From Tumblr: Ask - Why don't you allow reposting of your writing?

[nym_wibbly]

There’s no one reason. The biggest is that I want the ability to take my work offline if I ever need to, want to, or get asked or told to by the copyright/trademark holders of the material on which my writing is based.

I also want to keep the ability to make changes to the text at any time I choose, maybe years from now when I spot a typo or think of a sweeter phrase, which gets difficult if you have more than one copy lying around, and even more difficult if the other copies are controlled by someone other than me.

There’s also the fact that reader stats are my best guide to how well or poorly received a piece has been. Most people don’t bother with feedback, so when I had my own web site I got a lot of pleasure from looking at the statistics to see where my readers were linking from, how many countries one story could reach (a multi-national-flag story that had spidered across the globe gave me a happy even if it got no feedback) and so on. AO3 doesn’t have much in the way of stats, but it’s still better than the nothing that most readers leave behind after consuming a story. Again, it gets tricky if multiple copies are available.

If you’re referring specifically to the Russian translation of A Bed of Thorns, I don’t ever allow my works in progress to be translated because they’re not finished; they’re not ready to be translated, simple as that. I can’t communicate with that audience to explain the delays, I can’t share that motivating group WIP experience with them to help me along (which is why I like to write this way). Most of all, there’s no guarantee that someone starting work on a translation of the WIP will see it through to the end of my project and keep their copy in line with any hindsight alterations I make to my story. I want to focus on making my story the best that I can make it, not feel awful about the extra work I’m making for a third party every time I make an edit.

Most of my past experiences with people wanting to translate or repost my fanworks (since I moved online that is, around 1996) have gone like this:

PERSON: Can I translate/post your story?
ME: Thanks but I’d rather you didn’t.
PERSON: Please? With sprinkles?
ME: Thanks, but no.
PERSON: But I already started. I did so much work already, look. *lays on guilt trip about how I should appreciate all the work they did*
ME: You should have asked before you did all the work then, shouldn’t you?
PERSON: You’re mean and ungrateful and horrid, I’m posting it anyway because I want to.
ME: *objects*
FANDOM: *wankstorm*

I have agreed to translations of some of my work, mostly Harry Potter, but only by people I know are good translators, or into languages that I can read well enough to make sure that the translation is faithfully representing my original. There’s a lot of room for artistic license in a good translation, in fact I’d say it’s essential, but the Russian copy of ABoT turned out to have my little Rumple POV requested-remixes randomly and ridiculously stuck into the text. And while I was upset about having my wishes ignored in the first place, and pissed off about being deliberately excluded by that entire readership, I was devastated at being made to look so stupid by a major alteration to what I actually wrote, while not having enough fluency in the language to go to that audience and say “actually, no, I’m really not that stupid - here’s what I actually wrote and how they changed it”.

So, lots of reasons for not wanting my work reposted and/or translated, most of which boil down to “I’m here to relax and enjoy myself and I don’t want any hassle or technical difficulties imposed from outside.”