Web fiction
Fandom
A subculture of fans characterized by camaraderie with others who share a common interest, with its own practices, jargon and works.
A fandom is "a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of camaraderie with others who share a common interest," whose members "spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices." The line runs from the Janeites of the 1870s and the Sherlock Holmes fans who publicly mourned Holmes in 1893 and wrote some of the earliest fan fiction, through 1930s science-fiction fandom with its own jargon, "fanspeak," to the media fandom of the 1970s and the online communities that followed the migration onto the Internet.
Most of this cluster's vocabulary, from fan fiction to shipping, is fandom speech. For a web-serial writer, fandom is the operating environment: readers organize around stories, and Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fan fiction, is the standing proof that a fandom audience can carry a book onto the bestseller lists.