Episode 218: The Money Question 3: Books???
Following previous installments on the thorny intersections of money and fanfiction, Episode 218, “The Money Question 3: Books???” tackles the recent debacle around people illegally selling bound copies of others’ fic, which has mostly centered on mega-popular Dramione works. Jumping off from Elizabeth’s WIRED article on the subject—which ties the practice to the current pull-to-publish wave as well as the Twilight fan-run presses of the early 2010s—Elizabeth and Flourish discuss the context collapse when a fic “breaches containment,” double standards in attitudes towards money and various fan practices, and, for likely the 1,000th time on this podcast, what exactly “fair use” means.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:00:42] This is “The Money Question Part 3”—so of course there have already been two other installments. The original 2018 “Money Question” was about monetizing fanfiction (and divergent attitudes around fanart). Part 2, “The Appening”—which we released on the very doom-y sounding date of March 4, 2020—was in response to people skinning the AO3 and charging for fic-reading apps, and featured the one and only EarlGreyTea68.
[00:01:19] If you have no idea what we’re talking about, start with Elizabeth’s piece for WIRED: “Lots of People Make Money on Fanfic. Just Not the Authors.”
[00:01:40] That’s Episode 214, “Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 18.”
[00:03:24] Our last episode was called “Fanbinding,” and you can also read about Renegade in Elizabeth’s latest piece for Atlas Obscura, “The Emerging Art of ‘Fanbinding.’”
[00:06:16] You can read SenLinYu’s whole announcement here.
[00:19:25] Here’s the full post from Des, aka Celestial Sphere Press.
[00:24:36] The “white guy blinking” meme is actually an interesting example here. As the blinking white guy himself, Drew Scanlon, explains, it came from a video on the site where he worked, Giant Bomb, whose community regularly made reaction gifs of the hosts to share amongst themselves. In fact, it didn’t even “breach containment” until several years after it was made…
[00:25:09] Here are a few Reddit threads discussing the Gee’s Bend situation Flourish is describing. To understand the production differences, a Gee’s Bend quilt:
Versus something from the Target collaboration:
[00:37:34] Here is the game Flourish was discussing! (Yes, this is from Back In The Day, so it’s a Harry Potter fanwork.) They can’t find any photos of the award-winning packaging (“feelies”), but if you’re really curious, here are the files. And here’s a review of the feelies, which is not as positive as you think it would be seeing as they then gave Flourish the award lol.
[00:55:32] A reminder about the four main fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright law:
Purpose and character of the use: Why are you making this work? This factor includes things like education, parody, and “transformativeness,” aka the reason the OTW is the “Organization for Transformative Works.”
Nature of the copyrighted work: How “creative” is the original work? (Often this means fiction vs. nonfiction, with courts less likely to buy a fair-use argument for works of fiction.)
Amount and substantiality of the portion used: If you are wholesale copy-pasting the original work into your own, that’s probably not going to count as fair use! This factor is measured on both a qualitative and quantitative level. (Remember…there is a vibes element here lol.)
Effect of the use upon the potential market: Arguably the most important one historically, this is whether your profits from your derivative work are cutting into the market share of the original work. (See: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books, aka the Harry Potter Lexicon case.)
[00:57:02] Lawrence Lessig did indeed say “‘fair use’ is the right to hire a lawyer” re: the Google v. Oracle case.
[01:00:39] In Episode 193, “Ask Me About My Fanart” (which we recorded almost exactly a year ago), longtime fanartist Fox Estacado talked about the current climate and the ways fanartists deal with litigious rights holders:
Right now, there are huge witch hunts over fanart. That’s why it’s so important for artists to have kind of a community outside, to try to figure out OK, what’s dangerous to make art of right now. So we have a list. … Many fanart communities will share a list of, like, “OK, I got taken down for this fandom. I got taken down for this.” “I got taken down for this character,” et cetera.
So it’s well known that you don’t do Disney art. Ever. There are also certain Japanese fandoms that you don’t do art of, either. I’m not big into anime, so that doesn’t really apply to me. But I did some Yuri on Ice work and unfortunately, I can’t sell any of that online. Because they will go after everyone.
