Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World
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Legality aside, however, I think the general awareness that people can sometimes publish fanfiction has led to some misconceptions about how fan writers see themselves and their work. Outsiders often assume fan writers must be ecstatic over the new potential for profiting from their works, and many fan writers are pleased to have new opportunities. But not all of them have been pining for profit, and some find the practice terribly unethical. While many fans express nothing but love and support for fan writers who have found commercial success with their fic, others view it with tremendous scorn and anger. Some reacted with outrage initially, but have accepted the change; some judge on a case-by-case basis (greater transformation of the fanwork makes selling it more acceptable, while minimal or superficial editing is “just cheesy”); some hope their turn may also come. Some simply shrug and go on writing for fun and love—I’ve often been told by fan writers that if they’d wanted to profit, they would have written something different, but that what another writer wants to do with his or her work doesn’t affect them.
Many others, however, remain intensely, passionately opposed to the practice of publishing fic—most vocally, perhaps, among the ranks of the Twilight fandom that itself helped launch the current trend. The most vehement opponents to publishing fanworks quickly investigate and label any new publication on Goodreads lists and on Amazon, posting damning one-star reviews noting the publication’s fic origins. One such comment on Tara Sue Me’s The Submissive reads, “A lot of people want to give this woman a pass (and are coming up with hilarious bullshit to excuse it—pathetic hypocrisy at its finest) because they like her. She’s no different than any of the other morally bankrupt people engaging in this unethical, repugnant practice.” Another simply reviews the self-published Wake, a reworking of a popular fic in which cancer patient Edward struggles to come to terms with his ailing body’s sexuality, with the tags: “cheap-ploys-to-make-a-buck, rewritten-fanfiction, dont-even-bother, gonna-be-sick, no-just-no, not-cool, not-if-i-were-dying, severe-side-eyes, shouldn-t-be-published, wtf-is-this.” Even by the standards of Twitter and Tumblr (highly expressive rhetorical climates), exchanges on this issue stand out. Close friendships and working partnerships years in the making have ended, bitterly.
One of the most prominent, vocal, and vigilant critics in the Twilight fandom has been einfach mich, who early on wrote an influential blog post:
Sad fact is that not every situation can be a compromise. Especially when the actions of a greedy few insults the foundation of what we do.
You may not care where the stories come from. You may think you’re supporting a friend to live their dream (god knows I did), but in the end using fan fiction and someone else’s fandom to launch your own writing career will eventually harm all fan fiction writers and readers. Either by threatening fan fiction writers[’] . . . ability to do what we do without threat of being shut down or by convincing other fan fiction writers that their work is not legitimate unless they attempt to sell it.
If you do not see fan fiction as a legit art form do not write it.101
In this view, fandom is not and can never be about money; it’s about equality, open discourse, a near utopia of free exchange. Money threatens it, cheapens it, sullies both fan writers and source.
Of course, very few fan writers have received large publishing contracts: seven eight with major houses at the time of writing, but even ten times that number would represent only the tiniest fraction of the almost 4 million fanfics posted to Wattpad alone—just one archive, and a new one at that. Also, community mores vary by platform, fandom, and generation. In some fandoms, it’s acceptable to (quietly) pass around a kind of electronic tip jar or even to pay authors for commissioned fanworks. What is and is not acceptable within fanfiction communities changes all the time.
Some fans, though, are still wondering how any of this was possible. As Aja Romano, longtime fangirl and now commentator for The Daily Dot and other venues, explains:
For decades, the golden rule of fanfiction has been Thou shalt not profit. This is a twofold protection: it protects the original copyright holder from having their work infringed upon for profit, and it protects the fanfic author from claims of infringement.
But attitudes about fic for profit have changed so rapidly and so drastically that within the space of a few years, we’ve moved from the illicit, tacit practice of “filing off the serial numbers” to Fifty Shades of Grey openly owning its published-fanfic status.
And now, of course, we have Kindle Worlds, whose approach to fanwork as a kind of free-enterprise franchise tie-in may be an inevitable growing pain along the way to corporations reaching a more equitable permanent relationship with their fandoms.
But what does it mean to “profit”? At what point does one start profiting from fandom? Is it profit when someone loves your fanfic enough to draw fanart for it? When you have your way paid to a convention? When you get a job because of fandom connections, or when you capitalize upon your fan following to launch a successful Kickstarter, like Fight Like a Girl, the largely fandom-funded campaign that saw my literary fiction debut in 2013?
The road from “Thou shalt not profit” to “If thou profit, for heaven’s sake don’t admit it” to “Screw this, thou canst profit if thou wants to” is not a simple trajectory. It doesn’t track the course of early outliers like Cassandra Clare and Naomi Novik, who each directly tied their successful publishing careers to their successful fandom followings—Clare by retaining her familiar fan handle as her publishing pseudonym, Novik by treating her publishing identity as the “open secret” known only to her well-established fandom following. Neither of them were profiting from fanfiction—at least, not directly. But did writing fanfic allow them each to build a strong personal fanbase, make industry connections, and help them become disciplined, polished writers? Absolutely.
