundreds of different fandoms to raise over $100,000 for these organizations!
No matter what happens in November, we’ll be back next year.
No matter who our president will be for the next four years, we in the US will have an uphill battle to protect the most vulnerable among us and make our society more just. We hope you’ll come back too.
Here’s what you can do in the meantime:
1) Join the FTH Fanworks community - if you’re a creator, you can post your works there, or you can just join it to see all the great fanworks pop up on your reading page! (Note: Last year we had a comm for 2019 creations - this one is a new comm, but is for fanworks from any FTH auction, so you won't have to join a new comm every year.) You can also follow fth2020fanworks over on Tumblr, where we'll reblog fanworks.
2) Keep up with the groups you have contributed to. Every single group on this list is doing extraordinary work, and every single one of them is doing it on a very small budget. We’ve already made their financial situation a bit more comfortable with the auction. (Again: if you didn’t see their notes of appreciation, you should go look!) But these groups will certainly be grateful for more financial support in three months, or six… and they also need your support in non-financial ways.
One great thing you can do for each of these groups, whether or not you donated to them during the auction, is to sign up for updates to stay current with their work. Simply being aware of the problems they are fighting, and the work they are doing to counteract them, is also valuable.
3) Run your own fandom-specific auction! Big pan-fandom auctions are.. well, they’re big and pan-fandom. Our reach is broad, but in some ways, it’s also shallow, and there’s a lot of management that goes into juggling all the different fandoms involved. But fandom-specific auctions are easier to run, and easier to publicize, and they bring out people who might not show up for a big pan-fandom thing.
And, although FTH opted not to support specific candidates for office, there’s no reason another auction couldn’t! If you want to support progressive candidates for office – especially downballot candidates who are likely struggling for funding or attention – we would be thrilled to support you.
If you’re interested in organizing an auction in your fandom, we will help you get started!
We have a playbook and organizational materials we’d love to share with you. We have templates, spreadsheets, even scripts to automate the process so that you don’t have to make all those forms and posts by hand! And we’re happy to talk you through any of it if you’re overwhelmed and confused. Just drop us an email at fandomtrumpshate at gmail dot com. Even if you don’t use our materials, we’re happy to help advertise your auction with reblogs.
Okay - the auctions are closed, bids have been processed, and if you were high bidder on one or more auctions you should have an email waiting for you listing your high bids!
If you think you should have received one of these and didn’t, first, double-check the auction spreadsheet to make sure that a) you weren’t outbid at the last second and b) your bid was timestamped no later than 20:00:05, which is the cutoff we stated in our bidding policies. There were a handful of bids after that which did not count.
If you still think you should have gotten a high bidder email but didn’t, please email us at [email protected]! We’ve already had a couple bounces with no way to track down the correct addresses, so one of them may be you!
But if you do email us - whether about this, or with your donation receipt - please do not expect a reply tonight! Most of your mods are going to bed.
Are you interested in bidding on a fic writer or fan artist, but don’t have a lot of money to spare?
Have you been wondering what it would be like to work with a beta reader or a culture- or expertise-picker (hint: it’s great and everyone should do it) but nervous about taking the plunge with someone you don’t know well?
Do you want to use FTH to connect to creators in your fandom(s) that you don’t know yet, but you aren’t sure where to start?
We can help.
Back in early 2017, when the inaugural FTH auction got far bigger than any of us has anticipated, we worried that a lot of great creators were getting lost in the (in other respects, delightfully) enormous list of folks who had volunteered to participate. We also heard from a lot of bidders who wanted to use the auction as a way to connect with creators whose work they didn’t yet know, and weren’t sure how to find them.
For that reason, we came up with the term “golden needle” as a label for the less active auctions, to make them easier to find. We picked that name because finding them on the offerings blog is like looking for a needle in a haystack (or at least it would be, without the tag!) and because each of them is a treasure whose participation enriches the whole project.
So if you’ve been hesitating about placing a bid – for any reason – we encourage you tolook through the Golden Needle tag on our offerings blog. Bidding on one of these auctions is a great way for you to connect with a fellow fan, to get the fanwork or fan labor offer of your dreams, and to give yourself an occasion to send some money toward one or more of the amazing nonprofits we’re supporting.
