Food for thought on Pulled to Publish stories

Hello lovelies,
I'm back so soon, but I can't help it. I should be working on my org fic for Camp Nano, yet here I sit needing to share this with you in hopes you will share as well.
Today's topic???
The dreaded pulled to publish or p2p.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend from work today. Tammy is a great girl and an avid reader of smut. Gotta love her!
We were talking books. It was interesting since she doesn't read fanfic. Never has and probably never will. She has, however, read some of the somewhat famous p2p. What makes these conversations the highlight of my day, outside of the fact that I get to talk about writing, fanfic and smut is that Tammy has a pure heart in all of this.
 She doesn't know the writers or how badly they may or may not have behaved in the fandom. She has no tie to the stories. They were never Edward and Bella to her. They have always been whatever lame-o name the writer picked when they made the change to OF.
It is with this innocence from the fandom that I am able to get a perspective of a reader who is coming in cold to a P2P story. Trust me, if you are a writer considering P2P this is pretty amazing insight.
What did Tammy have to say about s few P2P that were once crazy popular fanfics??

"The problem with these stories are that often there is no emotional connection to the characters. They just lack character development and that hurts since if I don't care about them, then I don't care to what happens to them. End of story"

This is something I worried about when it came to P2P. This is something ALL writers considering P2P should worry about if they are seeking to appeal to readers beyond the fanfic world.

So you see, character development is key otherwise you end up sipping coffee with a friend trying to explain why people cared about the characters in these stories. I'll be honest when I say "People loved that guy because he was Edward" makes me feel uncomfortable since it leads to whole other conversation concerning fandom politics and fairytales formulas, but that's a post for another time.

XOXO
Mama