And it’s blanket. They literally have, like—they are searching the keywords on Etsy—they’re searching everywhere. They’re, you know, they will find you. [laughs] Even if you’ve made no sales, they will find you, and they will do, like, mass cease and desists.
And now these companies, like, they’re not even giving you really the—I mean, you can appeal it, but they’re gonna take down everything first. It’s—you know. Before, it was, they asked you to take it down, and you’d take it down. Now they just go ahead and take it down. And then if you want to appeal it, you could.
[01:06:02] We talked to information science professor Casey Fiesler about her work in 2019.
[01:12:52] If you’re curious, here are the top AO3 ships for 2023 (as determined by new works, not total).
[01:24:00] Our outro music is “Knowing the truth” by Lee Rosevere, also used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #218, “The Money Question Part 3: Books???”
FK: [laughs] Note the three question marks after “Books???”
ELM: [high-pitched] “Books???”
FK: [laughs] All right, and yes, as you may guess, this is the one in which we talk about the... How to even describe it? The fanbinding, BookTok, Manacled...also All the Young Dudes, also Etsy...that thing! [laughs]
ELM: Look, if I was going to describe it, I would not do what you just did.
FK: Great. Why don’t you describe it now? You’re the one—OK, Elizabeth, for context, if anyone has not been following this, Elizabeth is the expert on this particular fandom thing, having reported widely about it. I’m gonna call it widely. [laughs]
ELM: OK. I think that most people know what we’re talking about. So I think we should just get right into it. I wanted to start this conversation by sharing anonymous ask we received weeks ago.
FK: Right.
ELM: So, for context on this, in our last AMA, which I believe was in January, we had a letter that was saying, you know, “What happens when a fic ‘breaches containment’?” Right? Those were the exact words they used, and they said, you know, “There’s this fic in my fandom, and, like, people are reading it, and they say they haven’t even read the source, and it’s, like, wildly popular, and I don’t understand it.” And I said, as a joke, “Is it Manacled?” Ha ha ha ha ha...
FK: And they responded to us saying, “I’m the anon who asked the question that you answered at the beginning of your 214th episode, ‘Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 18.’ I just wanted to update you that you did correctly guess what I was talking about—”
ELM: Yeah...
FK: “—even though I hadn’t specified it in my ask. It was Manacled. I have seen a ton of people in romance book chat spaces be like, ‘I never even read the Harry Potter books, but I keep seeing Manacled recced, should I read Manacled?’ And that’s just baffling to me, no offense to Manacled, a perfectly fine fic that’s not better than 20 other Dramione fics I could easily name. The level at which it’s blown up and breached containment outside of Dramione fandom is bewildering. Anyway, thanks for answering my question. Impressive spidey senses!” [laughs]
ELM: That’s right. Well, little did they know [laughs] what was gonna happen next. So right around the time that that came in, it was also right around the time that I was reaching out to Renegade, which was the beginning of February. And I had wanted to write about fanbinding for a long time. I’ve actually tried to pitch that piece, a version of a fanbinding piece to multiple editors at multiple publications with different angles.
FK: Yeah, and we had been talking about doing an episode, too, for a while.
ELM: Yeah, for a long time, right? It was always on our—once we started seeing these posts going around over the last few years, we wanted to talk to someone involved. And if you didn’t listen to the last episode, you should. That was about the Renegade Bindery, which is this, like, large collective that Flourish is now a part of.
FK: [laughs] Yes, I have fallen into it. I love a hobby, and as many people have said, fanbinding is, like, 10 hobbies in one, so it’s perfect for me.
ELM: Tiffo literally said in my article about this, it was 1,000 hobbies in a trench coat, not 10.
FK: Yes! I, I… This is all absolutely correct. Anyway, yes, so I’m into this now. I should note, for anybody who’s wondering, this is totally normal [laughs] for the way that Fansplaining episodes happen. If something isn’t, like, super timely, we often talk about it for a long while before we finally do it, so… [laughs]
ELM: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, especially on a topic like this, and there’s even some topics that are related to this that we’ve literally been like, “Oh, we should do a...” Like, “We should do zine history.” Like, “We should do a—” You know what I mean? [laughs]
FK: Yeah, yeah. You know, other, yeah, there’s—I could name, like, 10 other notable things that we’ve been like, “Oh, yeah, we should do that.” And like—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: It just hasn’t happened yet.
