Do any of the following words mean anything to you? “Larry Stylinson” , “Superwholock”, “Tenrose” “Drarry”, “Y/N” If so, I’ll be forced to assume that you, like me, were a part of fandom culture in the 2010’s. Maybe you read One Direction fanfiction where Y/N would be noticed in the crowd for reading a book. Perhaps you were more of a Superwholock person and liked reading about Tardis adventures or mysteries to solve. Perhaps you even wrote self insert fanfictions about going to Hogwarts.
No longer something resigned to the trenches of Tumblr and Wattpad, fanfiction has become more and more respected in recent years. It seems unthinkable to imagine now that back in 2000 Fanfiction.net had to ban work based on Anne Rice’s novels due to her threats of legal action, or that JK Rowling used her lawyers to threaten writers of Harry Potter fanfiction which featured sex. In the years since the early 2000s when fan communities on the internet were just beginning to form, the publishing industry has softened their stance on the practice considerably.
For those not familiar with fan communities, fanfiction is the process of reimagining another author’s world/story/characters and writing your own stories about them. Fandoms (communities of fans) hang out on certain sites such as Ao3 and fanfiction.net where people can publish their own stories about any popular franchise (Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Star Trek etc.) Fanfiction goes back decades at least, and depending on how you define it, centuries.
Fanfiction has become such a huge industry that it is now impacting the publishing of original books. Some works are even being published in their own right with the serial numbers filed off. This means that details which tie it to the source material are removed – so Doctor Who’s name is changed and he’s made a chef instead of a timelord.
In 2003, writing explicit Harry Potter fanfiction could get you a letter from JK Rowling’s lawyers. In 2023, the subreddit R/HarryPotterFanfiction has over 94,000 members. One fanfiction, “All The Young Dudes” by MsKingBean89 has over 4 million hits on Archive Of Our Own. It is in fact so popular it has its own fandom. The #atyd hashtag on TikTok has over 700 million views. An original character from that fanfiction has his own fandom who make edits of him and fancast him. There is fanfiction about the fanfiction. I can understand it though, reading that fanfiction has been one of the best reading experiences I’ve had this year.
The recent surge of popularity for The Hunger Games led to a series of fanfictions which tell the story from Peeta’s perspective becoming very popular on TikTok. Fanfiction is huge. It’s mainstream. It is no longer confined to niche forums and Tumblr boards.
The publishing industry would have to be insane to not try to capitalise on all of this. And so capitalise they did. Most famously, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James started as a Twilight fanfiction. It sold over 125 million copies. Following in its footsteps, the popularity of Harry Styles fanfiction After by Anna Todd also led to a trilogy of movies. The series’ origins are well known with the latest movie even making reference to it as a character tells the main character he could play Harry Styles in a movie.
Fanfiction used to be seen as something which hurt IP’s and branding. It was viewed with a similar ire as piracy. At best it was copyright infringement and at worst it was damaging to the brand of the work itself. Now fanfiction can be seen as free marketing for existing IP’s.
It took the publishing industry a few years to realise the fanfiction space was basically an untapped market segment. It was an unexplored land full of enthusiastic fans and talented writers. Yet no one was making any profit from it! There is nothing marketers want to see less than a space where people could be buying something but aren’t. The fanfiction space was like if there was a huge tourist attraction but no one had built any restaurants around it or charged people to go. It is a ready-made market. Before After or Fifty Shades of Grey were ever published they already had thousands of readers. This meant publishers could count on buyers and they knew for certain that the material had wide commercial appeal.
The process of making fanfiction into an original novel is more complicated than it would first appear. It’s not enough to just change names and then have it stocked in Easons by tomorrow. Fundamentally there are differences in style between fanfiction and original writing. When writing an original novel one of your chief tasks is convincing the reader to care about the characters you’ve created. You need your readers to root for them, despise them, pity them etc. in order for them to be invested in the story you’re trying to tell. It’s one of the most important duties a writer has. With fanfiction, the readers are entering the story with preconceived ideas of who the characters are and how to feel about them. When you write about Harry Potter or Doctor Who or Bucky Barnes you don’t need to convince your readers to care for them in the same way because they already do. So when you adapt fanfiction into an original work and make those characters new you have to try to make readers care about them in a way that didn’t need to be done when it was fanfiction.
Fanfictions are also often written in a serialised format allowing the author to see readers’ reactions as they go. This is a huge change to the writing process and may be jarring in an original novel when plotlines are randomly dropped or characters respond to criticism of the past chapter. There is a huge community element to fanfiction which isn’t quite the same in published novels.
