Kindle Worlds: The Mainstreaming of Fan Fiction
When 50 Shades of Grey hit bookshelves back in 2011, it was as though mainstream America discovered that not only was there written pornography based on a popular book series, but that people liked reading it. Liked it so much that Barnes & Noble and your local library now carry 50 Shades of Grey not in the black-lined Erotica or Romance sections, but in Fiction. What is less well-known is that the E.L. James BDSM trilogy originated as Twilight fan fiction. With 50 Shades of Grey, fan fiction became a best-selling genre.
It was only a matter of time before someone tried to capitalize on that newly discovered phenomenon. A few weeks ago, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of Kindle Worlds, a digital publishing platform geared for writers of fan fiction. On the platform, writers will be able to submit, publish and be paid royalties from writing that has otherwise been done for free. But there’s a lot that Amazon does not understand about fans – and a lot they’re going to have to learn.
Kindle Worlds
The Kindle Worlds platform greatly resembles Amazon’s already successful platforms for self-publication of e-books. According to the Kindle Worlds press release, writers can submit works of at least 10,000 words for publication. They will receive 35% of the digital royalties every time someone buys what will be book or novella length fan fictions. Amazon also plans to launch a service for short stories (5,000-10,000 words), from which the writer will be paid a 20% royalty. Amazon has only optioned a few rights so far, to the book series’ attached to Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, but they plan on obtaining more rights in the near future.
The notion is a good one – rights holders will make a profit on fan fiction for the first time, and writers will be able to turn their fandom into a paying source. Given that all three of the series that Amazon has optioned are part of the Warner Brothers Entertainment Group, there’s been some speculation about future rights to the Marvel and DC Universes. Perhaps before long writers will be able to turn all that Avengers slash fiction to hard cash.
Perhaps there will be a number of fan fiction writers willing and eager to make a few dollars off their fandom. The question is: will their fandom be willing to pay for the privilege? It’s one thing to purchase ‘official’ spin-off novels based around TV series or books – there’s a long history of that in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who fandoms. But will readers be willing to purchase ‘amateur’ stories that would otherwise go up for free on the Internet?
There’s more to this than just will they or won’t they pay, though. Amazon’s new platform threatens one of the foundations of fandom – that fan fiction is community service and not done for profit.
Fan Worlds
It’s a mistake to view fan communities through the old concept of comic book stores and Star Trek conventions. The Internet has changed the way that fan communities are structured. Geek culture is now mainstreamed and turned into a powerful social force. In recent years, Comic Con has become a worldwide testing ground for big budget films. If the fans don’t approve of Iron Man 3 or The Wolverine, then it’s time for directors to go back to the drawing board. Media companies must please the fans before they can please themselves. Fandoms make the media empire go round.
Fanfiction.net remains the most popular site for fan fiction of all kinds, but many fandoms go way beyond that site for writing exchanges. A 
cursory Google search for Doctor Who fan fiction turns up 45 million results, including one website that boasts over 34,000 stories by 4200 different authors. The TV show Supernatural generates 4 million results, including numerous websites and livejournals exclusively dedicated to fan fiction. BBC’s Sherlock, a show with only 2 seasons under its belt, generates almost 3 million hits. And The Vampire Diaries, which Amazon now holds the rights to? It comes in low, at only 2 million hits. That’s a large fan community already writing, reading and publishing, for their own edification, massive amounts of fan fiction.
No single individual, company or creator has control over a single fan community. Authors, creators, and rights holders have no say in what direction a fandom will take. They even risk angering fans through character changes, deaths, or non-canonical interpretations within shows or films. The power and complexities of fan communities can make or break a film, a book or a TV show. It’s a million dollar business, but only if the fans agree to buy what’s being sold.
What Fan Fiction Means To Fans
Fan fiction as a genre has yet to be taken as a legitimate art form. Despite the varying quality of the work, there are few more dedicated writers, who do it not for the hope of remuneration but for the love of their subject. Fan fiction often begins at the point where the camera fades out or the chapter ends. This means that stories are often incomplete – offshoots of episodes or specific scenes that can only be understood by those with familiarity with the original text. Fans are passionate – some wildly so – and while that passion can be directed and even turned to profit, part of the fun of fandom is living outside the mainstream. It is the airing of private fantasy in a public but protected space.
