Re-publishing long S&H stories as original novels?
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
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I'm of two minds about this. Most all the re-purposed fanfic-turned-novel that I've seen are AUs, either fandom characters or RPS/RPF. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. At first level, you have to look at what the author created. AUs aren't relying on canon in many instances, so all you're left with is a character who physically resembles someone we know or has some kind of mannerism that we associate with someone well-known. Many writers base their characters' physical descriptions on actors or models. Ann Rice did it for Interview with a Vampire (Rutger Hauer) and she hasn't had any trouble. There's a couple of novels that have obvious call-outs to fandom characters in them (two detectives who drive a red car, two brothers on a road trip across the country in an Impala, etc) There's a famous Star Trek novel that crosses with Here Come the Brides that not only have those characters in it, but a host of other fandom characters from the time period just popping up in the journey.
The real question is "can the story stand alone, apart from canon?" What resemblances are there really? Does the reader have to know certain canon facts to get the story? 50 Shades of Grey, though I'm not debating the quality of the work, doesn't rely as much on canon as it does physical description. The characters were taken completely out of their element and presented based on resemblances. Now, from a fandom POV, does it do a disservice to those who were essentially the first-readers and might have pointed out strengths and weaknesses of the piece? Perhaps. Does it make them sad when their favorite fanfic was taken off the net to be published? Of course. I have a particular J2 fic that I read every few months which I adore, but it was republished as an original novel. I've read both, I can't NOT see the characters as J2, so I always go back to the fanfic version. Would a reader who has never read the fanfic make that connection? Probably not. They'd probably just think the descriptions sounded like the actors they've seen, which is a nice tip of the hat rather than a rip-off of their real lives since it's an AU.
So, there's no clear-cut answer. Readers will either buy the re-purposed fiction or they won't. It will be interesting to see what the sales numbers on 50 Shades of Grey are, since the initial sales (I think) were bolstered by fandom rather than mainstream readership. Will the series earn out its 7-figure advance? For the author's sake, I hope so.
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You have raised good points and food for thought for me. I don't see anything wrong with basing a character's physical appearance on a real person, though, in prose form. You can copyright fictional characters but I don't think you can copyright a person's physical appearance in words, celebrity or not. I mean, how many ways can you describe a curly-haired, blue-eyed man with a big grin? :P (In art/comics/graphic novels, it's another story altogether.)
Now I wonder ... does what happened with 50 Shades of Grey mean that fanfic writers everywhere can now openly do the same with their own fanfics?
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Even now, a number of agents who I follow have been saddened to see how much publicity this series is getting because the quality of writing isn't as polished as the industry standard. Through proper channels, the works would have gotten at least some polish from agents before pitching, then gone through editorial rounds at the publishing house prior to print. Because the works are so popular in their current state, I'm not sure how much polish can actually be applied at this late date. And if they are published as-is, what does that mean for the publisher reputation of putting out work at this level versus what they expect from their other authors?
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And if they are published as-is, what does that mean for the publisher reputation of putting out work at this level versus what they expect from their other authors?
Good question. I gotta go look up the publishers who'll be reprinting the book and check out their range. I'd be interested to know what the other authors of those publishers think about the book, too.
As for editing the book at this point, I think they won't bother. The Twilight fanfic is still available on the internet for download, apparently, so even if they do edit the hell out of the book, there's always the unedited Twilight-fanfic version around, and some blogs have already done comparisons between the fanfic and the current novel.
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But like you said, this does not a writing career make.
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