If you do place a bid on a golden needle auction, please drop us a note via email and let us know, so we can keep the tag as up-to-date as possible.
In its three prior auctions, FTH participants have come together to raise over $73,000. We’re hoping that this year’s auction will bring our combined total to $100K.
You can find all of this year’s offerings (almost 750 of them!) atfth2020offerings. The stickied posts at the top of that blog should tell you everything you need to know about the logistics of bidding.
And if you’re interested in tangible fancrafts, please visit the Fan Crafts Bazaar!
Bidding will remain open until Friday, February 28th at 8pm EST.
N.B. we use scripts to auto-open and auto-close the bidding forms, so it’s likely that some of the forms will open slightly early, and some of them will likely close a bit late. This is not ideal, but it’s also unavoidable; please read our bidding policies to see how we are handling it. If you happen to see a bid that was placed before 8am EST on the 24th, please email us to let us know so we can delete it.
Last year, we got requests for some banners to help people advertise their auctions. We were happy to oblige, and we've updated those banners with the 2020 date and added banners for a few new fandoms!
We've got eight of our biggest fandoms represented, but if you want to make one for your fandom (or any other FTH design), feel free to leave it in the comments for others to use! If we have time to make more, we'll add them here.
Just copy and paste the HTML in the box to your blog to display a banner that links to the FTH offerings blog. If you'd like to link directly to your own auction, insert the URL for your post instead of fth2020offerings.dreamwidth.org in the code.
You guys, we are absolutely blown away. This year we’ve amassed a whopping 748 sign-ups. We haven’t seen this much participation since our inaugural year in 2017, and we could not be more excited if we tried, truly.
Thank you to everyone who’s offered to created a fanwork this year; we are so very happy to have you join us. <3
The browsing period will open in a few weeks, and us mods have a lot of behind-the-scenes work to do before then. Don’t be alarmed if we’re a little quiet between now and browsing; it just means we’re hard at work getting everyone’s forms set up. =] We appreciate your patience in the meantime!
We’ll still be available through email, so if you have questions please feel free to contact us at fandomtrumpshate at gmail dot com.
And don’t forget our Fan Crafts Bazaar if you create or want to receive physical fanworks! We’ll be putting up our listing of all the stalls when browsing week starts on Feb 17, and we’ll keep signups open until the 24th.
Every year, we get emails and comments from people who make physical fan crafts or art who want to list their creations in FTH. There are a variety of reasons that non-digital fanworks are not a good fit for the way we run the main FTH auction, but we’ve always been willing to signal boost for fan crafters using their crafts to raise money on their own.
This year, we’re finally formalizing this process with the
FTH Fan Crafts Bazaar!
If you are a fan crafter:
You will set up your own “stall” for the bazaar - that is, a page (on whatever site is convenient for you) with all the details on what you’re offering, prices, how to contact you, etc. You can use an auction format if you’d like, or you can have set prices, or any other pricing system. Our one requirement is that you do not take payment directly but, as with the main FTH auctions, you ask buyers to donate directly to one of our organizations and send you proof of their donation.
Once you have your stall set up, fill out our form and let us know all the details.
At the same time we put up auction pages for browsing week, we’ll create our Fan Crafts Bazaar page with details about and links to each crafter’s stall.
After the auctions are over, we’ll email you to find out how much you collected for each of the organizations so we can add it to our total.
If you would like to donate in exchange for fan crafts:
Keep a look out on Tumblr or Dreamwidth for our Fan Crafts Bazaar page. You’ll be able to browse all of the stalls with descriptions of what they’re offering and in which fandoms.
You can click through to each crafter’s stall for full details, and from there you will contact them to work out donations and delivery.
