Long time no post... I got lost in RL a bit. We went on a weekend trip, and then lots of uni stuff came up during the past week. I've tackled all there was to tackle for the moment though, so I've got some time to lurk around here.
As I said
the other day, I have some thoughts on the subject of fanfiction and publishing. They're not very organised thoughts, so I hope you can make it through the muddle.
I write fanfiction myself occasionally. I'm not a very prolific author, but a lot of my friends on there are -- and they're also damned good writers. They write stories that create emotions within people, that move them, excite them, distract them. They write stories that really should be read.
Now, the problem here is clear – it's not right to cash in on someone else's success. You can't publish your fanfiction as fanfiction, and that's that. It wouldn't be fair to anyone. Clearly, you like the author of the original stuff, otherwise you wouldn't be writing fanfiction about their work. So I think it's a fair assumption that you respect them and don't want to screw them over.
Here's a dilemma: There are stories that are wonderful and should be told and heard and absorbed. Currently, these stories exist on a fanfiction archive where they are publicly available, but only a small fraction of potential readers will actually access them. A lot of these stories are geared to a different audience than the original books – more mature, more gritty, perhaps, or just a different genre. The stories can be "fixed". You change the names and take the magic out, or the vampires, or set it in a different time. No one would ever know that they were fanfiction originally, especially if they were about minor characters – a lot of good fanfiction is. And with minor characters, the only things that often tie it to the original universe are character and place names.
Would you rather you missed the perfect story, because it's fanfiction in a fandom that you don't particularly connect with? Or would you rather read a book, like it, and later find out that it was originally written as fanfiction?
Personally, I think that the story, and the ideas in it, and the writing – all that comes from the author who typed the words, even if another author's work served as inspiration. Without reading and drawing from other people's work, a lot of ideas would never happen. And if that story is good, it deserves to be told. In my opinion, it's the author's fair right to "originalise" his or her piece of fanfiction and publish it and, yes, take money for it.
There's one thing though that I just can't really agree with, and this is where 50 Shades has committed a huge ethical fault, imo. Once you make it public that you originally wrote your novel as fanfiction, and get publicity and sales through that, you are making money off another author's success. The cover design even is somewhat similar to those of the Twilight Saga:
Of course, one has colour and one doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that they're both large individual images set against a dark, quiet background, with the title (in white writing) on the top and the author name near the bottom. The thing is just – they wouldn't look out of place in a bookshelf next to each other. The 50 Shades covers are the Twilight Saga covers grown up – probably a lot like the readers are.
Or compare these two (other books from both series):
Shiny fabric travelling from upper left to lower right corner in some sort of wavy motion. Title in upper right corner, author name at the bottom, in white writing.
Now, I'm not saying that the author had any say in this, or that it is her intention to cash in through the Twilight fame. Clearly, the cover etc are decisions that the publishing house made, and obviously people are leaping at them. Do I find this unfair? Of course I do. If the way these books are marketed didn't scream "Twilight for all of you who grew up since New Moon", they'd probably sell a lot less. And other books that deserve to sell more might do better because they'd fill the gap.
So, to sum this up – generally, I'm all for making your fanfiction stories original stories and earning money with them. You've put time into writing, you've edited, you've made them excellent stories. And they are excellent, and people deserve to read them as much as your stories deserve to be read. But if you don't want to make money with fanfiction, don't make money by marketing your books as fanfiction. That's where, for me, it gets unethical.
But clearly this is a total grey area that needs to be explored ethically and legally etc. Copyrights have never been as big an issue as they are right now, and it has never been as easy to share things like fanfiction as it is right now. There's an obvious clash of interests and all sorts of things here, and it's all developing. Obviously my opinion is just that, and I'd be happy to discuss if someone thinks differently.
