• Momentum Books covered the usual concerns about authorship in the fanfic age. But they also cited the case of "Jordin B. Williams’ novel Amazingly Broken that has sparked accusations of intense plagiarism of multiple best sellers, identity fraud, and all-round skullduggery when it came to promoting the book. Readers were furious to find Williams’ book had directly plagiarised large passages from other authors of a similar genre, and the author has since been confusingly linked to a previous fanfiction story with a duplicate plotline...Perhaps these examples are a cautionary tale for aspiring authors looking to utilise online communities, or a warning to publishers to be wary of unknown writers."
• Who owns fanworks may become a controversial topic, especially if media properties distribute it without saying if they got permission to do so. Collaborative writing projects have been online for a long time with open-source characters. These days successful projects may be closer than ever to fan-created works. Projects such as Wikia's collaborative writing offer is deliberately asking for fan participation. But there's no discussion of contributor rights in their announcement, or what agreements fans might have to sign.
• Fanfic's ability to generate money is creating more open discussion about a project's fannish roots. But as this post at Today.com (which quotes TWC editor Karen Hellekson) mentions, who will benefit the most from this openness is still unknown. Says Henry Jenkins, "'The gender politics are very real here. The majority of fan fiction is written by women who are telling stories that don’t reach the public, because Hollywood has a hard time telling stories about women's lives.' He hopes that Amazon has women on its Kindle Worlds advisory board who understand the role women play in creating fan fiction 'or they’ll get serious pushback.'"

What ownership disagreements have you seen surrounding fanworks? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Australia's Business Review Weekly put a local angle on Amazon's expanding properties for Kindle Worlds. "The e-book market has enormous growth potential but it is also fraught with pitfalls. Australia’s biggest book retail chain Dymocks tried its hand at e-book publishing but struggled to get the business model right and closed its D Publishing venture in March this year after 15 months. However, it is not just about size; one of the big stories in the e-book world is Australian-based Writers Coffee Shop, a small e-book fiction publisher that shot to fame with the success of erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey."
• Canada's The Province Book blog posted about Kindle Worlds as well with a different sort of "local" angle. "Amazon has made a fortune off of KDP, and it is well aware that many indie writers either got their start writing fan fiction or continue to write fan fiction even as their writing careers take off. Bestselling author Naomi Novik, for instance, whose Temeraire series has been optioned for film by Peter Jackson, is a supporter of fan fiction...The Organization for Transformative Works, a 'nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms,' has a pretty good roundup of responses to this latest move by Amazon. While some fans certainly celebrate the announcement, others have concerns about what Amazon may want in terms of intellectual property — are they going to make films out of the fan fiction others publish?"
• Digital Book Wire claimed Kindle Worlds Has First Imitator: Outlier Digital From Twilight Producers. "The problem with the recently released Kindle Worlds’ platform, is it traps writers within the confines of Amazon’s as yet unestablished fan-fiction community instead of the extensive network already at their fingertips,” said Mark Morgan, one of the company partners, in the statement. “Their idea is close, but it actually prevents fan-fiction writers from posting their stories anywhere else, halting their existing fan-base outreach on other free portal options. It’s like saying they can write whatever they want as long as they do it for Amazon."
• Gamma Squad talked about the Jim Henson Company's pitch to fanfic writers to write a prequel story to The Dark Crystal. "To be fair, this is a bit more of a deal than Amazon’s attempt to get the next Fifty Shades of Grey for dirt; the winner, if there is one, will receive $10,000 as part of their contract. Of course, one doesn’t see the word 'advance' anywhere in the official rules, so you might be forking over your writing ability for little more than a pat on the head, but at least they don’t put 'valuable exposure' as a prize." Of course, given how media outlets are now ready to slap a fanfiction label on anything, the spotlight moment seems more and more likely.

