Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  My main purpose, according to TWCS, was to make sure the content was changed enough that we wouldn’t have any copyright-infringement issues. I was asked to handle Fifty Shades of Grey and James with kid gloves to maintain the peace and keep her happy. Looking back, would I have handled the edits of Fifty differently? Sure I would. I’d have gone with my gut instinct and made the changes I felt were necessary to the manuscript. Not doing so made me TWCS’ scapegoat when James became unhappy about the lack of a copy edit on Fifty Shades (there was no copy editor on staff when I edited Fifty). It also lost me the chance to edit books two and three, and kept me from being compensated properly for editing the book and from recouping any compensation for the work I did to develop TWCS as a publishing house.

  I was phased out of the house over a nine-month period—just around the time that deals were being brokered in New York for Fifty to be sold to Random House. TWCS replaced its offer for me to become managing editor over the erotica division with one for a position over TWCS Library, which didn’t pay enough for me to quit my day job. I have been blacklisted by many in Twilight fandom for working on the book at all. I have been unfollowed and not spoken to on social media by authors I once considered friends; fandom friends turned a blind eye when TWCS let me go—even though I was told over and over again that what happened was unprofessional and wrong. I am now known as the editor of the book that needed editing: the New York Times number-one, mega-millions-selling novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

  My experience has been bittersweet. I have seen sides of the fandom, fic, and publishing worlds that most people don’t—the good, the bad, the fabulous, and the ugly. I worked with authors who became close friends and who have gone beyond TWCS Publishing House in their publishing endeavors. I’ve seen a few of my favorite fics be transformed into works worthy of publishing and actually get published. While my opportunity to work full time for TWCS vanished long ago, I am now represented by Louise Fury, a fabulous agent with the L. Perkins Agency. I have my own novel in the works, and for the first time in a couple of years, I’m looking forward to what the world of publishing has to offer.

  part three

  FIC AND PUBLISHING

  THERE’S A WRITING COMMUNITY—well, many nested or overlapping or strangely parallel communities—based almost entirely on exchange, praise, mutual respect, and critique. The works produced in this community, almost by definition, have no monetary value. In at least some circles of this community, producing work for money is frowned upon, even derided, as selling out. A few may make money from the sale of their works, and these few are the best known to those outside the community, but they are mocked by true believers.

  Of course I’m talking about poetry.

  It wasn’t always this way. In a different time, two young men wanted to raise money for a trip to Europe. They thought, Hey! Let’s write a book of experimental poetry! While William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge could hardly have retired on the proceeds from Lyrical Ballads (although they certainly amassed an impressive amount of cultural capital), the idea of raising money through poetry sales was not as absurd in the late eighteenth century as it seems today. (Admittedly, Lyrical Ballads did not sell nearly as well as Fifty Shades of Grey.) The fact is, attitudes and expectations about writing change all the time. The systems of value—whether financial or cultural—that apply to different kinds of writing change as well.

  Financial and cultural values are sometimes seen as antithetical. The cultural critic Theodor Adorno argued that any form of mass, popular, commercial culture—anything that participated in “the culture industry,” as he termed it—was not art but rather art’s enemy. In an entirely distinct cultural milieu, Fic contributor Rachel Caine remembers getting the cold shoulder at a fan convention because she was commercially published—real writers, she was told, wrote only for love. In other circles (the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, for instance), only paid writers need apply; membership is open only to those with paid publications in approved markets. From yet another perspective, it’s also where you publish that counts, but in a different way: some serious, professional, publishing writers of literary and experimental fiction consider any association with the major commercial publishing houses to be destructive to literary aims and values, tantamount to consorting with the enemy.

  Ultimately, cultural and financial systems of value are very different, and should probably be understood as distinct. Instead, they are endlessly and perhaps unavoidably confused.

  This confusion has certainly been apparent in the tangled world of fanfiction. Some of it stems from fear of legal consequences, some from an exaggerated sense of the originality of the source material as opposed to the fanworks it inspires, and some from taking pride in “fic for fic’s sake” and the ethos of the gift economy. The fan culture tenet that “thou shalt not profit from fanworks” has been, depending on who you talk to, an almost sacred and inviolate, wholly necessary founding principle of fandom. To others within the same community, it’s only been a necessary evil.

  Part of the confusion about publishing fanworks stems from the fact that fanfiction does not name any one thing. It is a blanket term for works identified by their authors as relating to a particular cultural product or public figure, but the term itself makes no actual assertion about how closely related a given fanwork is to its purported source. Sometimes departures from the original are intentional (Holmes and Watson are Trojan women in ancient Greece!), and sometimes they are completely unintentional—the fan writer is trying, but the style, tone, and nature of the story would be unrecognizable as remotely related to its source were it not for character names, identifying tags, and the website where it appears (“OMG Homes, I cant even said Jon LOL Wastin U R so dumb that was homes said that”). So there’s more than one reason that for most fan writers publishing for profit will not become an issue.