Note: FTH will not be involved in craft transactions beyond this point. We pride ourselves on the amount of followup we do in our main auction. We can’t force anyone to follow through, but we work throughout the year to encourage communication between bidders and creators and to ensure that as many creators as possible meet the deadline. We will not be doing this for fan crafts. These transactions are 100% between the bidder and the crafter. If you don’t receive your craft, by all means let us know so that we don’t include crafters who don’t follow through in future Bazaars, but that is as far as our involvement will go.
How do I sign up if I want to host my stall on Tumblr, where I can't get a URL to give you until I post it publicly?
First: Please probably don’t make the post right now. If many people do that, it will probably just lead to confusion.
Instead: The Fan Crafts Bazaar will go live at the same time that auctions go up for bidding week, February 17th, and close at the same time auctions do on the 28th. But we will keep the signup form open until auctions open on the 24th. We will continue to add crafters to the bazaar as they sign up.
So you can wait to make your post on the 17th and then sign up. You can probably also get away with making the post a day or two early to get signed up before it goes live; that probably won’t cause much confusion. We just won’t be advertising you until the 17th.
If you’re putting up a page somewhere other than Tumblr, where you can, say, make a private post and then unprivate it on the 17th without the URL changing, or on your own website where you have control over it, then feel free to sign up at any time!
The hour has struck! Signups are open from now until the end of the day on January 31st. (any timezone; we’re not super picky.)
There are a few things we want to call your attention to, before you plunge in:
Our list of supported nonprofits includes some of the same organizations as last year, as well as several new ones. (A couple of last year’s orgs grew enough to shoot past our $10 million-a-year ceiling, which is actually pretty awesome for them.) It’s also possible for creators to select one additional nonprofit where their bidders can send donations; if you’re thinking of pursuing this course, please be sure to read our policy on donations to outside organizations.
As part of an effort to boost fan labor, we’re piloting a project called the Regiment of Fan Laborers (ROFL.) You can read all the details here, but we want to highlight two things:
Anyone who signs up for fan labor will be given the option to sign on for the ROFL
Anyone who signs up as a writer will be eligible to partner with someone from the ROFL for help and support with their FTH fic. We can’t guarantee there will be someone in the ROFL who meets your exact needs, though, so feel free to bid on individual labor auctions if you know what you’re looking for.
Though we still aren’t including tangible fancrafts as part of the auction (we explain why in our FAQ,) this year we will have a Fan Crafts Bazaar. The full details and a signup will be up soon!
Lastly, because of some updates we’ve made to the signup form regarding how fandoms are classified, the signup form is now, technically, 54 pages long. But don’t worry!You won’t see 54 pages. That number includes pages for every single subfandom menu. Nobody is going to see more than about seven or eight screens, even if all three of your fandoms break down into separate subfandoms. We’re mentioning this only because we don’t want anyone to flip out when they see “page 1 of 54″ in the bottom right corner (which would be a reasonable reaction.)
If you’ve done FTH before, you may have noticed that our three-fandom limit system made it difficult to offer fanworks in a fandom that has multiple subfandoms: either you had to be willing to write for anything in that fandom, or you had to dedicate one of your three slots to each subfandom you were willing to create for.
For example, if you’re in the MCU fandom and will write for Captain America or Thor, plus you’re in Star Wars and will write for the Original Trilogy or Sequel Trilogy (but not Prequel Trilogy), that would have been four fandoms under our old system, and you’d have needed to cut one out. It wasn’t a great system, to be honest!
Moving our posts to Dreamwidth helped with organization, thanks to DW’s nested tagging system, but that didn’t fix the problem of how to count fandoms.
But we’ve figured out how to fix it!
Rejoice!
On the new signup form (signups open Monday, Jan 13!), a handful of fandoms have asterisks by their names in the selection menu. If you choose one of these fandoms, you’ll then be taken to a page to choose your subfandoms. If you’re fine writing anything within, say, MCU, go ahead and choose “Any” and you’re done.
But if you only want to write for Thor or Captain America, choose those - and it all counts as one fandom.
So you can choose MCU: Any, Star Wars: Any, and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
Or you can choose MCU: Captain America, Thor, Black Panther; Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Rogue One; and Harry Potter: Fantastic Beasts as your three fandoms.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fthmods
