Amazon Jumps Into the Fanfic Business
Amazon announced Kindle Worlds today, describing it as “the first commercial publishing platform that will enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so.”
I didn’t know this was coming, but I’m not surprised, exactly. Amazon has been a very successful business, and if ( Read more... )
On one hand, it means that authors who want to license fanfic will be able to get money from it, which is nice for the authors. On the other hand, it means that if you are writing fanfic that is not being sold through Amazon and thus is not licensed, you potentially ARE costing the author money. There have been piles of free fanfic for years and years, which is good because for one thing 99% of it is dreck. Even stuff on recommendations lists is often dreck. Licensed tie-in novels had a gatekeeper and were presumably at least written by people who had a passing acquaintance with the rules of the English language, and who had familiarized themselves thoroughly with the rules of the canon and agreed not to completely violate them; that's part of what you were paying for, when you plunked down your $7 for the latest Star Trek novel from Pocket. (I always found it sort of irritating, as a fan, that there seemed to be no rule that the Pocket novels had to be in any sort of vague accord with one another. I once went through and tallied up all the different fates that befell the Romulan Commander seduced and betrayed by Spock, in the tie-in novels, and came up with four or five. That was in 1989 so I'm sure there are more, at this point. My personal canon is Diane Duane's version, FTR.)
(Let me note for the record that I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. Ahem.)
I am a casual fanfic reader and writer. I also have no objection to fanfic in my worlds....provided that people aren't making money off it....though I'd have no objection to the latter if I were getting a cut....but that's all academic as I'm simply not famous/successful enough for anyone to be writing fanfic in any of my worlds, anyway.
That was all very incoherent. See above about there being too many potential ramifications to properly process it.
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(Must... resist... urge to re-read all her books on my shelf... nah.)
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