Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  When Samhain bought Linden Bay, they didn’t automatically assume the entire catalog. Most of the books were released from their contracts. Of the three I had out with Linden Bay, they accepted one. It just happened to be the rewrite of “Rhapsody,” but even then, I was asked to make even more significant changes to it (including rewriting the entire third act/ending for the second time, LOL). I don’t think my editor was ever aware that it began its life as a Buffy/Spike fanfic, though, and certainly, the practice of reworking fanworks was never encouraged.

  Andrew Shaffer is a writer, critic, and publishing observer who tends to attract the label “gadfly.” He is remarkable for having more alter egos than your average fic writer, among them Evil Wylie, Emperor Franzen, and Fanny Merkin, the acclaimed author of the parody Fifty Shames of Earl Grey. Here, he reflects on the phenomenon of publishing fanfiction and his own role of parodist.

  Fifty Shades of Gold

  Andrew Shaffer

  When James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, on January 24, 1848, he inadvertently triggered a mass influx of settlers that came to be known as the California Gold Rush. Similarly, when Random House signed E. L. James to a seven-figure, multibook deal for her Fifty Shades series in March 2012, it was the shot heard ’round the publishing world. Not only had fanfiction become fair game as a writing farm system, it was now a lucrative vein of ore just sitting there waiting to be mined. By the end of the day that Publishers Marketplace announced the Fifty Shades deal, half the agents and editors in New York were busy panning for gold on FanFiction.Net—while the other half assigned the task to their interns.

  By now, the story of Fifty Shades is familiar and tired: forty-something mother of two becomes a worldwide sensation by writing Twilight fanfiction under the pen name “Snowqueens Icedragon.” After changing the characters’ names and restructuring her work as a trilogy, she releases the books through a small Australian press. And fans can’t get enough. Within a year, the press sells a combined 100,000 print and ebook copies of the trilogy. When a New York Post reporter catches wind of the racy books making the rounds of wealthy mothers in the Hamptons and publishes a subsequent exposé, the books blow up. Not just explode: they actually blow the fuck up. They top the Amazon ebook charts for weeks on end; bookstores can’t keep the $30 print-on-demand editions in stock. Dr. Drew is talking about them on The Today Show. And then Random House buys the trilogy and republishes them with minimal edits in order to get them in stores as quickly as possible. It turns out they didn’t need to worry about the fever dying down: the rereleased Fifty Shades trilogy spends an unprecedented six months on top of the New York Times and Amazon bestseller charts, dominating the national and international consciousness in a way no other book has in quite some time.

  Not since Twilight, of course.

  Which brings up a question, one that was in the minds of every publishing industry professional (including those scouring fanfiction websites in search of the next Fifty Shades): Isn’t there something wrong with this? Isn’t there something wrong with co-opting a living author’s work and fanbase?

  Copycats are not a new phenomenon; blockbusters had been spawning them forever (“If you liked X, you’ll love Y!”). But this was different. Random House was not publishing a vampire novel because Twilight had proven there to be a market for paranormal romance; Random House was publishing a series that copied another book character by character (Edward = Christian, Bella = Anastasia, Jacob = José). This wasn’t so much marketing a similar work to a fanbase as it was using Meyer’s characters and fans as a springboard.

  New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult was one of many authors to speak out about the shady origins of Fifty Shades. “If u like [erotica], read erotica,” Picoult tweeted. “But read authors who create their own characters and don’t steal a fan base another author worked hard for. [James’] readers wanted more of Meyer’s characters, & tuned in. If she hadn’t started as fanfic would she have been as popular?” Still, she acknowledged there were shades of gray when dealing with the ethics of publishing fanfiction. “Interesting to ask where to draw line: is [Pride and Prejudice and Zombies] suspect too?” she tweeted, questioning Quirk Books’ “mashup” of the public domain Jane Austen classic.

