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

[misachan]

What makes this extra devious is that Alloy book series (Pretty Little Liars, etc) are already work for hire - WB owns the worlds, so they're basically all tie ins. Now they get to have fans write new ties for free, and they can even publish the really good ones as much as they like without shelling out a single penny in compensation.

eeee, Cleo quoted my twitter

[cleolinda]

Hee!

And didn't they boot the original Vampire Diaries author because they wanted to take it in a different direction, and she'd been hired specifically to write that series, so it was theirs and they could do that? That's the ethic I'm seeing here.

[sarahtales]

Yeah they did. Poor L.J. Smith, what a horrorshow. I mean, we can all have our contracts cancelled if pubs don't like what we're up to, but having the series continue with your name on it must be a special kind of awful.

[cleolinda]

I get that they had the legal right to do that, but... yeah, I felt awful for her.

[kathrynthegr8]

IDK, it may work. I have friends in RL who are huge fans of books/movies/etc and have no idea about fanfiction or fandom beyond maybe a sanctioned website. Those fans may love this and make it successful. Which makes me kind of sad because fandom and fanfic is so diverse, to only see the approved stuff is missing a lot of what makes fandom fandom.

I don't know of many who are already in fandom/reading-writing fanfic who will go for this though. Why pay when we can get it for free? And most do it for love of the subject. I'm also intrigued by the "no porn" rule. I mean, come on. That's such an integral part of fanfic. What would happen if? Here's that missing scene! If so and so loved so and so, here's how it would go down.

I just don't know if it will work.

[cleolinda]

Yeah, I see a majority of fandom writers (and readers?) not being on board, but the writers who do publish through Amazon appealing to non-fandom readers. Which may be all Amazon wants after all--a few potential tie-ins, not the entire conversion of fandom for profit.

The real problem would come in if whoever decided to stop any fanfic that wasn't published for profit through Amazon. That would be like herding cats (and then trying to issue them C&Ds), though.

[kathrynthegr8]

Maybe so much like herding cats that they wouldn't bother? It is worrisome in that respect. Like a commenter above, this makes me want to donate to AO3.

[tiffanynichelle]

The real problem would come in if whoever decided to stop any fanfic that wasn't published for profit through Amazon. That would be like herding cats (and then trying to issue them C&Ds), though.

Now this scares me. If all non-Amazon fanfic for those properties go the way of the Anne Rice fanfics.

[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

[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?

[sushis]

The big problem with this has nothing to do with fanfiction itself. It's this: "Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright."

One should NEVER give all rights to a creative work away without a huge payment upfront. If you can't even retain copyright, walk away.

[cleolinda]

Basically, and the reason I bolded all of those terms. It's also what John Scalzi's saying at the link I just added.

[ext_1313168]

I have to agree - that makes me a little uneasy, especially without seeing how they deal with reversion of rights to the author in their contract. Theoretically if they consider it in-print as long as there's a copy available, and if they always have it for sale on Amazon, they could hold onto the rights forever.

[sucrelefey]

Rent seekers. Content farm. The corporation is a fuedal lord and they want Fandom to be their serfs. I also suspect the on paper legalese for this one is dizzying and could make copyright law and work for hire doctrine even more ugly.

[cleolinda]

Because we totally needed that, yeah. They either have the best lawyers or the worst ones, to attempt something like this.

[sucrelefey]

An even sadder legal scenario is there might be a how shall we say "reality challenged" fan that might look at this and think oh hey selling fanfic is legal after all and self publish or otherwise run afoul of lawyers and copyright. The marketing buzz may created a misleading version of copyright law in the mind of the ignorant.

[auralan]

Yeah, this entire thing has me curious how much of that agreement is actually enforcable. If they try to do anything with the more extreme ends versus just tossing some of those clauses out there to avoid getting sued themselves, I'm pretty sure it could get real ugly and messy fast. I can't even start to guess what way it comes down once courts get near it, but everybody involved could spend a heck of a lot on lawyers in the process.