ALERT ALERT ALERT

[cleolinda]

ANNOUNCING KINDLE WORLDS

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for

Comments

[channonyarrow]

The cost issue is going to be interesting. It's kind of like they're trying to make Kindle into iTunes - I was reluctant at first, but now I'm all "Oh, I really love that song, I don't want to go buy a whole album, I'm already on the computer, I'll just buy it here! It's 99 cents!"

But the problem with that is that radio and YouTube and music shares by my friends are the reason I keep listening to new music. I have a connection to the product already, and a pretty good sense of whether or not I want to plunk down my buck. I've never actually bought anything from iTunes and regretted it, except once. Considering how much I've bought, that's a good hit rate.

I mention all that to say that I don't think the pay model is going to work here. You may well get people who have Kindles but don't know about fanfic, but I don't think that Venn diagram is all that pronounced, particularly if you add the ring "would be interested in fanfic". My mother has a Kindle and doesn't know about fanfic, but I promise you, she won't read it.

There's no way to preview it that I know of, there's LOADS of it online for free, there's not been a lot of success in e-publishing for unknowns, and newspapers have real problems with paywalls, particularly the minute someone reposts an article. I don't see it working just for those reasons, and then alienating the ficcers because there's no porn or questionable content - I mean, come on. This is AMAZON. They pulled a bunch of gay and lesbian books what was it, two years ago? Comixology, which as far as I know isn't affiliated with Amazon, pulled an issue of SAGA because of two relatively small panels that showed male homosexual activity, and that not even explicit, because it was "inappropriate".

This is what the fanfic community is built on, people. You can't remove it and assume you have the same product AND an additional revenue stream.

And going back to iTunes - I have the ability to check quality control by previewing the work, which I have the ability to hear in its entirety elsewhere as well. And when we're talking an actual tie-in book, someone, somewhere, objectively said "This is crap, fix it" and the book is better for it. So now I'm not even paying my money for something that has decent odds of being at least readable?

Fuck that shit. All of it. Everything is wrong about this. But the porn thing also has me in the position of just laughing and saying "NICE TRY."

[annlarimer]

Most Kindle product has a pretty extensive preview available on the Amazon site.

[esther_a]

Interestingly, those previews are longer than a significant percentage of fanfic stories. From a quick survey of AO3, I'd estimate about half of the fic on the site are under 2000 words.

[cleolinda]

Pretty much all of that, yeah. The iTunes thing has ended up working really well, particularly since $12 or so seems like a reasonable price for an album, and that's about how much it works out to at $0.99-1.29 per song. As micro-payments go, it's just right, and it's an easily understood quantity. The problem is that we don't have a similar metric for publishing. I mean, nobody seems to price books per so many thousand words or something (although that might be interesting and fair). I remember when most authors (that I saw, anyway) thought that $9.99 was an appallingly low price for an e-book, and now $9-12 seems standard for a "name" author, and a lot of genre books seem routinely priced at $0.99-3.99, and people freak out that so and so is ruining the market for everyone else by "giving their work away." I guess my point here is that it would be nice to come up with a seemingly consistent metric where things are priced by unit, like songs. But... how can you do that with a medium that varies as widely as books do?