The success of Fanfiction.net and other online platforms lies in the fact that they facilitate relationships within a fan community. Readers comment and criticize each other’s writing, suggest plots and devices, disagree on interpretations, and offer continuations or alternatives. The exchange is willing and welcome – because there’s no remuneration, every writer does it purely out of love for the show and desire to please their fellow fans. This means that an entire community becomes responsible for the writing. Writers change their styles or subjects in order to please as many people as possible. Through the medium of exchange, fan fiction becomes a form of populist art. It represents the masses taking over their media in the most direct way.
Development within fan universes will have to change if Kindle Worlds succeeds in its goal. Fan fiction is based around exchange – fans agreeing, recommending, commenting, writing, and re-writing. The second you make that a paying enterprise, the exchange will begin to dry up. Fans will once again be single writers working in their rooms, without the support of their community. No longer will chapter-by-chapter fan fictions be guided and directed by the fandoms. By commodifying it, Amazon threatens to take the community element out of the writing of fan fiction.
Fan Fiction as Pornography
Due to the anonymity of many fan communities, it is difficult to parse out the gender/age groups of most fan fiction writers. However, one study done in 2010 found that a vast majority of writers were self-identified girls/women between the ages of 15-25. The readership of fan fiction is usually weighted in favor of women, and novels like 50 Shades Of Grey are marketed for women. Amazon obviously understands this – Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries are all heavily weighted towards the young female demographic.
But some of the most active fandoms are not ‘female-centric’ at all. Shows like Supernatural and Sherlock are massively popular among young women, inspiring legions of homoerotic fan fiction with male characters. This trend in slash fiction has been observed before, most famously in the relationship between Kirk and Spock. It’s long been an accepted media trend that straight men find girl-on-girl action arousing – a simple scroll through fan fiction archives and you’ll find the male-on-male fantasies of thousands of young women. That’s a demographic that has never been courted. It’s a demographic that has never even been acknowledged.
But does it really want to be acknowledged? There is something inherently underground about fan fiction – most writers write anonymously or under pseudonyms. The pleasure of it comes from anonymity, the chance to air fantasies publicly but safely, with a supportive community that feels the same way. Making it totally public, with actual names attached, as well as removing the communal aspect means that many fan fiction writers will lose their anonymity and their autonomy. It means that private fantasies will become public knowledge.
50 Shades Of Grey showed that even the poorest form of pornographic writing could sell, and sell exceptionally well. It also showed that women of all ages are a demographic that has never been exploited when it comes to pornography. Amazon will have to open up to any manner of erotic writing if they’re going to attract communities willing to pay good money for fan fiction. That mainstreaming could mean a cultural awakening to fantasies that come not from the minds of men, but from the minds of women. Or it could result in the mainstreaming of communities that want to continue to be anonymous, sharing their ideas, imaginations and fantasies only with a select group of people. In either case, before it is successful Amazon will have to accept the truth that fan fiction, nine times out of ten, means pornography.
And in the end…
It is a matter of conjecture what the Kindle Worlds platform will mean, to fan fiction, to fan communities, or to Amazon itself. Although there are still problems with self-publication and e-books, there’s no doubt that Amazon’s platforms have already changed the way the industry thinks and operates. Amazon might just be trying to get in on the ground floor of a form of writing that has the potential to be profitable. Or it might be pioneering the way fan communities will operate from now on.
What continues to bother me about Kindle Worlds is that simply by attempting to legitimize fan fiction in a platform, Kindle Worlds claims that fan fiction is not yet legitimate. There’s an inherent disrespect for the medium, and a disrespect for writers who have written for love of their fandom. Fan fiction has often been treated as a bastard child of romance and pastiche, which it is not. It is the imagination of the fan allowed to dwell on scenes never shown, paths never taken. It is the continuation of episodes following their end, and films following the last fadeout. There are thousands of different routes to take, but all of them have the same end: to create a world by fans and for fans, independent of mainstream control or commodification. It is a community, an exchange, and a fantasy world. Take that away and you’ve taken away the joys of fandom.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
Isn’t this the program where the fan-fic writer loses all claims to any creations of theirs by granting perpetual rights to the creators? Ie.- You have a great idea for Superman, you write fan-fic, Worlds handles it, DC decides your idea is great and any characters you created are great, and then takes all that and makes a billion dollars off it, and you are entitled to none.
