So the news has hit that Amazon, in its ever increasing hold in publishing, will be supporting sales of fanfiction for certain franchises who have already given their approval. The premise is that all those fanfic authors will finally get a little something back from something that they love doing. This is all well and good…on the surface. After all the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey started life as Twilight fanfiction and Cassandra Clare’s Harry Potter fanfiction is speculated to be the base from which her Mortal Instruments series sprang from. I honestly don’t have issues with people starting off with fanfiction and later taking the time to edit out the parts that resemble the original too closely. All things considered, it looks like a really good strategy for some hopeful authors. For that matter I’ve written fanfiction to cope with what I felt was a downturn quality from the original.
But here’s the thing, I don’t expect to get paid for my fanfic. Cassandra Clare and E.L. James went through and changed parts of their stories to pull them out of their starting universes (with varying levels of success) before getting paid for those stories. The consensus from the people I know who read and write fanfiction understand that if money gets involved, then the fun part walks out the door and the possibility of litigation walks in.
Once that threat of litigation is taken away, as the Kindle Worlds option seems to be trying to do, what’s left? Well, the pesky fine print says that the fanfic author gets paid once and that’s it. If a fanfic contains something that the copyright holder for the original work likes something that one of the fans came up with and posted to Kindle Worlds, then the copyright holder isn’t obligated to give credit or monetary compensation to the fan who came up with the neat idea.
This indicates a few things to me.
First, the franchises agreeing to this setup think that their fanbases are there to be exploited. Were we talking about this kind of deal for writers of original fiction, it would be reported to any number of writer beware sites.
Secondly, the franchises opting for this deal are shortchanging whatever writers they actually employ. Why should they pay someone decently when there are gullible fans who will spout off ideas for nebulous exposure and a bit of pocket money?
Thirdly, to me this seems like an admission that the people controlling the original content don’t know what to do with it or where to take it. Congratulations, now we the consumer get to know exactly who has run out of ideas of what to do with their intellectual property so badly that they have resorted to asking the fans what they want.
I don’t know about everyone else, but if I can come up with better explanations for stuff happening in an existing narrative universe than the people who are paid to come up with such things, I stop being a fan of that narrative universe and find something else. If someone wants me to do work for them, I want some form of material compensation for the job. Free fanfiction doesn’t take anything away from an author’s original work and may instead act as free publicity for that work. The second a fanfic author accepts money for their fanfiction, we are potentially on the hook for legal repercussions.
Besides, shouldn’t the people who are paid to produce that tie-in novel write the book with their benefits clearly stipulated beforehand with an advance? If someone’s fanfic is that good for a franchise property before it goes through the hands of an editor, shouldn’t they be treated the same as any other professional author?
At the core of it, I think that fanfiction is written mostly for fans, not the person(s) holding the rights to the original work. It’s a way of commercializing part of a fandom and for me, that is always suspect. I prefer fandom to be a community for free exchange, discussion, and criticism where one doesn’t need a special token to show what a dedicated fan one is. Have open submissions and actual contracts if a franchise needs fresh perspectives. Don’t pretend that you are doing your most talented fans a favor by a crappy contract through a third party where most benefits are granted to the original work’s copyright owner and the distributer, but not the crowdsourced author.
All in all, I think I’ll be sticking to the free fanfic sites. At least there the legalities are clear. Maybe someday I’ll try to finish and publish it…but only after I’ve rewritten the derivative parts out of it and replaced them with something better.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins
I absolutely agree with your views. It is shameful the things that Amazon is trying to do in several areas and this is just the latest. Fanfiction is for enjoyment; the only money changing hands were for the cost of paper, ink, and postage. Now that we have the internet, there is no reason to have money exchanging hands and even less area for lawyers to try and say you are being compensated (note: some sites, mostly big sites, will have donation buttons to help out with the cost of server space). There are many fans that will share a work to a friend and that gets them excited enough to go and buy the book the characters came from.
I’m with you there. The whole point of fanfic is that it’s the fans opportunity to play in someone else’s sandbox and do things that the original creators either wouldn’t or didn’t. It loses something once you start making it a commercial venture. Nothing wrong with dabbling in fanfic to develop your own writing skills, many have done that, and gone onto successful careers, but this is making it almost like franchise fiction. I can also see some legal bunfights ahead.