Is money ruining fan fiction?

Before Ali Hazelwood’s “The Love Hypothesis” was a bestselling novel or Prime Original movie, it was “Star Wars” fan fiction.

Hazelwood is one of many authors who have made the leap from fan fiction to traditional publishing. Those authors are inking lucrative publishing deals–but mixing money with fan fiction, historically a labor of love, is controversial.

This week, Reema Khrais talks with Elizabeth Minkel, the editor of fandom news site Fansplaining, and cultural commentator Josh Lora about how money is changing fan fiction, and fandom along with it. “The darkest, darkest timeline would be that people begin writing fan fiction to then get seven-figure book deals,” Lora said.

A few takeaways from this episode:

• Fan fiction has historically functioned as a kind of gift economy. People wrote fan fiction for free, as an offering to the fandom they loved. Minkel said this also protects the practice legally. “Because fan fiction does exist in this gray area under copyright law…one of the ways that fan fiction writers have historically tried to protect themselves is by doing it purely for free,” she explained. “The second money starts to change hands, that's when the rights holders start to get interested.”

• A newer practice called “fan-binding” has led to even more complications. Fan-binding involves taking a novel-length fan fiction published online and hand-binding it into a physical book. Some fans do this for their own pleasure, but others are selling the books for profit. “Thousands of dollars are now changing hands of someone else binding this author's work, and the author is not making any money off of it,” Minkel said.

• The type of fan fiction being written is changing. Fan fiction has historically been a place where popular media could be reimagined by LGBTQ fans. But with an influx of money, Minkel said, “we’re seeing fan fiction just look like what’s valued by the publishing industry.” That means more stories like “The Love Hypothesis,” about straight couples who appeal to general audiences.
  

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