Amazon to launch fanfiction platform

Fan fic on the kindle? Critics of the idea of "pulled to publish" fanfiction will probably have a lot to say about this.

Recently Amazon announced that they're opening up a new publishing platform Kindle Worlds. The platform would enable fanfiction authors to publish their works for a profit without having to actually change anything in the works themselves, supposedly. All with the approval of the publisher/company that owns the rights to the books or shows in question. Of course the author won't get the lion's share of the money charged per book. Authors of longer works (10,000+ words) will receive 35% of the price for their books while ones who have written less than 10,000 words will only get 20%. According to Entertainment Weekly, the pricing will be between 99 cents and $3.99.

So far only one company has decided to play ball with this new format, Warner Bros, and only for three very  specific book turned television show series: Gossip Girls, The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars. This limits the amount of fanfiction that can be published, as not everyone wants to write fanfiction for these shows, but it'd be interesting to see if any other companies would come aboard if this does well.

There isn't a set time as to when this will drop, but I'm of mixed emotions about this. There's no doubt that some fanfiction authors work very, very hard at what they do and put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that their specific works stick to canon or if not, would read as believable to their audience. Part of me thinks that there's nothing wrong with rewarding them by giving them money in a format that has the approval of the official copyright holders.

Then again, part of me is a little antsy about this because for some reason this just seems a little well, wrong. One of the core things about fanfiction is that it's written by fans, for fans for free. Technically there's nothing against the law about charging for fanfiction if the publisher has signed up for fanfics to specifically be published for profit. I can't even say anything about the very real inevitability about someone putting out a work that's not even worth ten cents, because we already get this with both self-publishing and the mainstream publishing world.

So I can't quite put my finger on why this bothers me so much. Maybe there's just a worry about this going from someone exploring their love for a show/book/movie to where it turns solely into something they're doing for profit. Or maybe I'm just afraid that people will only publish fanfiction and not create their own worlds. Both are possibilities, but the second has always been a fear for fanfiction and the first is something that goes on in the publishing world already. How many times have we seen authors pump out garbage because they know it'd be a guaranteed sell because of name recognition? Neither are really feasible reasons to not publish fanfiction for profit because that'd be punishing a lot of authors who either aren't interested in putting out non-fanfiction work and/or have no interest in actually getting rich-rich off their work. (But don't mind getting a little money.)

Or perhaps I'm afraid that this might be a way for publishers and companies to start actively cracking down on fanfiction authors. I haven't heard of any whisper of censorship for the works, but it's a possibility. It's well within a publisher's right to request that certain things not be published under their banner, although I will admit that I doubt that they'd refuse to publish things such as slash fanfiction. I can't even say that the publishers can now go after people who aren't publishing under their banner, because that would probably take more money and time than it'd be worth- although it'd be interesting to see if Warner Bros would seek for Fanfiction.net to remove fanfiction for the three shows mentioned above.

I guess all we can do is just wait and see.

Further Reading:
*Amazon to launch fanfiction platform (Entertainment Weekly)
*Amazon to allow e-book fan fiction sales in US (BBC)

Fanfiction for sale: SOLD!

Hi everyone!

I was just informed of two upcoming fanfics that will be getting an official publication. I think this makes it the fourth book in the last year or so that has its roots as a fanfic of one work or another.

This brings up a question that really makes me wonder: is it really right to profit off of a work that was originally based on characters another person wrote? My first reaction is that it's not right, that the characters are based off of someone else's creativity.

Fifty Shades of Grey is one example of a fanfic turned published work where you can see the book's roots as a Twilight fanfic. Ana is Bella, right down to the repetitive lip biting and several times during the story you can see where James drew heavily on the original Twilight series.

Then you have stuff like the upcoming book Beautiful Bastard, also a Twilight fanfic. (The other book, if you're curious, is a One Direction fanfic. Go figure.) I dug a little and found that the book will only have a fraction of the original fanfic in it, the rest of it being rewritten for publication. Of course, James made those same claims, that she rewrote parts of Fifty Shades, only for comparisons to show that the only big change she made was to rename all of the characters. Does rewriting a fanfic make it OK?

Part of me thinks that it's a little unethical to publish fanfiction and get paid for it. Then I did a little research and realized that honestly, it's not uncommon at all to see people base fictional works off of other people's creations. A look at the Wikipedia page for stuff based on Alice in Wonderland shows a plethora of works where people have directly based their works on the various characters. Heck, there's even an adult movie based on Alice, called Alice in Wonderland: An X-rated Musical Fantasy. It's a little hypocritical to say that some artist in Japan can create an entire franchise around Alice dating various characters in the Caroll books, but James can't create three books worth of original fanfiction about Twilight characters and publish it herself.

I do realize that Alice in Wonderland is in the public domain and Twilight is not, but a lot of the arguments about fanfic-ing for profit tend to go beyond copyright laws themselves and usually center around whether or not it's really right for someone to write a work based on someone else's characters, regardless of legality. I'm still mostly unsure as to where I fall on this. Obviously the legal standpoint is shaky on either side.

Here's how the law pretty much stands:

You can write whatever you want about works that are in the public domain as long as you credit the original creator somewhere in the work and do not try to pass off the basic designs as entirely your own stuff. You can pretty much even publish the original work as long as you don't try to say that you wrote Pride and Prejudice. This is why you see so many copies of public domain works from different publishers and companies. It's when you get into specific translations of works from another language or Ye Olde English to modern phrases that copyrights can be claimed. When it comes to stuff that's currently under copyright, you can do what you want when you have permission from the author/owner to do it.

But when you don't? That's when it gets shaky. You can write that you were "inspired by" the story and say that it influenced you, but that your story is your own. Or you can say that everything is a coincidence, as is the case with Jude Law's Repo Men and Repo!: The Genetic Opera. (But to take a look at the two plots, many of us are calling BS on those claims.) If you did base your story off of someone else's copyrighted work, you can publish the work legally if you change enough of the stuff to where you say that everything is entirely your own. This is where it gets really difficult to win a lawsuit if you're the one that wrote the original work that the fanfic is based on. You not only have to prove that the original work was based on your own stuff, but that the characters and situations are so close to your own that it's a copyright violation and not just the other author pulling in common tropes and situations. Most times it's just not worth it in the long run to bring to court, partially because it's so hard to prove copyright violations, partially because it costs so much, and partially because nobody comes out of it looking good.

But the concerns over whether or not it's legally right to profit off of other people's works does not answer whether or not it's morally right. It's easy to say "copyrighted", but like I said above- people often end up arguing over reasons that don't entirely have a lot to do with copyright and everything to do with creativity. There's no easy answer here, that's for certain.