What fanfic marketing promotions have you come across? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• The Barnard Center for Research on Women's blog proposed feminist remixes as the next step to combating negative media representations. "Through our studies, work, and activism, many of us have learned to be critical of these images, to deconstruct them in order to understand the assumptions and messages behind them." Remixes can then create something new out of the deconstructed work. Emeritus OTW Board member Francesca Coppa teamed with Elisa Kreisenger to present at this year’s Utopia conference. "Kreisinger encouraged Utopia attendees to try their own hand at remixing as a way to take back their identities from corporate commoditization and depict women in ways that do not revolve around heteronormative relationships and procreation. Her mantra and advice to fellow feminists: 'Don’t blame the media, become the media.'"
• The U.S. Department of Defense site Armed With Science wrote about how fandom objects are also historical markers. "From the swirls and statues of the ancient world, to the banners of the mid-evil armies, to the crests of colleges and sports teams, to iconic superhero emblems, to even the branding of large companies, humanity is filled with identifiable signs that mark the trail through our history." Discussing the impact of Star Trek in culture, the post cites how its creations "are often seen as agents of scientific and social change."
• While some fandoms like Bronies don't lack for people willing to step forward and declare their allegiance, many in furry fandom reacted poorly to media presence at Furlandia. "Attendees started to wonder what was going on when production teams and cameras began to show up. It didn’t take long for someone to announce that MTV had arrived. According to the PR director, an announcement had been made at opening ceremonies; no written notification had been given." In comments to the post, one reader pointed out "From a television producer's point of view, furries really are a nightmare scenario" because "you have a producer who's expected to get exciting footage trying to get said exciting footage from a group of hard-to-find, reluctant, camera-shy people who may only agree under very specific and limiting conditions (which almost ensure that nothing crazy will happen), all the while letting you know that they will be scrutinizing your every movement and most likely hate anything you say about them." The poster concluded that "if a good documentary about furries is going to come from somewhere, it's going to come from within the fandom, and it's probably going to be targeted toward furries (it just won't have the appeal or the resources to make it to the mass public)."

What fandom objects do you think will have an impact on general culture? Write about it in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

