Whoa. Dude.
So apparently, Amazon are starting to sell fanfic. Sell sell. For actual money. (As opposed to fanfic web cred. I have a slowly diminishing pile of that somewhere…) My world is on SIDEWAYS. SIDEWAYS I TELL YOU.
How is this going to work out? I have no real idea. They’ve only got three titles ‘available’ for playing with from what I can see, and none of them even sound like they’d interest me.
Now me, I’m up for this weirdness. That CC-BY-SA on all of my stories says I pretty much have to be. I can’t wave that flag around and then say ‘but this thing is bad’! That would be hypocritical to say the very least! (And I don’t want to anyway.) But it’s weird, as Red Dwarf’s Cat might say, with a capital Wee. For me, at any rate. I spent a lot of time writing fanfic, in that grey area of Fanon, messing with other worlds and weaving the threads into my own pattern. It was fun, it was good, and if I thought I could do it without risk of backlash I’d happily link it here. But I don’t think I can do that, and that’s why this is weird: outside of certain ‘permitted’ fic (Star Wars extended universe, Warhammer 40k tie-in books, Star Trek ditto, Doctor Who, all that stuff), I’ve never, ever known it get more than an author’s discreet nod and wink, and sometimes a lot worse.
And now Amazon are buying up rights and opening the playing field for everyone to not only write the stuff but sell it in a three-way profit arrangement.
That’s weird. (And I am tired enough to be rambling mildly incoherently, although that may also be a product of still being confused by all this, so now there will be a line break to hide the rest of this post.)
