Amazon announces fanfiction publication scheme Kindle Worlds

[Chilari]

So Amazon have announced Kindle Worlds, which will allow fanfiction authors to publish their stories, provided they are of licensed works ("Worlds") and meet certain guidelines. I don't know what to make of it just yet, though have blogged about it (see signature), but I have seen some interesting initial reactions from John Scalzi and over at The Mary Sue.

What do you reckon?

 

[danr62]

There is some discussion on this over at kboards as well.

I never got into fanfic, so I'm not sure what to make of this either.

 

[Darkblade]

Well they say no porn so that cuts out three quarters of their potential writers.

More seriously Eric Flint has been doing something similar with the 1632/Ring of Fire series and the Grantville Gazette. At the moment I cannot find anything regarding it's copyright policies but having run for nearly a decade I'm going to assume it has been successful and that is with a very niche target.

 

[Ophiucha]

'No pornographic material', I think guarantees it's failure. I also don't like that Amazon gets control of the material, by the sounds of it, since I know many writers who start out in fanfiction adapt some of their old ideas into their first books. I mean, the copyright implications of Cassandra Clare are already questionable, let alone if she'd published it through this service and then tried to published City of Bones. I'm curious to see what they will define as acceptable content. There are the simple questions, like how violent could fanfiction be for The Vampire Diaries versus Gossip Girls. But there are a lot of more fandom-specific questions. Will the publishers of the licensed works allow for shipping? Will they allow for slash shipping? LGBT relationships often up the rating of a TV show for 'sexual content' regardless of how non-sexual the relationship is; will Amazon even allow the Samwise/Frodo shippers to publish their works? And if not, well, good luck with that! You just alienated 99% of the people who read this stuff.

I'm not sure why anyone would ever pay for fanfiction when there are literally hundreds of thousands of free fics already online, either, but ehhh, capitalism continues to confound me, so I wouldn't be shocked if it did make money.

 

[Devor]

You just alienated 99% of the people who read this stuff.

99% of the people who read this stuff currently. I would be willing to bet that the potential market for fanfiction without that content is much bigger.

 

[danr62]

99% of the people who read this stuff currently. I would be willing to bet that the potential market for fanfiction without that content is much bigger.

I agree. This move could potentially make more people aware that fanfic exists. Or, even if they already know it exists, making people more aware of it.

I mean, imagine going to Amazon.com, searching for Vampire Diaries, and finding a bunch of books written by several different authors. That's a lot different from going to ff.net and looking for something.

 

[Mindfire]

However successful this venture is, it's not going to kill fanfiction. Sadly.

 

[Ophiucha]

99% of the people who read this stuff currently. I would be willing to bet that the potential market for fanfiction without that content is much bigger.

Perhaps, though I don't think there is anything wrong with slash, specifically. It's no worse than most other fanfiction, anyway, and I must wonder how large the genuinely potential market is for it, really. (Also I was being hyperbolic, there is plenty of fanfiction online that doesn't feature it - the Snape/Hermione fandom alone must have 100,000 fics out there.) I mean, fandom as a concept is pretty niche. Most people are content to have their characters from 9 to 10 on a Thursday evening and leave it at that. How many people outside of fandom would ever pay for fan-created material, and how many people who would don't already read it online for free? I just don't know how many new people this will attract.

I mean, imagine going to Amazon.com, searching for Vampire Diaries, and finding a bunch of books written by several different authors. That's a lot different from going to ff.net and looking for something.

I really hope you can't just search for 'Vampire Diaries' and end up with fanfic. Like, no matter what header they put it under, it would take six hours, tops, before somebody emails in complaining about how they thought they were buying an ebook for the actual novels and instead got a 2000 word marriage fic between the main girl and whoever the writer wanted the girl to pick for the love triangle. (Can you tell I don't watch this show?) It would have to be in its own section of the site, surely. And I can't imagine it will be well-advertised, buried deep beneath all the DVD box sets and official merchandise, and even then it would be presented without a cover (or with the quality of cover the average fanfic writer can make, which probably involves badly photoshopped promotional images of the actors slightly closer together). And I doubt it'll get a lot of space on the front page after launch week, you know?

 

[Devor]

Perhaps, though I don't think there is anything wrong with slash, specifically. It's no worse than most other fanfiction, anyway, and I must wonder how large the genuinely potential market is for it, really. (Also I was being hyperbolic, there is plenty of fanfiction online that doesn't feature it - the Snape/Hermione fandom alone must have 100,000 fics out there.) I mean, fandom as a concept is pretty niche. Most people are content to have their characters from 9 to 10 on a Thursday evening and leave it at that. How many people outside of fandom would ever pay for fan-created material, and how many people who would don't already read it online for free? I just don't know how many new people this will attract.

I'm not offering any kind of judgment on it. That's not really a discussion I care to get into right now.

But I think fanfiction's high percentage of slash and pornography - and even, really, just your basic shipping - is a big turn off for many people. I think emphasizing fanfiction that is true to the characters would find a much bigger audience and give more legitimacy to fanfiction authors to your average reader.

But even re-pairing relationships, I think, is (usually? often enough anyways) rewriting the characters' basic personality to fit the new author's view of what is or would or should be attractive, rather than demonstrating an understanding of what characteristics would or wouldn't be attractive to the character's personality.

For instance, Ron and Hermione have traits that complement each other. Hermione and Harry, some, but less so. But it's hard for me to see anything that would justify coupling even Hermione and Draco, let alone Hermione and Snape, without reshaping the characters, what they want, what they care about. I think that kind of thing pollutes the basic appeal of the characters and the stories they were a part of to a large numbers of potential readers.