Fanfiction can be a space to reclaim a piece of work and make it more inclusive or add new perspectives to it. With JK Rowling being rightfully shunned by most of the LGBT community, Harry Potter fanfics which reimagine the world with more queer characters and a world which is populated with and accepts queer people can be a really valuable thing for LGBT fans. Fanfictions are inseparable from the fandoms they spring up from. The serialised format meaning authors can change their story easily to suit needs, the way fanfiction can be a reclamation of a piece of work from a certain community and how all fanfiction sites let you post comments on each chapter are ways fanfiction spaces build community in ways traditional publishing can’t.
Once enough changes are made, the copyright issues are circumvented and you just have a book with a pre-made audience. Authors’ opinions on this practice vary with some like Anne Rice, Diana Gabaldon and George R.R Martin despising it, and others like Neil Gaiman being very open to it.
Defining fanfiction can be trickier than you would imagine. You haven’t been part of discourse around the validity of fanfiction until you’ve had someone tell you that Dante’s Inferno is fanfiction, actually. BBC’s Sherlock, any Spiderman comic released in the last couple of years, and Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves all involve someone using the art or creation of someone else to tell their own story but these works wouldn’t generally be referred to as fanfiction. What is “fanfiction” and what is not is poorly defined and more down to copyright law distinctions than anything to do with the actual text.
The publishing industry’s reluctance to go anywhere near fanfiction was understandable. Many authors raged against it, people thought it would violate copyright laws and people fundamentally did not respect fanfiction. The public perception of fanfiction at the time was that it was all just Harry Potter and Star Trek erotica. In recent years their stance has softened when considering the amount of money that can be made from it. After, Fifty Shades Of Grey, City of Bones and The Love Hypothesis have all been huge successes. Beyond just the immediate payout, it also helps to modernise the industry and appeal to young readers. Many of us bookworms in our 20s will have grown up reading fanfiction. We know that it can be just as impactful as original fiction. A lot of us will have had formative reading experiences with fanfiction.
Fanfiction authors and readers will go to bat and buy books based off fanfiction. The more books based on fanfiction can sell, the more legitimacy the art form gains. A win for one is a win for all. Anyone who cares deeply about fan communities will want to buy these books. They’re a loyal community. I mean, you have to be pretty dedicated to scroll through the thousands of less than stellar works on Wattpad and AO3 to find the good stuff.
Most original published novels have no such built in audience. Publishers will publish based on guesses of who a target audience may be and how likely the book is to appeal to them. Publishers take a big risk hoping there is an audience out there for the books they publish. Published fanfiction helps alleviate some of these worries.
Yet fanfiction also comes with its own set of problems. For one, publishers aren’t getting first print rights. The content already exists and has been read by likely thousands of people. There is a risk of readers realising they could just read it for free online instead, or a lot of the core demographic already having read it.
The lack of respect these books will face is another problem for publishers. While these books may sell well, they are often critically panned and a large subsection of the literary community will never consider fanfiction real art. You might make the bestseller lists but you won’t be getting a Pulitzer.
In contrast, books which are “inspired” by other works can and do often rake in big literary prizes. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, a retelling of The Iliad won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2012. Books which focus on real people (we call this real person fic on AO3) like Hamnet, Rodham, The Other Boleyn Girl etc. are respected and generally not considered fanfiction. Hillary Clinton is still alive, so what makes a book about her historical fiction but a book about Harry Styles fanfiction? Why is a book inspired by The Iliad or Sherlock Holmes fine but a book inspired by Harry Potter not? The sole reason for this is copyright law which dictates that stories may enter the public domain after a certain period of time. This makes sense from a legal perspective, but why does it also inform how we speak of fanfiction in culture? Why do we think of it as a more valuable artistic pursuit to write based on someone else’s work if that someone died over 70 years ago?
This type of sneering at fanfiction is another factor to consider in the publication of fanfiction. It’s possible that as the years move forward that fanfiction will become more respected but this also may not happen. Regardless though, published fanfiction is not going anywhere. It’s a pretty reliable business model and has proven it can bring in money. While most fanfiction isn’t Booker Prize material, it can be valuable for both readers and writers. Fanfiction is an interactive process which reimagines a piece of art from the lens of fans rather than just the original creator. Fanfiction is interactive, transformative and based in community. It is an art form in itself and should be respected more than it is. People cry at fanfiction, people are happy from reading it, people debate it and criticise it – in any real sense it is just as valuable as a published book.
WORDS: Leah Kelly
