I suggest that for a lot of the people you want to attract at this stage, consuming a lot of sf is proof of normalcy. As for fanfic, I suspect that the type of fanfic matters a lot—if it had been slash of comparable quality to the existing work, there would have been a substantial yuck factor to surmount as well as people who were enthusiastic.
I don’t know what the result of HPMOR is going to be if SIAI ever wants to get bank loans—there are a lot of steep weirdness hills to climb at that point.
Harry Potter fanfiction and its readers is way closer to mainstream culture than the sort of people who could read that crossover fic; keep in mind, Harry Potter fanfiction novels have been published as have entire books just predicting what would happen in book 7 or comprising dictionaries of Harry Potter-ania (you may remember the lawsuit over the latter).
Have you updated any of your underlying premises?
I suggest that for a lot of the people you want to attract at this stage, consuming a lot of sf is proof of normalcy. As for fanfic, I suspect that the type of fanfic matters a lot—if it had been slash of comparable quality to the existing work, there would have been a substantial yuck factor to surmount as well as people who were enthusiastic.
I don’t know what the result of HPMOR is going to be if SIAI ever wants to get bank loans—there are a lot of steep weirdness hills to climb at that point.
I don’t especially think I have; suggestions welcome.
I had one in my comment—that respectability varies more between mainstream culture and the people who are likely to read HPMOR than you realized.
Harry Potter fanfiction and its readers is way closer to mainstream culture than the sort of people who could read that crossover fic; keep in mind, Harry Potter fanfiction novels have been published as have entire books just predicting what would happen in book 7 or comprising dictionaries of Harry Potter-ania (you may remember the lawsuit over the latter).