  I was also a vocal critic of the pull-to-pub trend (pulling fanfiction offline and publishing it for profit, also called “removing the serial numbers” when changing the names to avoid legal complications). In fact, I announced on Twitter that I would write fanfiction of Fifty Shades of Grey and put vampires back into the story. I started writing a parody, titled Fifty-one Shades (because it was “one better than Fifty Shades of Grey, an oblique reference to one of my favorite satirical films, This Is Spinal Tap), and serialized it on my blog for free, posting a few paragraphs a day. I joked that as soon as I had a chance to “cash out” with a publisher, I would change the title and character names à la E. L. James.

  After just three days, the unthinkable happened: I received the first of several inquiries from publishers. My agent asked me how quickly I could finish the book; I said I thought I could have it completed within a week. One case of Red Bull and seven days later, I emailed the rough draft to my agent; a week later, I had a book deal with Da Capo Press. Da Capo rushed production to get the ebook and print editions out as quickly as possible (although I spent two months revising the manuscript with my editor, to ensure we were putting out the best book we were capable of producing). And, true to my word, I changed the title (to Fifty Shames of Earl Grey) and changed the characters’ names.

  Despite my jokes, it wasn’t “fanfiction of fanfiction,” but instead a parody that poked fun at Fifty Shades of Grey, erotic romance, and the media’s coverage of the whole affair. Still, I dropped hints throughout Fifty Shames of Earl Grey that the hero, Earl Grey, was secretly a vampire. In the acknowledgments, I also thanked Stephenie Meyer—who, in an ironic twist, was not thanked by E. L. James in the Fifty Shades books’ acknowledgments. I felt like I had righted a wrong in the universe. But had I? An irate Fifty Shades fan approached me at a literary convention and told me my parody was offensive and that I should be ashamed. “It’s wrong to piggyback off someone else’s success,” the fan said, apparently unaware of the irony.

  Parodies are legally protected in the United States and Canada. By mocking and questioning pop culture, they serve a critical function in society. Fanfiction, by contrast, doesn’t (at first) appear to serve any function other than to let fans get their rocks off. But isn’t some fanfiction just as transformative as parody? Especially alternate universe fanfics, where the characters are changed from vampires to kinky businessmen. Had I been too swift in my judgment of Fifty Shades of Grey? Were E. L. James and her publishers just as entitled to their profits as I was to mine?

  For many writers and artists born into the pop-culture-saturated twentieth and twenty-first centuries, fanfiction is an important stepping stone in their creative evolution. My first experience with fanfiction was in the third grade. I was a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan: I had the comic books, I played the Nintendo video game, I watched the cartoons. Hell, I even tried to learn to skateboard because that’s how the Turtles rolled. I wrote and illustrated my own TMNT comics in college-ruled notebooks. Somehow, one of my teachers must have caught me drawing in class instead of paying attention, and, to her eternal credit, she didn’t scold me. No. Instead, she asked me to contribute a monthly four-panel TMNT comic strip to the grade-school newsletter sent to every home in the school district. I think I drew only three “episodes,” though, since we were close to the end of the school year, so—horrors!—my big debut in the comic book world ended on a cliffhanger. (There are probably old classmates still waiting for me to finish my saga, to which I can only say: keep waiting.) But even at the time, I, a third grader, knew that it was somehow “wrong” to use the Eastman and Laird characters without permission. The school was letting me do it, though, so what did I care?

 
That was sort of the publishing industry’s informal response: what did it matter if we’re now in the pull-to-pub game? Stephenie Meyer didn’t seem to mind that Fifty Shades had begun life as a facsimile of her work. “I haven’t read it,” she told MTV News. “That’s really not my genre. Good on her—she’s doing well. That’s great!” Everyone kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some nasty litigation from Meyer or her publisher now that millions of dollars were changing hands . . . but nothing happened. And so the publishing world descended on the fanfiction forums in a feeding frenzy . . .