• Amazon's announcement earlier this month that it would be launching Kindle Worlds as a way to capitalize on fanfic writers didn't just get a lot of attention among fans and online discussion sites it also launched dozens of related articles ranging from tech publications, business publications, publishing sites, entertainment sites, journalism sites, fan-oriented media and mass-market media, in the U.S. and internationally, as well as individual responses by authors. We thought we'd take a look at some of the issues raised in this coverage and what the media was focusing on.
• One of Forbes' articles on the topic pointed out that the content restrictions imposed by Amazon's terms mean that the juggernaut hit that was Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have been able to be published through this program. Writers using this program won't be making that much either. "The revenue split is considerably less generous than authors who use their own characters enjoy, with Kindle Worlds writers keeping 35% of the net. That’s for works over 10,000 words; for shorter ones, the rate is an even lower 20%. Ordinarily, writers who self-publish e-books through Amazon keep 70% percent."
• Author John Scalzi also looked critically at Amazon's terms and what a bad deal it is for fanfic writers. "Essentially, this means that all the work in the Kindle Worlds arena is a work for hire that Alloy (and whomever else signs on) can mine with impunity. This is a very good deal for Alloy, et al — they’re getting story ideas! Free! — and less of a good deal for the actual writers themselves. I mean, the official media tie-in writers and script writers are doing work for hire, too, but they get advances and\or at least WGA minimum scale for their work."
• Scalzi's comments about how Amazon's move was more likely to replace writers of tie-in novels with cheap, unedited writers, tied into Forbes contributor Suw Charman-Anderson's comments about how Amazon's move was yet another example of a slow-moving and risk-averse traditional publishing industry. "How many more business opportunities are Amazon going to create from things that the publishing industry has ignored or rejected? Publishers cannot allow themselves to be pushed constantly onto their back foot by Amazon, they can’t let outdated attitudes towards copyright, licensing and creativity define their future. They need to do what Amazon does only too well: Find under-served communities and then give them the tools to write, to create and to make money from their work." Megan Carter at The Daily Beast also looks at the matter from a publishing perspective, saying "The interesting thing about the Kindle Single is that it isn't just changing how long people write, but how people write. The books can be written much faster--you say as much as you have to say, and then you stop. Then if they do well, they get turned into a hardcover, which can be revised and extended based on the commentary the ebook received. "
• Some, such as Matt Carter, are concerned about what this will do to professional writers. "The joy of fan-fiction for some has always been the pleasure of writing for the sake of writing, and then sharing among like-minded friends. The concern here is twofold in that the original author of, say, a “Vampire Diaries” script could feel slighted if a fan-fiction author suddenly pulls in more money than them, and that there will suddenly be authors who will actually take to writing fan-fiction rather than trying to create original worlds of their own, thus setting a limit on future creative projects."
• Carina Adly MacKenzie at Zap2It pointed out what Alloy is. "It should be noted that Alloy is a book packager, so the three available properties aren't the brainchild of specific authors, but of a sort of brain trust of creative types and marketing geniuses. Alloy has a team of people who sit down and come up with plot ideas that they believe will make profitable franchises, mostly directed at young women. Then, they hire an author to write their previously outlined stories. This means that Alloy retains the creative rights to the "world" in which the books are set, because Alloy came up with it, which makes something like Kindle World a lot easier. Whether this sort of system would work with content that emerged in a more traditional way -- from the mind of one writer or producer -- is yet to be seen."
• TechnoBuffalo raised a concern likely on many fans' minds -- what comes next. "One lingering question from this project, however, is if the studios that license the properties will continue to allow fans to publish their works for free around the Web. In theory not much should change, but there is now a financial stake in this sub-section of fandom where companies can earn money from the work of others, so there might be an incentive to drive people towards the pay version of fan fiction. We reached out to Warner Bros., the parent company of Alloy Entertainment, for comment on the matter, but had not received a reply by publication time."
• One concern about the Worlds program may not be as restrictive as people think. "Fan fiction has never been about money. Inhabiting a beloved world and bonding about it with other fans is what's kept people publishing thousands of words for free. Doing so for dollars but being limited by Amazon's terms (one of which is no pornography, of which a sizeable amount of fan fiction is comprised) may turn many off. However, when asked if Fifty Shades of Grey would violate the "no pornography" clause, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Fifty Shades of Grey involves consensual sex between adults and does not violate our content guidelines." So how Amazon defines pornography is definitely somewhere outside the "I know it when I see it" dictum."
• However, others are more concerned about what this development will mean for fanfiction communities, though the less they know about them, the more likely the think of Kindle Worlds as a great development. "Most fan fic authors would jump at the chance to legally write for their beloved franchise, but with a possibility of getting paid and perhaps even recognition from the creator? It's going to be an instant, phenomenal success." Others are less sanguine: "Fan fiction is a place of wing fic...and Mpreg...You can't package up a place like that and sell it. And telling and retelling stories, however we want to, is bigger even than a giant like Amazon. Fanfic existed before the internet and it will still be around when we live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. After all, it's created enough of them." And one commentator proposed the idea that Amazon spaces will become community forums for fanfic writers. "'I think it just builds the network effect, which is one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s competitive advantage,' said R.J. Hottovy, senior ecommerce analyst at Morningstar. 'The more people use (the platform) and discuss, the more powerful it is for people who sell things.'"
• Some outlets contacted the OTW for comment, such as Wired: "Indeed, given the limited licenses, draconian content guidelines, and dubious contracts, it’s hard to imagine fans abandoning open platforms for a far-from-guaranteed paycheck. While Kindle Worlds is sure to attract a fair number of fan writers excited at the prospect of working under official license and maybe even making a buck or two off their stories, for many, the most appealing route to publication will remain the one taken by Fifty Shades of Grey author E. L. James: just file off the serial numbers."
• At least one likely outcome to widespread media stories on fanfiction will be the continuing practice of spreading confusion about fanfiction terms and practices due to a lack of fact checking or research, including being able to accurately determine the number of Vampire Diaries stories at Fanfiction.net. But at least fanfiction readers can rest easy that fanfic's already been easily available for their Kindles since 2010.

What additional views on Kindle Worlds have you seen? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.