 

[tlbodine]

Right, but if fans wanted to read things that were accurate and canonical, they'd just read the real book. The whole *point* of fanfic is that you get to explore things that you won't ever see happen in the book.

 

[Mindfire]

But I think fanfiction's high percentage of slash and pornography - and even, really, just your basic shipping - is a big turn off for many people.

Understatement of the millennium.

 

[Mindfire]

Right, but if fans wanted to read things that were accurate and canonical, they'd just read the real book. The whole *point* of fanfic is that you get to explore things that you won't ever see happen in the book.

In other words: "This thing that I really like? I don't like it all that much. It would be so much better if the author did things my way."

That's one of the many things I don't get about fanfiction. If you like the work so much, why on earth would you twist it into a pretzel just to suit your (frequently odd and disturbing) fancies? I find it ironic that some of the very same people who agonize over the changes in the Lord of the Rings films go home and write Aragorn/Legolas. Hypocrisy at its finest.

 

[danr62]

I wouldn't write fan fiction because I'd rather play in my own world, but if I did it would only be to tell new stories involving the characters and world the author wrote, not revamped characters that I would rather they had been.

 

[tlbodine]

In other words: "This thing that I really like? I don't like it all that much. It would be so much better if the author did things my way."

That's one of the many things I don't get about fanfiction. If you like the work so much, why on earth would you twist it into a pretzel just to suit your (frequently odd and disturbing) fancies? I find it ironic that some of the very same people who agonize over the changes in the Lord of the Rings films go home and write Aragorn/Legolas. Hypocrisy at its finest.

I don't write fanfic, and haven't read any of it since high school. But the reason why non-canon shipping happens so much is because it's the easiest short-hand way to share a fantasy. If you take characters that are already well-known and liked, the people reading your story will already be invested in them, already have an idea of what they'll be like.

I really don't think most fanfic writers think that their stories are in any way better than the source material. They mostly either think it would be interesting to pursue something that doesn't get pursued in the book, or want to borrow some well-known characters as actors for otherwise original stories.

It's, like.....when you were a kid, did you ever re-enact scenes from your favorite movies, with all of your toys? Fanfic is exactly like that.

 

[Steerpike]

It's, like.....when you were a kid, did you ever re-enact scenes from your favorite movies, with all of your toys? Fanfic is exactly like that.

Yeah. Everyone I've known who has written fanfic really likes the source material a lot. The idea that they didn't like it that much and are just going to put time into their own version of it seems silly.

 

[Mindfire]

Like I said I don't "get" fanfiction.

 

[Chilari]

I really hope you can't just search for 'Vampire Diaries' and end up with fanfic. Like, no matter what header they put it under, it would take six hours, tops, before somebody emails in complaining about how they thought they were buying an ebook for the actual novels and instead got a 2000 word marriage fic between the main girl and whoever the writer wanted the girl to pick for the love triangle. (Can you tell I don't watch this show?) It would have to be in its own section of the site, surely. And I can't imagine it will be well-advertised, buried deep beneath all the DVD box sets and official merchandise, and even then it would be presented without a cover (or with the quality of cover the average fanfic writer can make, which probably involves badly photoshopped promotional images of the actors slightly closer together). And I doubt it'll get a lot of space on the front page after launch week, you know?

Don't worry, it won't be like that. For a start, there's a minimum word limit - 5,000 words to 10,000 is allowed, but gets a reduced royalty rate, while 10,000 words up gets the 35% rate. There are also content guidelines including one which means Amazon and the rights holder can refuse works which give "poor customer experience", and the rights holder can stipulate specific other content guidelines, so in theory the rights holder can say "no non-canon shipping" or "Bob and Carol don't make a good couple; any fic shipping these two won't be allowed." Having said that, I don't know how many rights holders will put limits on like that, because shipping is quite a big chunk of what's left after pornography is removed, so it would hit their bottom line.

As for the cover, Amazon will help with that - they'll have some predesigned covers, to which the author adds the title and their name, presumably using customisation for font, colour and position. There will be covers, though, and not rubbishy ones.

As for how they get listed, Amazon haven't stated anything, but I think it's in their best interests to make it absolutely clear that this is fanfiction, not official merchandise because misleading customers makes unhappy customers. I should think they'll have a Kindle Worlds page where you can browse by World/original property.

 

[Jeff Xilon]

I think the biggest problem with this that has caused a certain portion of the internet (like my twitter timeline) to explode for awhile is that people are getting hung up on semantics. The way I see it Amazon is trying an experiment with a new thing. The obvious name for this thing is fan fiction. The problem arises from the fact that there is already this other thing with the same name. Similarities exist between these two things, but at heart they are completely different things. The confusion bred by this same name for two related but different things has some people thinking Amazon is trying to do things it really isn't trying to do.

So someone else already linked to John Scalzi's good post about this, I'd like to recommend Matt Forbeck's blog post about it as well: Kindle Worlds = Worlds Burning? - Forbeck.com

 

[Jeff Xilon]

EDIT: Sorry for the double post. It hadn't seemed to take the first time.

 

[Chilari]

I think the biggest problem with this that has caused a certain portion of the internet (like my twitter timeline) to explode for awhile is that people are getting hung up on semantics. The way I see it Amazon is trying an experiment with a new thing. The obvious name for this thing is fan fiction. The problem arises from the fact that there is already this other thing with the same name. Similarities exist between these two things, but at heart they are completely different things. The confusion bred by this same name for two related but different things has some people thinking Amazon is trying to do things it really isn't trying to do.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Don't you think that what Amazon is doing is publishing fanfiction - of the same type that is already widely read for free? What do you see as the differences here?