  Many fan writers are surprised to learn that there’s a long history of adapting fanworks for commercial use—in the case of Sherlock Holmes, as we’ve seen, at the suggestion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself: “Dear Sir, I read your story. It is not bad and I don’t see why you should not change the names and try to get it published yourself.” Of course, fandom history is not necessarily cumulative in the minds and experiences of any given generation of fans. Today’s fan writers know nothing of Conan Doyle’s letter, nor of the open, accepted practice of transposing new names onto Sherlock Holmes pastiches and publishing them commercially. Similarly, the new generation of readers and writers today who are growing up sharing original and fanworks on a single platform, as we see them doing on Wattpad and online writing community Movellas, may not experience the sharing of original and fanworks as different in kind. And as for the small number of writers who have gained recognition and even commercial contracts on those sites, I’ve seen no outcry.

  Of course we will never know how many novels began as works of fanfiction that were never publicly shared, the writer realizing at some point in the process that the work had veered off into independent territory and could be pursued as such. Even for work that has been shared as fanfiction, “filing off the serial numbers,” as repurposing derivative or transformative work is often termed, isn’t even a little bit new. What is new is that the practice has now come fully and loudly out of the closet—so much so that what Newsweek, Time, and Publisher’s Weekly singled out as last year’s bold new fashion trend is old hat this year. But it’s a hat that still seems to get plenty of wear. Fanfics that get publishing contracts don’t make headlines anymore, but as long as fics amass millions of reads online, they will continue to receive publishing contracts—until a sufficient number of them tank precipitously enough that publishing an author with a record of tens of thousands of readers seems riskier than investing in an unknown debut novelist. For now, it’s the hugely, wildly successful fanfics that are getting contracts—those whose hits number in the multiple millions—not the undiscovered gems, or the gems discovered only by a few
hundred or a few thousand readers.

  As I hope this section will make clear, though, filing off the serial numbers is by no means the only relationship fanfiction has had to commercial publishing. The far more common story is one of apprenticeship, of new or novice writers building skills and confidence within fanwriting communities before launching their own publishing careers. These fanfic origins used to be hidden, but these former fic authors also are increasingly coming out of the closet.

  It’s not always a one-way street, either. There are instances of long-successful professional novelists who write fanfic on the side, for fun. S. E. Hinton is perhaps the best known, although she, like many others, is less public about her fanfic pen name than she is about the fact of writing fic. Anonymity is a key benefit. Fanfic offers professionals the same things it offers amateurs: honest critique, the play (which can also be discipline!) of assuming other voices, other styles and story lines. The freedom to experiment without risking your reputation or the investments of your publishers. Nonfiction writers—and professors!—get to take off our mantles of authority and all the positive and negative baggage that comes with them. If only J. K. Rowling had published her mystery novel as fic, she could have gotten much of the benefit (the honest, unbiased, Potter-free response to her work) she sought.

  The writers in this section all have different experiences of fanfiction and how it has related to their publishing careers. With new fic licensing schemes, corporate-sponsored fanfic-like projects, and the integration of fanfic and original amateur stories on sites such as Wattpad and Movellas, we’re likely to see an even greater variety of these experiences in the future.

  An Interview with Eurydice (Vivien Dean)

  I KNEW I’D WANT TO CONTACT a fan writer named Eurydice for this book, because she wrote the first fanfiction I ever read all the way through. I was in the hospital. I was hurt—I wanted comfort. Wait . . . I had heard . . . wasn’t there was a whole genre for that? I’d been collecting fanfic links for when I was brave enough to read it (several times already, I’d had the same experience most people have when they randomly click on some fanfic link: horror—in my case, not at anything that’s going on in the fic, but at the grammar and punctuation. Professional hazard). What I finally settled on was a long (I wanted long, it was going to be a long night) “between-the-scenes” or episode insert, a classic hurt/comfort fic called “The Promise of Frost.” Buffy and Spike got stuck in a cabin in winter and . . . stayed.

  Eurydice was a writer who seemed very in control of her style, and while she could be more romance-y in spots than I myself preferred, many readers singled out those same passages as favorites. As I researched her, I found that she had published original work since writing “Frost.” Today, she’s moved back and forth between fanwriting and professional romance writing for most of her career. At one point, Eurydice significantly revised a work she’d posted as fanfiction and published it as a novel, leaving the fanfiction version up online. It was all very open.

  I asked Eurydice how she experiences the differences between fan-writing and original romance; about changes she’s observed in fanwriting culture, including the relationship between fanfiction and publication; and about what, as a writer, keeps her coming back to fic.

  How do you see the difference between your original work and your fanwork? Are the processes different for you? Which seems more free, which has more rules or constraints?

  The processes are very different for me, actually. I was always driven to write fanfiction because of my love of the characters, and so I mostly wrote stories specifically to make the characters happy.

  My [fic] readers had one expectation most of the time: to see the pair they love get together. I could bend or ignore a lot of rules on the road to getting them there. It’s not the same in original romance. There are genre expectations that typically need to be met. Depending on the audience (I write m/m as well as het original work, and the audiences don’t always have overlapping needs), I might have to specifically choose to limit secondary characters, for instance, or stick to monogamous relationships even if they’re not committed. I actually began writing in a new fandom the past couple of years specifically because I was in search of something with more freedom.

