The team behind the Harry Potter brand . . . latched on to influencers such as the webmasters of popular fan sites, making them an integral part of the marketing strategies that were critical to the brand’s success. By giving influential fan sites sneak peeks and insider information, the online buzz soared, and by listening to what customers were saying . . . the marketing team could adjust their marketing strategies and tactics to best meet the customer’s demands and massage perceptions or messages to meet the needs of the business.77
The Leaky Cauldron is at the forefront of the fan community. It describes itself as “an all-purpose site for the Harry Potter enthusiast.” The Leaky Cauldron started life in 2000 as a one-page news blog, constructed and run by Ben “B. K.” DeLong, a Harry Potter fan from Massachusetts. Over the years, The Leaky Cauldron has grown into one of the most successful examples of a fansite that you could find. Their brand has spread over the years, and now, in a strange twist of fate, Melissa Anelli and her fellow site leaders are celebrities in their own right.
Naturally, it takes time and money to run The Leaky Cauldron, a site that, according to Anelli, currently sees 20,000 to 30,000 unique visitors per day. “[The] Leaky [Cauldron] makes money on advertising, and takes roughly about what it makes, to run. We pay a small staff of six a few hundred dollars a month each, and the rest gets covered by the considerable cost of bandwidth.”78
On the back of a decade at the forefront of Harry Potter fandom, Anelli used her training and growing career in journalism to pen an autobiographical look at, as Harry, A History’s subtitle puts it, “the true story of a boy wizard, his fans, and life inside the Harry Potter phenomenon.” The book has sold over 70,000 copies worldwide. She is currently working on a revised edition that will include the final years of the saga. Over the years as web mistress of The Leaky Cauldron, Anelli developed close relationships with Warner Bros., the film’s producers, and with J. K. Rowling and her publishers. This has allowed her site to lead the way with news direct from the source, quashing rumors and confirming castings. Arguably their greatest achievement—a joint venture involving friendly rivals MuggleNet—was being invited to J. K. Rowling’s house in Edinburgh to interview the author on the release day of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Having famously steered clear of the fan community for many years, Rowling at this time showed a tremendous faith in the work that Anelli and Spartz do, as Anelli described: “I think she knows that we really respect her and the franchise, and that the people on Leaky are really loving of it. She knows our interests are hers, where the fans are concerned. And we do a lot for charity—I think she likes that a lot.”79
Anelli has found fame and fortune through her work with The Leaky Cauldron and her subsequent book release. However, surely there are legal and moral implications to this? Anelli defends her success:
I don’t think I’ve made a living based on J. K. Rowling’s success, per se—I think I’ve made a living writing a nonfiction book, which is what I am equipped and trained to do . . . I won’t deny that the immense popularity of Harry has helped, but so did spending more than six years reporting on the phenomenon before writing a word. So, I think it’s a mix, and that it’s symbiotic: I couldn’t have walked off the street and written a successful book on this, I had to have the history. Similarly, I couldn’t have written this successful of a book on a phenomenon that wasn’t, you know, a phenomenon.80
Heidi Tandy, an intellectual property lawyer, sets the record straight on fan-generated content and its ability to make profit:
If you’re writing about the books or films or fandom, you can make money off it. That’s why things like Melissa’s book . . . can sell and bring in money for it. The HPEF con[vention]s have also produced and sold compendiums of papers and presentations. For things like [W]rock, I know they have “agreements” with Warner Brothers about how and when they can sell stuff and for how much, but that’s based as much on their wanting to have a good relationship with WB.81
One of the major contributing factors to the online Harry Potter community is fanfiction. This takes many forms: book fiction, film fiction, actor fiction, romance, horror, continuations from the books, sequels, “ships,” and, most alarmingly (for some), “slash” (gay) fiction, incest, or teacher/pupil-based stories. Fanfiction is a remarkable outlet for fans. In an UrbanWire interview, Tandy, a founder of the popular FictionAlley.org, says:
[F]or a lot of people, it’s just another way to discuss the books . . . People like exploring their creativity in a communal format—you can have that community with fanfic, whereas you don’t when you’re writing on your own. Fiction Alley is much more than a fanfic site—we have over a million posts discussing the books, the movies, writing, etc.82
Tandy’s role in the fan community is a very interesting one. By day she is an intellectual property lawyer; in her spare time she writes fanfiction, has chaired the HPEF panel, and continues to report on Potter events. “As a lawyer who works in Intellectual Property, I wanted to research the legalities of fanfic before reviewing/commenting on any, and especially before writing my own. And that’s how I started developing a speciality as a ‘fandom lawyer.’” This intriguing set of circumstances has led Tandy to become a go-to person for fan communities who need confirmation of their legal standing in respect of intellectual property rights. In her role as an intellectual property lawyer, she represents “a number of authors, websites and literacy, writing and education-focused nonprofits in contractual and intellectual property matters.”83
The lawyers of Warner Bros. famously embarked on a campaign in 2002–2003 of sending cease-and-desist letters to the owners of Harry Potter fansites they felt were breaching their trademarks and confusing other fans with their unofficial websites.