Some fan writers are just as critical of these dynamics as they are of writing fic for profit. For example, einfach mich’s previously quoted Tumblr post decries the practice of glorifying some fan writers over others, and of making fanfiction fandom about fic writers and fics rather than about enthusiasm for and adherence to the original source stories. She complains that new readers came to find stories about Stephenie Meyer’s Edward and Bella and found stories about strangers—a variation on complaints that AU fic “ruins” or “isn’t really” fanfic that date as far back as responses to Jacqueline Lichtenberg’s Kraith universe in the 1970s.
einfach mich also reiterates the dearly held and oft repeated points that “fanfiction is meant to be a gift to other fans” and that “fans don’t turn other fans into customers.” The wholly egalitarian fandom she imagines may not be the norm—Big Name Fans seem to have been a fact of fandom life from the get-go—but certainly the introduction of money to a nonmonetary economy complicates the relationships and implicit agreements that underlie its functioning.
Take beta readers. Beta readers act as pre-readers, sounding boards, and editors for fic writers. All their labor is volunteer, and it is real labor. They lavish time and attention on work on short notice, and because many do not write themselves, they won’t receive the same service in kind. Critique groups or writing partners, of course, fulfill a similar role in the broader writing community, but unlike a critique partner in a writing group, where the community understands that publication for profit is a likely and desired end result toward which the group is all working, fanfic betas volunteer under the assumption that no commercial gain will come from their labor. One beta reader who wishes to remain anonymous likened the feeling of having beta-read work sold outside the community to donating labor or crafts to a nonprofit that then turns around and says, “We decided to sell your stuff and keep the money because YOLO.”
Active fan writer Ms Kathy was the beta reader for Tara Sue Me’s “The Submissive” and its fanfic sequels, now available from Penguin. She was also temporarily the Twilighted.net validation beta for Snowqueens Icedragon’s “Master of the Universe” (Twili
ghted.net required its authors to go through this extra level of editing, although Snowqueens Icedragon’s popularity meant that she had more leeway to ignore suggestions). Ms Kathy doesn’t approve of profiting from fanworks, and has long expressed her concern that this practice has harmed the fic community and will continue to do so. Despite this stance, her volunteered time and energy has arguably contributed to the commercial success of the fanfics she worked on. (While making her position known, Ms Kathy has not been among the more angry public voices and seems unwilling to let even fundamental disagreements destroy what had been productive friendships: “I appreciate everyone’s ability to choose for themselves and I’m deeply grateful to the authors for trusting me with their words when their projects were fic. I am grateful they allow me to speak out and say that while I always support them, it’s not something I myself would do or support with my money. Differing opinions will always happen in life, and I like it when we can all be respectful grownups.”102)
This idealization of fandom as a profit-free, noncapitalist space is also not strictly accurate. Visit the exhibition floor at Comic-Con and you will see enormous corporate booths and smaller, independent crafters and vendors, all selling to fans. Some of these works are authorized by rightsholders, some not. But there is rarely any outcry from fans towards selling fandom-related crafts to other fans, even those that clearly infringe on trademark (although corporate C&D orders do go out on such works all the time). Fans historically have turned other fans into customers in all sorts of small-scale ways. Part of the difference in opinions toward repurposed fic may be explained by the difference in scale, but even so it does seem that there’s a special rage reserved for profiting from fan writing. (Why? Writing’s easy mass reproducibility? The romanticization of originality and authorship? I don’t know.)
The Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), the parent organization behind Archive of Our Own (AO3), is a proponent and supporter of a noncommercial, nonexploitative space for fanworks. Its website explains its position on publishing, profit, and their nonprofit site in their FAQ, under the heading “Does the OTW support the commercialization of fanfic?”:
The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy, who are looking to be part of a community and connect to other fans and to celebrate and to respond to the media works that they enjoy . . .
