I was one member of the League of Extraordinary Gentlecolts, a confederation of famous and not-famous authors (I'm in the latter category, for the record) who convened to perform some Science on the mechanics of fame here on FiMFiction. We paired off, one famous author and one unfamous author, and wrote fics for our partner to publish under their name.

In my case, this means that I did not write "Tiaras, Spoons, and Feathers." Wanderer D did. And D did not write "The Rough in the Diamond," I did.

As it happens, D and I chose unpopular characters and unpopular tags for our pair of stories, so the Science was not as useful as it could have been. :D Still, it showed the expected results: the story published under a famous name got more views (although neither got many views, see previous observation re: everyone hating SS and DT), more comments, and more votes. Other LOEG pairings have found somewhat more interesting results, which they will no doubt talk about in their own blog posts.

Tentatively, the preliminary result from all this is that, in the context of FiMFiction, quality is much less important than quantity. To the best of my knowledge, there was not a single LOEG story published which was called out as being noticeably different from the author's usual style, no matter who the authors were. This suggests that famous FiMFic authors are not necessarily especially skilled at writing, but rather, they have simply published enough stories (of at least decent quality) to build up a large number of followers.

So take heart! You too can be FiMFic famous! Just publish, publish, publish!

In the end, this was a fun little project, although not without more than its fair share of drama, and it produced some interesting insights into the mechanics of fame in this site's context.

Here is a link to Wanderer D's site blog on the subject: LOEG.