WB was very concerned that kids would Google for Harry Potter and find higher-rated fanfic and fan art. They asked our site [fictionalley] to make all slash fic . . . R-rated and we refused to do so . . . WB never asked us to do it again, and it didn’t seem to hurt our relationship with them, but that’s just from my perspective . . . we did get invited to the premiere for [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban] the following year. Once Daniel took the lead in Equus, there was a significant drop-off in requests that sites “ensure” that kids Googling Harry Potter saw nothing salacious! And when JKR said Dumbledore was gay, that was the end of requests to rate slash differently from mixed-gender relationships.84
This is one area of the online community that will undoubtedly survive. As a purely creative medium, fanfiction will continue to allow fans to engage in their own literary talents.
Another new area of fandom can be found in The Harry Potter Alliance. Their mission statement:
The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) takes an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Our mission is to empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a better world . . . We are harnessing the power of popular culture toward making our world a better place.85
The Alliance was started by Paul DeGeorge—a founding member of the Wrock community—and Andrew Slack on October 10, 2005, when they decided that they “needed an organization to act as a Dumbledore’s Army for our world, full of Harry Potter fans wishing to embody the message of the books to create social change.”86 Their success stories speak for themselves; raising $123,000 in just two weeks, they sent five cargo planes of supplies to the earthquake-stricken Haiti. They have donated more than 55,000 books to locations around the world, including 20,000 to the Mississippi Delta in the wake of the 2010 floods, and 4,000 to Rwanda. This is a very powerful tool; the themes that Rowling discusses throughout her canon of work are reflected in so many ways in “reality.” It is promising to know that Slack and his team are using this initiative to collaborate on such important themes. Not only do they promote literacy among young people around the world, bu
t they allow them to actively participate in current affairs and issues.
Heidi Tandy (Heidi8) has been involved with the Harry Potter internet fandom since its earliest days. She began as a moderator (mod) on the discussion group Harry Potter for Grownups, helped found and administer the fanfic website and archive FictionAlley, and wrote for the popular sites The Leaky Cauldron (J. K. Rowling’s favorite) and the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator (HPANA, now defunct). She’s a multifandom vidder, fanfic writer, fanart/gif reblogger, and an intellectual property attorney who has often commented informally on legal issues surrounding fanfiction and long advocated for fanfic as a type of transformative work.
How Harry Potter Fanfic Changed the World (or at Least the Internet)
Heidi Tandy (Heidi8)
I used to be terrified of Warner Bros.
Recently, I asked a friend to re-send to me a cease-and-desist letter that her fansite had received from WB in January of 2003, and when the subject line “C&D” showed up in my inbox, even though I knew it was going to be there, my heart skipped a beat and I had to catch my breath. Even after years of a good working relationship with Warner Bros. and Bloomsbury, J. K. Rowling’s agents, Universal, and Scholastic, seeing those letters and that symbol in my inbox sends me right back to 2001 and 2002 and 2003, when we felt like we existed at their sufferance.
That’s what fandom taught you, all those years ago. Anne Rice would send a nasty letter to FanFiction.Net and they would delete all the fanfic based on her books, close the section, and bar comments in the forum. Paramount could come into a fan con with Cleveland law enforcement and close the vendor room for three hours, with no warning and no notice, and fans couldn’t do anything about it. If someone uploaded the Sorcerer’s Stone trailer to the Files section on your Yahoo! group, and WB found out about it and complained to Yahoo!, they might delete your entire community and everything in it; they didn’t even have to provide a way for you to get in contact with the members of the community. It’d just be gone.
The large-for-that-time Harry Potter for Grownups Yahoo! group, which hosted over 4,500 messages per month at its peak, suffered a few nerve-racking months when a former mod decided to retaliate against the community. Her complaints to Yahoo! resulted in the deletion of one of the group’s organizational mailing lists, and forced us to close the files section. Then it got worse. After she unsubscribed herself from the mods’ organizational list, the mod claimed complete ownership of the posts she had made, and only stopped her harassment when I successfully argued to Yahoo! that she had granted the group a license to her posts for archival purposes.
If one individual could cause that much unrest, we thought, imagine what Warner Bros. could do if they learned about fandom!
Of course, they already knew. Fandom had already survived the domain name disputes of 2000 and 2001, where Warner Bros. sent Umbridge-esque threatening letters to teens around the world, insisting they hand over domain names that included terms from the Harry Potter series. Children and teens (and their lawyers) had pushed back by pointing out that their usages were noninfringing and noncommercial. But the disputes made it clear that Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowling were aware that fans existed, chatted, and created among themselves.
But was it true that fanfiction writers were bad fans, as journalist Christopher Noxon claimed in a sensationalized article in 2001 (which he rewrote in 2003, causing fans to panic when it was published again)? Was Warner Bros. waiting for a section of fandom to poke its head up so they could lop it off? Was WB “likely to greet Harry Potter slashers with more takedown orders than tolerance”? Were “billable hours . . . about to start piling up”?87
Probably not, as I learned late in 2003 when I made my first visit to the sudios of Warner Bros. in Burbank to meet with members of the Harry Potter team and their intellectual property counsel. At every meeting, they were nice, friendly, and supportive of fans, fandom, and fannish creativity—even slash fanfic. In a way, our discussions were the direct result of a piece on the front page of the New York Times in May 2002. The Times article opened with a paragraph from a Harry/Draco AU (alternative universe) called “Snitch!” where the boys were gangsters in London circa 2010, then continued with a few quotes from me and others about fanfiction, romantic ships, and storyline predictions.
