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fengi is hitting the comedy goldmine this week. Ah. This is going to be great, you guys. So great.
Because it's not funny enough that Yahoo bought Tumblr, now Amazon has plans to monetize fan fiction.
Discuss. Bonus points for digging up hilarious wank. — Sabs]
Originally posted byfengi at Let's give moody, hyperactive kittens chainsaws and catnip.
ETA: I made this point onfengi's post but I'll repeat it here:
I almost see this as a form of outsourcing. Authors have these pesky agents, after all, and wouldn't it be nicer if we could just get naïve amateurs to write our tie-in material? We don't even need to pay editors. People will do it for loooove. Toss the fanfic writers less than a pro would get paid, but more than they'd get paid if they were posting on ff.net; toss the authors a bone because copyright, and still more profits for Amazon.
It's an interesting model. I think publishing definitely does need a new model, and I'm vaguely in favour of anything that recognizes the inherently collective nature of creation, but I think this is going to fail miserably and hilariously. — Sabs
fengi is hitting the comedy goldmine this week. Ah. This is going to be great, you guys. So great.Because it's not funny enough that Yahoo bought Tumblr, now Amazon has plans to monetize fan fiction.
Discuss. Bonus points for digging up hilarious wank. — Sabs]
Originally posted by
fengi at Let's give moody, hyperactive kittens chainsaws and catnip. Amazon has decided to monetize fan fiction. Not fucking kidding:
Is trying to cash in on the emo side of the net the new thing? I wonder what's next: Google purchases Encyclopedia Dramatica?
Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.I read about this in a post by author Jim Hines who offers soem intitial observations. Chuck Wendig does as well including a very interesting possibility:
The weird thing is what happens to that comfortable space that separated canonical from non-canonical. Like, one assumes that the fan-fic remains officially non-canonical — and yet, people are paying for it...it still grants it a kind of territory in the canonical space. Someone might read Book 3...and say, “But this doesn’t refer to that time when she time-traveled back to the Old West in that novella, Booby Nuthatch.” And you’re like, “That wasn’t real, though, someone else wrote that.” But then they say: “I PAID FOR IT SO IT FELT REAL TO ME”...That’s a pretty serious shift in authorship and authenticity.For me, the interesting part is an aspiring oligarchy is injecting some "creative disruption" (i.e. greed and exploitation) into a scene which, to be polite, is slightly prone to hyperbolic reactions which at times involve distorted perceptions.
Is trying to cash in on the emo side of the net the new thing? I wonder what's next: Google purchases Encyclopedia Dramatica?
ETA: I made this point on
fengi's post but I'll repeat it here:I almost see this as a form of outsourcing. Authors have these pesky agents, after all, and wouldn't it be nicer if we could just get naïve amateurs to write our tie-in material? We don't even need to pay editors. People will do it for loooove. Toss the fanfic writers less than a pro would get paid, but more than they'd get paid if they were posting on ff.net; toss the authors a bone because copyright, and still more profits for Amazon.
It's an interesting model. I think publishing definitely does need a new model, and I'm vaguely in favour of anything that recognizes the inherently collective nature of creation, but I think this is going to fail miserably and hilariously. — Sabs