  Penguin’s Berkley imprint picked up Sylvain Reynard’s Gabriel’s Inferno and Gabriel’s Rapture in a “substantial seven-figure,” two-book deal in August 2012. Gabriel’s Inferno began life as the Twilight fanfiction “The University of Edward Masen,” under the pen name Sebastien Robichaud. Once the fanfiction was complete, Reynard pulled it offline and published it under the new title—with the characters’ names changed, of course. Reynard made the decision at the urging of his readers, he explained. “I was listening to the thousands of messages sent to me by readers who wanted the story to be published,” he wrote in a blog post that April. “So of course I didn’t expect a backlash at the publication’s announcement. In fact, the [negative] reaction of some, including those I called friends, has greatly surprised me.” A few months later, Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books imprint bought the rights to Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings’ Beautiful Bastard, a reworking of the Twilight fanfiction hit “The Office.” The deal was reported, again, as “substantial”—meaning major publishers were plunking down serious money, all in the hopes of tapping into the same success that E. L. James found with Fifty Shades.

  The “angry” fans to whom Reynard alluded have voiced their displeasure with this new phenomenon on forums and in Goodreads and Amazon reviews. One anonymous reviewer, using the name “VanessaLovesBooks,” left this one-star review on Amazon for Tara Sue Me’s “The Submissive,” another former Twilight fanfic: “Save your money, this is another fanfiction story, THAT WAS FREE, in which now the author is using Stephenie Meyer’s fans to sell their books.” Australian blogger Bianca wrote on her blog WriterlingWorks about the trend, “Can’t anybody come up with anything original anymore? Or are we just going to exhaust this thing ad nauseam just for a few extra dollars? The snake is eating itself!”

  The controversy over pull-to-publish and “filing the serial numbers off” has so far been limited to online fanfiction communities, and has not negatively impacted the commercial prospects of any of the novels that were originally fanfiction. The general public simply doesn’t seem to care about the ethical questions surrounding the publication of fanfiction. All most readers are looking for is a good story; if that story resembles another story they liked, then all the better (which probably goes double for Hollywood executives in charge of greenlighting movies). And while many authors such as Picoult have spoken out against the trend of publishing fanfiction for profit, it’s (probably) not illegal. It’s difficult to imagine a court of law reading Twilight and any one of the reworked fanfics and finding any infringement—in fact, that may be one of the reasons Stephenie Meyer hasn’t tried to sue James or any of her other imitators. (Only Meyer and her lawyer know for sure.) Even if Meyer or another author takes a fanfiction author to court, it’s far from certain that it would set a precedent.

  All indications are that the trend will continue until the FanFiction. Net archives are exhausted. (They’ll be replenished, but possibly not fast enough for speculators.) Thankfully, the next gold rush has already been identified: self-published ebooks, not derived from fanfiction. Self-published authors such as Tracey Garvis Graves and Bella Andre have already signed seven-figure deals; Sylvia Day signed an eight-figure contract for books four and five of the formerly self-published Crossfire series. Self-publishing is experiencing something of a golden age, as a publishing industry shaken up by the Great Recession and the rise of ebooks struggles to adapt.

  But when the fanfiction and self-publishing wells temporarily run dry, what then? Editors and agents may need to return to panning the slush-piles for gold—a grim prospect indeed. It’s no surprise that publishers and authors have begun to circle the wagons and hunker down to protect their intellectual property. In perhaps the ultimate irony, James’ French publisher sent a “warning letter” in November 2012 to publishers it felt were infringing on the copyright of Fifty Shades of Grey by publishing books such as 50 Ways to Play: BDSM for Nice People and Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion. “Some of these titles, which pick up on elements of the book, are clearly parasitical,” an editorial director for James’ publisher told The Telegraph.

  James’ lawyers have also busied themselves by clamping down on everything from Fifty Shades–themed lingerie parties to bootleg T-shirts. Her agent, Valerie Hoskins, defended the crackdown. “You can’t just hijack something someone else owns,” Hoskins told the Mirror. However, if the success of Fifty Shades and other Twilight fanfics is any indication, you can hijack something someone else owns—and make money at it. So, for now, the gold rush continues . . .

