Earn money from [some of] your fanfiction on Amazon

I thought this was really interesting:

Amazon To Allow Writers To Sell Fan Fiction
By Jason Boog on May 22, 2013 11:58 AM

Amazon Publishing has reached out to fan fiction writers with Kindle Worlds, a platform allowing authors to write fan fiction based on someone else’s work and share royalties with the rights holders.

Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment division will work with Amazon on the program, letting fans write about Cecily von Ziegesar‘s Gossip Girl, Sara Shepard‘s Pretty Little Liars and L.J. Smith‘s Vampire Diaries. Fan fiction writers can publish their own work about these stories in the Kindle Store. The program launches in June. Here’ more about the payment structure:

Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both the rights holders of the Worlds and the author. The standard author’s royalty rate (for works of at least 10,000 words) will be 35% of net revenue. As with all titles from Amazon Publishing, Kindle Worlds will base net revenue off of sales price—rather than the lower, industry standard of wholesale price—and royalties will be paid monthly.

Amazon “plans to announce more licenses soon” to expand the Kindle Worlds program. Over at FanFiction.net, you can read more than 500 stories about Gossip Girls, nearly 300 stories about Pretty Little Liars (both books and TV show) and more than 800 Vampire Diaries stories.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/am ... ion_b70906

Right now, it sounds pretty limited, but it's a very cool idea. I hope book publishers start doing this as well.

I saw something about this on Twitter earlier (of course, I can't find it now!) about who retains copyright of the created work - not copyright of the shows, but the copyright of the fanfiction itself.

HA Found it! This John Scalzi post, that someone linked on Twitter and of course I subsquently couldn't find until I Googled for it. Anyway. Here's a couple other commentaries on it, too, since I stumbled across them as well.

Anyway, apparently part of this entails signing the copyright of any created work to Amazon - why, I'm not sure, and I can't look anything up right now. However, I can dig into it later if anyone wants me to, unless anyone else gets to it first ^^

(We'll talk about my library/info science student problems later, ja?)

I read the Scalzi post a couple days ago, but I don't agree with him.

For one, how is it a bad deal for fanfiction writers? Currently when you write fanfiction, you're infringing on someone else's copyright. In practice, no one cares unless you're profiting from your fanfiction, but the point remains nonetheless that you are guilty of copyright infringement.

What Amazon is doing is allowing people to profit from their creative works who can't currently do so. Now, in order to do this, it is necessary to transfer the copyright and all rights to the rights-holder of the underlying story. Otherwise, the author of the fanfiction could sue the rights-holder in case elements of their story are used by the rights-holder in the future. This is true even if the rights-holder had no prior knowledge of the fanfiction. All the stuff Scalzi doesn't like is really just the only way this arrangement works. Moreover, if you don't like the terms, don't take them. You're in no worse a position than you were before this announcement.

Secondly, I think Scalzi is being duplicitous. At the end of his blog entry, he writes that he doesn't like writing fanfiction at all. So it comes off a bit as someone chastising Maps on the iPhone when they've never used an iPhone.

The bottom line is this: Prior to this announcement by Amazon, fanfiction writers of certain TV shows had no way to profit from their work. Now they do, and that strikes me as a good deal.