The day after the article ran, when posts were popping up on Usenet, in Yahoo! groups, and on FictionAlley about the havoc Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowling were surely going to wreak on the Potter fandom and all other fandoms besides, I got an email from the new manager of the recently relaunched WBShop.com site asking if FictionAlley wanted to be an affiliate of their store.
They didn’t want to shut us down. We could stay online; we could go on hosting and sharing fanfic and fanart, discussions, debates and all sorts of creativity, regardless of the ships/romances they included—and we didn’t have to worry that they’d Expelliarmus our stories or pictures. That kind of contact from The Powers That Be—supportive, interested, and curious—would start to occur more and more frequently as time went on, until an invitation to the Warner Bros. studio was, if not a common occurrence, at least a logical step. But that’s the moment when everything changed.
Ten years ago—before LiveJournal, Tumblr, Facebook, the iTunes store, Kindles, midnight book-release parties, YouTube, Google Docs, Kickstarter, or CafePress—Entertainment Weekly had to explain Quidditch in their Harry Potter FAQ, Dragon*Con filled only one Atlanta hotel, and Comic-Con didn’t sell out at all. I mused about a time in the future when there’d be dozens of Harry Potter fansites.
My prediction was not as accurate as Trelawney’s prophecy; by the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there were hundreds of thousands.
In those days, TV networks and movie production companies could shut down online communities with a sharply worded letter to Yahoo! or FanFiction.Net, but communications scholars hypothesized that “eventually . . . there will be a continuum between point-to-point and broadcast communication . . .”88
But even they couldn’t predict half of the wizardry Harry Potter fans would do.
The Harry Potter fandom, which began in 1999 and shows no sign of ever ending, arrived in a perfect storm of radical new communication methods and interpersonal relations, which combined with the fantastic creativity of Harry Potter fans—creativity in writing, art, law, social networking, filmmaking, science, animation, humor, and a drive to change the world.
Kids and young adults who wrote Harry Potter fanfic in 2000 and 2002 and 2004 now have novels on New York Times bestseller lists.
College students who wrote and performed in fan films now star on TV shows and have created their own production companies for stage and screen.
Authors have teamed up with Wrock bands to raise funds after natural disasters and have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to help those in need.
Filmmakers cast Harry Potter fans in major roles and as extras, and cast members write dissertations about the Harry Potter fandom.
Theme parks and museums include fans as consultants and team members to help perfect their rides, showcases, and exhibits.
Fans—with the support of J. K. Rowling and other authors, actors, and celebs—have raised about a million dollars over the years by creating and selling Wrock albums, fanart collections, T-shirts, stickers, wristbands, and fanfic stories, alongside Rowling-signed books, in fund-raisers to support marriage equality, victims of earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes, kids who want to read, and so much more.
Fan artists who shared their art with friends and fellow fans create games for Electronic Arts and book covers for Scholastic and Random House, and work for Dreamworks.
Site moderators and archivists are librarians and teachers and literary agents.
Quidditch had a place at the 2012 Olympics.
Multinational corporations no longer go to war against fans who want to set up websites, podcasts, vlogs, or Twitter accounts about their favorite books and films and ban
ds and shows. Instead, they give them advance reading copies of books, visits to film sets, and space on the red carpet at movie premieres.
The fandom crowdsourced the grammar on the teaser poster for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, persuading Warner Bros. to add a vital comma; helped an exec at Warner Bros. with an email to the producers about the incorrect date of death of Tom Riddle’s father, which was corrected using computer graphics by the time the film came out; participated in the creation of Pottermore; and worked with Universal Orlando as consultants as they created and built The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
That’s not all that’s changed, when it comes to the rightsholder/fan relationships, interactions, and magic. In the 2000s, fans felt like they had to cave and kowtow even if the rightsholder overreached and claimed more rights than they were entitled to under US copyright or trademark law. But in the last ten years, in cases utterly unrelated to fan creativity, US courts have expanded the definitions of “fair use” and transformative works. At the same time, the Organization for Transformative Works and their fanfiction archive, archiveofourown.org, have invested in their own servers so as not to worry that some ISP will overreact to a bogus and legally untenable complaint from a copyright holder and delete thousands of person-hours of transformative works.
The Harry Potter fandom is really the first “social network”—possibly the largest, and still one of the strongest. But it’s not a monolith, and never was. To some, it’s Fluffy, Hagrid’s three-headed dog, where some fans focus on fan creativity; others indulge solely in discussions of the book canon; and a third group are fans of the fandom itself. Or perhaps the Harry Potter fandom has split into seven or more parts, like a Horcrux. Or maybe it’s a reverse of that, as thousands of souls came together to generate something new, unique, and fascinating.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 19