  The Briar Patch

  Fic Writers on Publishing Fanfic

  RECENT PUBLISHING TRENDS have demonstrated there is money to be made on fanfiction. Publishing houses (Omnific and The Writer’s Coffee Shop) have sprung from popular fic archives; the sale of self-published repurposed fics has become quite common; fanfiction contests have offered gift cards or other rewards; and, most recently, Amazon’s authorized “fanfiction” licensing scheme Kindle Worlds has begun offering royalties for works that obey set conditions and rules. The most prominent (though least common) instances of former fic going pro have entailed the Big Six Five publishers taking on reworked fanfiction as “original” novels: Fifty Shades of Grey, Beautiful Bastard, Gabriel’s Inferno, The Submissive, Wallbanger, Sempre, and Loving the Band.

  I’ve used scare quotes around the word “original” not to suggest that fanworks can’t deserve the term, but rather to highlight the term as contestable—and much contested. In publishing, it often seems to mean “original enough” (not to be sued), and it seems to have meant that for a long time—not just since Fifty Shades. To lay readers, the meaning ranges from “unique” to “the product of my own labor” to “I think I can make a buck from this” to “the completely autonomous expressive content of my soul.” “Original” means different things to different people in different circles—much like the word “fanfiction” itself. “Fanfiction” is often used synonymously with “derivative work,” a phrase with copyright implications. Yet fanfiction is often better described as transformative, parodic, critical, and, yes, “original,” in any of the senses above. And, while such distinctions may be the stuff of literary debate (is this really parody? Or is it just bad imitation? Isn’t all work derivative of something? Does any piece of writing really “stand alone”?), these slippery terms are often used to distinguish the legal difference between “okay to profit from” and “infringing.”

  The recent explosion in published fanfiction has occurred because publishing companies came to realize—very publicly, and on a large scale—that “fanfiction” was not a synonym for “derivative.” It turns out that the publishing world and fanfiction communities had long been operating on assumptions about copyright law as it pertains to fanworks that were even more restrictive than copyright law itself.

  Fic contributor and intellectual property attorney Heidi Tandy offers a perspective on how and why at least some of this profit has been legal:

  One of the fundamentals of U.S. copyright law is that an author/creator can only protect the “expression” of an idea. Usually, that means the word-for-word text in a song, movie, or book. Since the 1950s it’s also been possible to copyright a character, but the protection for characters is very limited; a character is only copyrightable when she’s especially distinctive, or so central to the story that the character is essentially the “story being told.” Young,
dark-haired boy wizards with scars and owls are not copyrightable; if they were, Neil Gaiman’s Tim Hunter (in The Books of Magic) would have made impossible the existence of the Harry Potter we all know. But as Gaiman said in 1998:

  It’s not the ideas, it’s what you do with them that matters.

  Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.100

  Tropes, oft-used character elements, character flaws, Mary Sues and Gary Stus—even when an author uses a lot of those elements all together, it doesn’t make the character copyrightable, and therefore, if someone else uses those elements to tell a different story using different words (and different character names, because using the same names could be a trademark issue) the second author isn’t automatically engaging in copyright infringement. The expression of the ideas—the specific words—aren’t the same.

  Legal opinions, of course, vary on every subject, and Fic is not handing out legal advice. But the idea of copyright described above is very far from the one many fan writers understood. Fan writers often believe their writing lives exist at the pleasure of rightsholders, and while that may not be true, few fan writers have the resources to fight a legal challenge from a large corporation, and no case has ever been fought in court. Most fans take work down when asked. Many oppose attracting attention to fanworks in any way—let alone commercially, as Fifty Shades of Grey and its cohorts have—and this has been especially true of those fans who remember the “bad old days” of multiple cease-and-desist orders.