Re-publishing long S&H stories as original novels?

[gideonbd77]

You may have heard about a certain Twilight-fanfic-turned-novel called 50 Shades of Grey and all the brouhaha about it. If you haven't, the non-tl;dr version of the situation is that a fanfic writer in the Twilight fandom posted a many-chaptered AU story featuring Edward/Bella called Masters of the Universe, but then pulled it, changed the names of

Comments

[toasterdog]

hmm well to be quite honest

my take on the "fanfiction turned literature"-problem is more that of a consumer, I guess.

Quite often when reading fanfiction I think to myself 'boy, I wish this was a "real" book! I'd buy the hell outta that!'
I've read quite a lot of books, and quite an amount of them were complete bollocks, so why not turn good fanfiction into a good, published book?

So, while I understand the argument "but she simply took something that existed before and wrote something based on that and now claims it as something original!?", I generally can't see anything bad in doing so, simple because I *LOVE* books, and I'd *LOVE* to own some of the fanfictions I read as books, because they're really really good and the authors deserve some fame, money and whatnot for it.

So, since they can't publish it in it's "original" shape (meaning: as fanfiction, containing characters that are trademarked), why not do it like this?

I'll add that I did not know about this Twilight ff-turned-book and that I generally dislike everything about Twilight. Ahem.

[gideonbd77]

Yeah, I've seen similar opinions on the pages I linked above. It's fascinating how varied the responses have been about the situation! Writers and readers seem to have very different perspectives on publishing.

The thing is, I don't see the point of reading a fanfic in book form if the characters had to be changed to evade copyright issues. If I really liked a story, I'd just print it out myself or have an ebook format of it for reading. Once the characters, places, etc. are changed, it's not the story I like anymore, which defeats the purpose of making it into a book in the first place. You might as well just create your own characters and worlds, and rest easy knowing that your profits are fully yours. As for authors deserving monetary gain, fame, etc., sure, as a writer/artist in the industry, I totally get that, but ... it's only positive to me if those things are earned without taking advantage of other people/fandom and, if the situation calls for it, original creators/estates are compensated.