Fansites are much more fun to run when it’s a cult thing and news trickles out every month or so, each tidbit an exciting morsel of knowledge.
With the release of the Wallace and Gromit movie I can’t keep up. Just this week I missed the news about the World Premiere! Had to post about it after it happened. I get emails from all sorts of people now giving me new leads about toys and books being released, and although I greatly appreciate their emails and attachments, it’s just too much. I wonder if I should have arranged for some of the people who email me info to write up some articles themselves so I could just drop them on the site as-is. Maybe setup the site to run on wordpress with the lj plugin so I wouldn’t have to update the site and community separately. Or somehow figured out a way to assign different sections of the site to different people so that my movie images section wouldn’t be so pathetic. I have new pictures! But putting them up takes time – cropping, resizing, uploading, linking – especially when more news is coming in almost daily and my entire day of computer time is limited to a couple hours after work. I have other things to do too!
OK, you’re right, I love it. But when I saw 10 WnG related articles in my inbox, plus 2 other fans emailing me last night and I didn’t have time to make updates until the time between my shower and driving to work this morning (and still didn’t get it all updated!) I felt flustered.
Apparently this near burnout on fansites is not terribly uncommon. There is a pull to think “Hey it doesn’t even matter, it’s just a bunch of fake characters, why do I work so hard on this?” and the “I love this! And hundreds of people read this site!”
Lucky for me this is just a passing moment. The flood of news isn’t as overwhelming as it might be for something more popular. I can’t imagine how those comic book fansite people keep up when their comic is made into a popular movie. Unless Wallace and Gromit explodes into US theaters, shaking the world and creating something phenomenal (which I doubt, you know how American audiences are), the busy times for my site will soon pass.
Once it’s passed I’ll probably get bored and wish it was back. Wallace and Gromit rock, and I love them!