Amazon Jumps Into the Fanfic Business

[jimhines]

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 they see a potentially profitable area they can branch out into, they’re gonna do it.

I found out about this through Chuck Wendig’s post here, wherein he talks about the press release and proceeds to fragment his own brain into tiny, shiny pieces.

I’m still digesting and processing this, and I suspect some of it will boil down to having to wait to see how it all plays out. But some of my initial reactions are…

• This isn’t a free-for-all. Amazon has licensed these rights from the rights-holders, and it’s for a specific and limited list of properties.
  • But wait, if they’ve licensed the rights, is it really fanfiction or is it an open call for licensed tie-in work?
• They’ve got a no porn rule. Fair enough. If anyone’s going to write 50 Shades of Blue: A Goblin’s Erotic Awakening, I think it should be me.
• My understanding of the fanfiction community is that there’s a strong value on not profiting from your work. This seems like a potential culture war between Amazon and the community they’re trying to court.
  • That said, no community is perfectly homogenous, and as a writer, I have nothing against getting paid for your work, so long as it’s done legally, which this would be.
  • Also, as someone who isn’t a part of that community, I could be TOTALLY AND EMBARRASSINGLY WRONG ABOUT THIS PIECE.
• Who decides whether to license a work, the publisher or the author? Can DAW license Libriomancer fanfic without my approval? Can I do it without theirs?
• Amazon takes all rights to your fanfiction story. Which isn’t entirely unreasonable in a work-for-hire situation, but will make a lot of folks uncomfortable.
• Why would people pay for fanfiction when so much is available online for free?
  • Then again, why would people pay for licensed tie-in work when so much fanfiction is available online for free…
• Should prolific fanfic writers look into getting agents? I’m not sure the benefit of an agent in this situation, but I also cringe at the idea of writers who aren’t very, very business-savvy signing contracts without someone else looking it over.
• Does this mean fanfic could now qualify for SFWA membership?
  • Waiting for various heads to explode at that question…
• Finally, Amazon is not pro-author, nor are they pro-reader. They’re pro-Amazon. (This doesn’t make them any worse or better than most businesses, by the way.) When Amazon’s interests overlap with those of readers or writers, great. But don’t lose sight of their bottom line, because I guarantee that’s what they’re watching.

I’m sure there will be many, many discussions and arguments about this, and I have no idea how it will all play out or whether or not it will work. But I do think it’s a fascinating step in the ongoing evolution of the industry.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Most of the OMG NO, NO MONEY MUST CHANGE HANDS attitude is in skittish reaction to various past lawyerly smackdowns, I believe. More precisely, there's a widely-held (and in the opinion of many people who know more about the law than I do, as well as my opinion, incorrect) attitude that the act of writing and sharing fanfiction without money changing hands is itself illegal, but just not worth prosecuting as long as no money is changing hands.

A lot of fic has disclaimers to the effect that the fanwriter owns none of this, made no money from this, and please don't sue. It's relatively rare to see a fanwriter make the accurate claim that the fandom-sourced characters and worldbuilding belong to the owners, but that any original characters are theirs, and so are this fic's worth of shenanigans.

It's more common to see fic writers who are building on original characters created by other fanwriters give credit for those characters to the fanwriter who created them. I think that even fanauthors who aren't particularly apt to claim their own original contributions to an established universe that they're writing unlicensed extras for, are likely to recognize and credit unlicensed extras contributed by specific other people. If I were to write Stargate fanfiction that had Clan Mitchell presence, I'd credit them to my friends synecdochic and ivorygates, who did that chunk of worldbuilding. If I wrote fic with Mulder and Scully's daughter Casey, I'd credit amalnahurriyeh.

[kaz]

Hmm... I feel a bit as if the OMG NO, NO MONEY MUST CHANGE HANDS thing may have grown out of the fear of lawyerly smackdowns, but in some parts of fandom turned into a noncommercial gift culture that many people now value for its own sake. I'm thinking of the OTW and the bits of fandom it grew out of here, or the FanLib debacle - obviously *part* of the backlash against that was that it was monetizing fic without any of the money going to the actual fic authors and that it put everyone in danger of lawyerly smackdown, but I'm pretty sure I remember posts going up where people were defending the noncommercial nature of fanfic as something worth preserving in its own right.

Of course, as Jim very rightly points out there isn't a single fannish culture, and I expect this to go very differently depending on what the fannish norms in the fandoms affected by this are. It's similar to how I always get irked when people talk about 50 Shades of Grey as if the attitude behind that is typical of fandom, when it looks like what happened is that Twilight fandom developed pretty independently and has much less of a taboo against making money off your fic than many other fandoms do.

(And as an interesting cultural sidenote, I feel as if the people who want to keep the gift culture thing are less likely to use disclaimers; they're relatively uncommon on AO3, which I mentally orient as far closer to "fandom as a gift culture" than FFN.)