That Dan And Nate Gossip Girl Slash Fiction You Wrote In High School Could Now Earn You A Small Fortune
Amazon launches Kindle Worlds, an e-book imprint for professional fanfic.
Fan fiction, recently (and quite hilariously) described by Forbes as the “purest form of literary art there is”, is finally being brought out of the dingy environs of the deepest, darkest internet with news of Amazon’s latest initiative, Kindle Worlds. Hooray?
As the AV Club notes, the announcement marks the first professional attempt to bring the genre’s iffy intellectual property issues aboveboard, proposing an agreement where original creator and fan fic’er can both profit from their work. The imprint has already signed licencing agreements with Warner Bros’ popular franchises Pretty Little Liars, The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl and plans to expand the selection much further.
It’s not all happy harmony, though. Whereas writers who normally self-publish e-books via Amazon keep 70% of the net, Kindle Worlds offers a considerably less generous revenue split for fanfic-ers at a mere 35% for works over 10,000 words and smaller still for those under. Similarly, the imprint imposes strict guidelines on writers regarding pornographic and offensive content, which, you know, how the hell are you supposed to describe your Dan and Nate dreams now/what’s the point anyway!
As Forbes notes, the platform also offers another sneaky benefit to Amazon, who can use it to “identify promising undiscovered writers it can sign to its imprint.” This could be quite substantial; many successful authors have previously sharpened their skills in the underground world of amateur fanfic, including Rumble Fish and The Outsiders teen prodigy, S.E. Hinton; Mortal Instruments‘ Cassandra Clare, and E.L. James, whose wildly successful Fifty Shades Of Grey began as a piece of Twilight ‘shipping.
So, is this a positive development for the underground subculture? A cynical cash-grab by Amazon? Fair remuneration for the studios whose original content is used as a basis to these works? None of these? All of these? Something else entirely? Bueller? Bueller?