I have heard the horror stories of writers terrified of looking at their community comments, lest they open themselves up to future lawsuits from people convinced that some independently invented story element was in fact stolen. If fanfiction writers did own their own creations, kindle worlds could rapidly become a narrative minefield for the creators of the original work, and no one wants that.
I’m sure that Harry Potter fanfiction writers wrote stories where Snape killed Dumbledore and Ron got together with Hermione long before JK Rowling did, and if they could claim money off her, the court battles there would be very ugly indeed.
Yes – I didn’t really take the time to address the issue, but it’s a major one. It’s essentially as though fan fiction writers would be writing directly for the rights holders, and like a novelist who makes their money off of writing Dr. Who novels, they wouldn’t actually have the rights to their plots. I can see where this just turns into a testing ground for plots, the companies take what stories they like and wind up getting a lot of plot devices for next to nothing.
I completely agree with you that this is rather disrespectful to the fan fiction community itself. The idea of having an opportunity to sell your work in and of itself isn’t a bad idea, but the targeting of Fan-Fic as a novelty doesn’t truly speak to the passion that comes from this art form.
Great Article.
Thanks!
I honestly think it’s a cash grab based off of the success of 50 Shades of Grey.
I love this! Totally agree that fan fiction is built around a community that allows anonymity and freedom, and that it’s ‘naughty’ non-mainstream nature is what makes it what it is.
Great article. I personally can’t see Amazon making much money from this simply because you can already get such an array of fan fiction for free, and there’s no guarantee that what you’re buying will be good writing. But then again who would’ve predicted 50 shades?
I’m not sure it really is fanfic, as fandoms are communities with their own conventions and etc, and the terms of what they’re soliciting is pretty limited, so it’s probably more accurate to say is what they’re doing is throwing open the doors to writing tie in novels. But the terms are pretty shitty, which may not be rare, but is really, really, really contrary to the culture of fandom, which is all about remixing and reinventing things, including the fanworks created to remix and reinvent some other piece of media.
Your point about legitimation is bang on. Since when does paying for something make it an automatically legitimate enterprise? I love reading the odd fanfic here and there, but I think it would lose that collaborative nature if we had to pay for it. This isn’t a case of “well, it’s not worth paying for”, its more like it would change the role of the practice entirely. If I wanted to pay for a book, i’d buy it.
Fantastic article.
This was a great article. There are definitely many issues for Amazon to address, and, personally, I’m not sure fan fiction communities will be enthusiastic about paying for a work with minimal room for interaction and exchange. However, while fan fiction will probably remain more of a private thing, this platform might do the service of making the writing of fan fiction less looked down upon by the general public. Fan fiction writers create their material solely for the love of the subject and the craft of writing, which is great, and I feel like most of these writers are unfairly judged.
The exceptional sales figure of 50 Shades of Grey is really a miracle, and me and my friends have no idea how such a horribly written story could sell so well. Amazon will probably quietly drop this program when they realize fanfiction writers write more for the love of the series/characters
Great analysis of how Kindle Worlds could impact the future of fan fiction; I don’t think that any company will succeed in truly commodifying it. I will admit that the majority of fan fiction is poorly written, especially since much of it is done by young teenagers, but I have read some stories that have better writing than most published novels. Not only are fan fiction communities a great way for people to bond over common interests, but they also provide an outlet for people to improve their writing through practice, which is invaluable.
Erotica and slash fan fiction seem to be less taboo nowadays than in years past, although perhaps I only think this because I’ve grown older. I’ve heard it said that men are more visual and women more word-oriented, so it makes sense that women are the major audience for fan fiction and men are more attracted to porn videos. But women talk about Fifty Shades of Grey so openly, it seems. I’ve also seen several women reading it at the airport or on flights, and they seem to have no shame about reading erotic in public.
I completely agree with you! Thanks for writing this!
There’s very little Kindle Worlds can do to make people pay for Fan Fiction. I’ll be very surprised if it kicks off successfully. It’s free and there’s no reason people would want to make it otherwise. And it’s too ingrained into the internet for any one company to take absolute control of every fandom on the planet.