Amazon is launching a new idea - self-published fanfic.
I can’t say I’m an expert in how it works, but it seems that certain people who control the rights to certain stories (and they’ve already got several, including The Vampire Diaries), give Amazon permission to license any author to write stories based on that original fiction and sell it for royalties.
In other words, you write your, for example, Vampire Diaries fanfic, self-pub it through Amazon and you get money as well as whoever owns the rights to Vampire Diaries (and, we assume, Amazon gets a big stash of cash as well).
This has caused rather a lot of kerfuffle, as you can imagine.
In fandom, there is a lot of concern about this changing the very culture and point of fandom itself I can understand some concern in fandom that the fanfics they now enjoy could actually just be a practice run for being published. I can see that, and I can see the sense of how the community is being exploited that way - as some kind of collective beta-readers or testing the waters. Except isn’t that already a risk? Look at 50 Shades of Grey - we’re in a world now where it’s apparently acceptable to re-name your fanfic characters and present it as an original work. Sure, 50 Shades is an AU (Alternate Universe) so more easily adapted - but the point remains, authors can already tweak their worlds and characters to present their fanfic as AU - or at least life huge chunks, like characterisation, from their fanfics to an original story. Or Stories.
I can certainly understand the idea of a changing culture - since fanfiction may be moved behind a paywall - and anything that you do for sheer joy does change when you do it for profit and gain. If it becomes prevalent, there will be a shift in fandom culture, in the culture of just doing this for fun, in the culture of just doing it for love. There will be people who look not for the fandoms they love, but for the fandoms that are the most popular, the fandoms they can be sure they will be able to make money out of. Once one goes from extreme love to calculated exploitation - even among a relative minority of writers - it’s going to change the culture.
But is it really going to be that widespread? After all, there are vast archives of fanfiction out there; are people going to buy what is so readily available for free? Again, I point to 50 Shades. There is a limit due to Amazon’s “no adult sexy times!” rule which is probably going to limit a... fair amount of Fandom. But I think we can’t think of it in just those terms - this is the first step and it’s possible Amazon will remove that restriction in the future - or another company may come along and decide on their own unrestricted version. Again, pointing to 50 Shades, there’s money to be made here which means this Amazon project may just be the first of many attempts to monetise fanfiction into published works.