While some transformative works legitimately circulate in the for-profit marketplace—parodies such as The Wind Done Gone (the retelling of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of a slave), critical analyses that quote extensively from an original, “unauthorized guides,” etc.—that really isn’t what fanfic writers and fan creators in general are doing, or looking to do. We just want to enjoy our hobby and our communities, and to share our creative work, without the constant threat hanging overhead that an overzealous lawyer at some corporation will start sending out cease & desist notices, relying not on legal merit, but on the disproportionate weight of money on their side.103
Archive of Our Own is a nonprofit space, by fans, for fans, with its parameters and expectations clearly laid out. This already distinguishes it from much of fanspace, which as we’ve seen tends to hold to the notion of a common ground of self-evident truths that is neither as common nor as self-evident as it seems. It is common for fanfic hosting sites’ Terms of Service and author disclaimers alike to specify that works are not posted for commercial purposes, but also to specify that fan writers retain the rights to original material in their stories. Yet I have often seen and heard the opinion that posting a version of a story as fic constitutes a promise never to adapt it for profit later. I asked Fic contributor and OTW cofounder Francesca Coppa to comment:
I personally don’t think that publishing a story as fanfiction is a promise not to commercialize it later, and there’s nothing in the AO3 TOS to stop people pulling their fic and selling it professionally, or even rewriting a fic that’s archived with us and selling it professionally, though we would not allow a fan to use the AO3 to promote or link to that published work. You also can’t, for instance, post the first chapter of your work, fan or original, to the AO3 and then say, you know, “Buy the rest here”—that’s a violation of our TOS. But again, this is mostly hypothetical: most fanfiction isn’t suitable for the market (that’s the joy of it!) and as I’ve noted in the media a lot recently, to me Fifty Shades is primarily distinguished by how traditional it is (heterosexual paranormal erotic romance is already a huge publishing category).104
What constitutes market “unsuitability” is subject to change, and it’s been changing pretty rapidly recently. Whatever the given value for what is marketable, however, there’s a vast amount of potential fiction that falls outside of it, and the knowledge that there’s a space and audience available to that work (if one without monetary reward) is one of the biggest values fanfiction offers literature. As Coppa points out, the works of fanfiction that have received big publishing contracts do not begin to reflect the diversity of stories out there.
The most obvious example: All of the major publishing contracts for repurposed fic have gone to heterosexual romances, despite the fact that even a little research can unearth slash writers who also command “read” or “hit” counts in the millions. But consider the case of fan author Kryptaria’s Sherlock fic “Northwest Passage,” now forthcoming (very substantially revised) as The Longest Night (Sourcebooks, July 2014). As the author (publishing under the name of Kara Braden) explains on her Tumblr post about the process of “filing off the serial numbers,” one of the first things she decided when planning to adapt her fic for publication was to change the central relationship from M/M to heterosexual. In fact, she’d begun the revision process and made the choice before she was contacted by a publisher about reworking the story. When the press’ editor asked her if she’d be willing to reimagine the story as heterosexual, she had her answer ready:
Part of wanting to be a writer is that I want to be a professional, published author. Full-time. This means I need to make money off writing, which means reaching the largest audience possible. There’s a much bigger audience for het romance than for m/m. I don’t necessarily like it. In my opinion, Northwest Passage, as it was originally written, is a gorgeous romance that goes beyond “OMG GAY SEX” and speaks to the heart in a way that might well be obscured by assigning gender roles to the characters.105
This post helps illustrate how the market intervenes to shape what appears on shelves in a way it does not shape fic. “The market” that does this, though, is a projection—a set of assumptions about how one book will fare based on generalized trends or perceptions about trends. “Northwest Passage” was a popular story, but despite a proven track record with readers and the growing presence of a lucrative (if less mainstream) market in M/M erotic romance, assumptions about the market led to its reinvention as a more mainstream, more normative story. In the culture at large, this kind of intervention happens in editorial, studio, or network executive notes—and before that, in authors’ minds. It happens before stories get onto our shelves or screens. Even repurposed, though, internet fanfiction leaves a track record: the finished non- (or less) normative story as originally conceived, realized, and engaged with by readers.
Part of the important—even crucial—social, literary, and political function of fanfiction is that people actually tell the stories they want to tell, without pre-censorship or preconceived notions about what will sell. Writers can do that at any time, of course, but fanfiction gets these stories to readers for whom such stories resonate, even if these readers do not constitute a valuable marketing demographic. It’s this value that is threatened by the commercialization of fic.
Another concern voiced by opponents of publishing fic is that individual profit threatens the way creativity works in fanfiction communities: the free exchange of ideas—story concepts, premises, prompts, tropes—that occurs in many fic fandom
s. There’s a sense that fic is a collective enterprise, and that removing a work and laying exclusive claim to it steals community property. This sounds very much like the argument that property is theft, a fencing off of a commons. But that’s not a fic argument, that’s an anarchy argument. That’s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Property is Theft!) or the Marquis de Sade: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft.”106 By this logic, E. L. James stole from fic, which stole from Stephenie Meyer, who stole from Shakespeare, who stole from . . . someone who stole something first, and that first theft is ownership. Whatever the communitarian values of fanfiction, however, and whatever the popularity of BDSM-themed stories, fanfiction communities are not populated by a majority of Sadeans, anarchists, or socialists. The anti-profit position seems better summed up as, “There’s an infinite amount of private property—but not for us,” as Franz Kafka, who has inspired a lot of fic we call literary fiction, might have put it. Or to put it another way, if the model is “fans don’t turn other fans into customers,” doesn’t that lead to a one-way flow of capital from fans to corporations?
At this point, I want to be quite clear about where I come down on all of this, and what my role has been. I have been quoted fairly often in the media, talking about fanfiction and publication and also talking about well-known fanfics, some of which got large publishing contracts.