Publishers Are Warming to Fan Fiction, But Can It Go Mainstream?

Literary publishing's uneasy relationship with fan fiction has been complicated by the realization that fandom is a huge potential market—one already stocked with both prolific authors and enthusiastic readers. But how to tap that market is a dilemma that few publishers seem quite prepared to engage.
Art for Juniper Lane.Image quaedam via kickstarter
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Kady Morrison's debut novel, Juniper Lane, won't be on store shelves for months, but already her fans number in the six figures. They're familiar with her work from Archive of Our Own, a fanwork site where Morrison writes fanfic under the handle gyzym.

Her publisher, Big Bang Press, is well aware—in fact, it links to her Ao3 page directly from its website. For a conventional publisher to acknowledge, let alone link directly to, a writers' fan fiction is unprecedented, but Big Bang specializes in original works by authors recruited from the fan-fiction community.

The overlap between the professional and fan literary communities is one of those uncomfortable secrets no one denies, but few discuss. Fan fiction is mostly published pseudonymously, and the stigma surrounding it often causes writers to keep their professional and fan identities carefully compartmentalized.

Literary publishing's uneasy relationship with fan fiction has been complicated by the realization that fandom is a huge potential market—one stocked with both prolific authors and enthusiastic readers. But tapping that market is a dilemma few publishers seem quite prepared to engage.

That's where Big Bang Press comes in.

Tapping a Ready-Made Market

To Morgan Davies, Big Bang's editor-in-chief, mainstream publishing’s difficulty tapping the fan market is a byproduct of its cultivated distance from fandom. "They know there's something there, and they know they should be doing something about it, but they don't really understand how it works," Davies says. Most publishers who scout fanfiction, she says, simply look for popular works that can be repurposed as original novels--50 Shades of Grey, for example, started as a fan’s reimagining of Twilight.

Big Bang takes a different approach: Instead of trawling platforms like Archive of Our Own or Wattpad for stories, Davies decided to focus her search on authors: "We want to take people who have been writing a lot of fan ficiton and honing their writing talent, but who are interested in writing original stuff and clearly have the talent and ability to do so."

Big Bang isn't the first publisher to plumb the fan community for new talent. For decades, it was understood that fanzines and amateur press associations were where writers—particularly in genre fiction and comics—got their chops: Ray Bradbury's first published stories appeared in his four-issue fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. And there's a long tradition of what's known as "filing off the serial numbers": removing trademarked names, settings, and other details to republish fanfic as a new original work. (Often, this happened with "AU," or alternate-universe, fanfiction, which was already so distant from the original that the changes were little more than cosmetic.) Legend has it that Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor, the first book of her New York Times-bestselling Vorkosigan Saga, started as Star Trek fanfiction.

Blurred Lines

It's easy to argue 50 Shades of Grey is an outlier, that its success isn’t indicative of a larger trend. However, since its publication in 2011, the lines between literary and fan publishing have continued to blur.

Image: Courtesy of Amazon

Hugh Howey, author of self-published bestseller Wool, has encouraged readers not only to write fan fiction based on his works, but to sell it. It’s an interesting case: Howey’s own history as a self-published, digital-first author brings him a good deal closer to the model and economy of fandom than most of his print-first counterparts. His model is becoming increasingly popular as the tools of digital publishing become more and more accessible, allowing writers to bypass the traditional gatekeepers to literary success. Notable, too, is Howey's embracing the term "fanfiction" to refer to Peace in Amber, his recent pastiche of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

"Fellow writers got in touch and expressed shock that I would allow people to dabble and profit off my characters," wrote Howey in a recent Slate essay. "But I was profiting while writing about Joseph Campbell’s singular hero of a thousand faces. We are all telling the same story with slight variations."

Howey published Peace in Amber through Amazon's Kindle Worlds, a licensed portal that allows writers to publish and, critically, sell fiction based on a handful of properties through Amazon.com. It’s same market through which Howey’s fans can publish and sell fanfic based on his work. Worlds' system has some significant problems--writers cede rights to not only their work, but also any original creations that crop up in context of it—but it's a key marker of the increased legitimization of fandom, and its growing and increasingly visible place in the literary marketplace.

A New Model?

But can fan fiction—and its authors—break out of self-publishing and into more traditional literary publishing models and markets? That's what Davies and Big Bang Press are counting on.

"There wouldn't be any reason for us to hide that the authors were coming from fandom," said Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Big Bang's managing editor and social media director. To Davies, the association with fandom is a critical means of distinguishing Big Bang from the competition: take away the fandom ties, and "we'd just be another little indie press, doing what all the other little indie presses are doing."

So far, it's worked: Publishing colleagues warned Davies about the stigma associated with fan writers, but Big Bang successfully raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter in November to fund its first wave of books. If the success of the Kickstarter is an indicator, then Big Bang has the potential to do more than give fan authors a path to publishing original works without abandoning their roots: it could deal a significant blow to the guardians of the gates that separate fan authors from their "real" counterparts—not just on the internet, but in the larger publishing marketplace.