  As a writer, what do you get out of fic that you don’t get from your professional writing? Many people—including fic writers themselves—view fic as practice, something to be moved on from, but I know a number of pro writers who still write fic—or who started after successful publishing careers. Speaking only for yourself, why do you enjoy both?

  Writing fic allows me to wallow in characters I adore. There are only so many shows out there, a finite number of experiences for me to have with these people. Fic, both writing and reading, gives me the opportunity to spend time with them when I couldn’t otherwise. But I get bored pretty easily, to be honest. I don’t want the same thing over and over again. So writing both gives me the best of both worlds.

  I know you reworked [your Buffy fanfiction] “Rhapsody in Oil” as original, removing the vampire elements. Did you feel you needed to change much about the characterizations, or had that Spike and that Buffy—in the painting world—become so distinct they felt like your own?

  I actually reworked “Rhapsody” quite extensively. Many plot points are different, some relationships are different, the ending is different, and more than 70 percent of the prose is rewritten. What I ended up taking from it was the basic premise, the initial antagonistic relationship between the hero and the heroine, and certain scenes. Because I had to create completely new backstories for them, they took on a life of their own that felt separate enough from Buffy and Spike for me to be comfortable calling them their own people. Of course, they share similarities. Cash is British, quick-witted, slightly dangerous, and sexy as hell, for instance. It actually took me as long to rework it as it did to write it in the first place, because of all the changes/rewriting.

  I was taken by the open way you announced the publication of “Rhapsody” on your LiveJournal, and I notice that the fic version is still up online. It all seemed low-key. Are you aware of the controversy in other fandoms over “pulling to publish,” or “filing off the serial numbers”? From what I saw in the Buffyverse, fandom seemed encouraging of writers going pro with their fic. Did I miss a lot of wank?

  In Buffy fandom, not so much. I have heard mention of it in a few other fandoms, but not witnessed it firsthand. I’ve seen more wank in the original [writing] world by readers and other authors who have blown up when it’s been revealed that fanfic has been reworked for publication. I get it [the fandom controversy], actually. One of the primary beliefs in fandom is that you never profit from it. I think part of it might depend also on how popular writers are when they announce they’re pulling fic. Writers with a large support group, people they consider friends, don’t seem to get as much flak for it.

  Do you have any idea how widespread that publishing practice was, in this or in other fandoms you were in?

  Other than what I knew of my Buffy friends, I only know what I see in the original romance market, mostly in the m/m niche. Opinions seem to be divided. On the one hand, the writers who know how much work goes into fanfic seem not to be too bothered by the practice (and certainly some publishers don’t care where it comes from as long as it makes them money). On the other hand, I’ve seen readers feel cheated that they paid for something that was once free, and writers angered because they don’t understand fandoms and fic writing.

  Did you have any idea of readership numbers in the Buffy fandom for popular stories like yours? There seemed to be so many different archives, LiveJournals, and award sites, and at least when I was there, the fandom had largely migrated from ff.net. I don’t remember anyone talking about review counts. I wasn’t sure if that was just a difference in culture, in the scope of the community, or a lack of tracking (review and hit counts on sites like FanFiction.Net and Wattpad are now sometimes used as evidence of “platform”).

/>   I only knew about hits to my site, but I’ll be honest, I never bothered paying attention to any of it. Popularity has never been my goal (I’d probably sell more original if I wanted to cater to broader, public needs, LOL). But caring about review counts, monitoring hits . . . that’s at the core of what drives blogging mentality these days, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s deemed so important in certain communities.

  Was there ever any wank/drama about being a Big Name Fan or Big Name Author in any of the fandoms you were involved with? This was a big deal in the Twilight fandom, and there were sites dedicated specifically to bringing down fans that seemed “too big for their breeches.”

  I never saw it, no. The closest thing I can remember in my corner of the Buffy fandom was a popular Spuffy author who wanted to write full time. She offered to write fic for people who “donated” to her, I’m sure thinking it would be like patronage during the Renaissance, and she immediately got slammed/torn down for daring to want to make money off her fic. She disappeared from the fandom very quickly after that. I have no idea whatever happened to her.

  I remember Linden Bay Romance as being an online publisher who published a lot of fan authors, sometimes their original works, sometimes their repurposed fics. Was this an open practice of theirs? Did they discuss it, do you know? Linden Bay was bought by Samhain Publishing; was Samhain aware, and do they still support fan writers?

  Two of the original Linden Bay owners were popular Spuffy authors, so they immediately approached a lot of us about writing for them. I was asked to rewrite something and I refused, mostly because I didn’t believe it was right to shave off the serial numbers and call it good like I knew some authors chose to do. I ended up writing an original romance novel instead. The practice didn’t get discussed in the romance community, only behind closed doors and within the fandom community from which they got their authors. I only ended up rewriting “Rhapsody” after three years of writing original fic, both with Linden Bay and elsewhere. I felt at that point I’d learned enough about the market and was comfortable enough about how much to significantly change to make it original.