ELM: Right, so I reached out to Renegade because I had pitched it to my column editor at Atlas Obscura, beginning of February, and he was like, “Oh, yeah, sure.” Even though I had already mentioned it months ago as a potential idea. And when I reached out to Renegade, they were like, “Oh, yeah, it’s Binderary!” And I was like, “What fortuitous timing!”
OK, here’s what happened three days after that. In the beginning of February, an announcement went up on the Substack of SenLinYu, who is the author of Manacled, said containment-breaching fic. Right? This is, for context, if anyone doesn’t know, it’s a 370,000-word Dramione fic written, like, five years ago?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It is, like, a Voldemort-wins AU, right?
FK: Yup.
ELM: That’s the term we used to use, I feel like.
FK: That’s a term in their tags. And it’s very much in the tradition—at least the part that I’ve read so far, because I’ve decided that I’m reading this thing. The part I’ve read so far is—it is a competent Voldemort-wins AU that is exactly like a billion other ones that I have read. I’m sure that as I read more of it, there will be specific things that I understand that people particularly like about it. But right now, I’m like, “Yeah, that sure is a fanfic of this type.”
ELM: Which, side note, I will say is interesting, because I’ve seen commentary, perhaps from people who haven’t read the story, that it is particularly disconnected from Harry Potter. Whereas your initial impression is it’s within a very classic Harry Potter fic subgenre.
FK: I have read this subgenre and Snape/Hermione, I have read this subgenre in Harry/Draco, [laughs] I have read this subgenre in a billion different Harry Potter, you know—
ELM: As have I.
FK: Right! In a lot of different Harry Potter stuff. And I’ve read this subgenre, furthermore, in genfic, which has nothing to do with shipping, because it’s interesting to think about, like, what would the dystopia be like if Voldemort won?
ELM: Sure. Right, right, right. All right. So this is a very popular fic. It is the second-most popular story on the AO3. It has 7 million-plus hits, which is a lot for AO3. I think everyone knows that if you are a reader on AO3. So SenLinYu posted about this, made a big announcement saying basically, what’s been happening for the last few years is people have been binding copies of Manacled, and obviously, there’s a whole world of not-for-profit, like the folks at Renegade or plenty of other people who aren’t affiliated with Renegade at all, who are binding stories like Manacled just for their own use or for a friend or something like that, right? You know, maybe it’s just for personal use, maybe it is to show off the way you did it, right? But—
FK: Right. It feels a lot like—I used to print out fanfic sometimes, before the advent of e-readers, I would print out fanfic, because I didn’t want to be staring at a glowing screen. Totally—right? Like, this is just an elaborated version of that.
ELM: Sure. Right. I mean, I think there is something specific going on about the materiality elements of the—
FK: Oh, yeah.
ELM: —and bookmaking right now and like…
FK: There is, but I’m just talking about in terms of an ethical—you know? [laughs]
ELM: Sure, right, right, right. But also what was happening for years is that people were creating copies of Manacled for money. And there are a few different ways this has been happening over the last few years. One is via, like, kind of print-on-demand Etsy binding. People selling it on Etsy, right? Some of it’s not even hand-bound, but they’re still charging, like, $100, $150 for it, right?
FK: So they’re doing a print-on-demand service, and they sell the print-on-demand books on Etsy.
ELM: Yes.
FK: OK.
ELM: Also on a site like Mercari. There’s a few other sites where people are doing this, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: There’ve also historically, with this fic and with a few others, been people who are hand-binding, but selling, right? Or doing an expensive—you know, doing a commission for profit. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: From what I know of the backstory, and I briefly referenced this in piece—oh, by the way, we’ll put the link to this in the show notes. I wrote a big piece about this for WIRED, what I’m describing right now. So last year, there was a fan auction, you know, in the style of Fandom Trumps Hate, or whatever—
FK: Yeah yeah. Classic.
ELM: —to raise money for a particular person. I believe it was someone who was trying to escape Ukraine. And people were auctioning off bindings of a bunch of Dramione fics, including Manacled.
FK: Sure.
ELM: And the price just went astronomically high, like thousands of dollars, right? And it led a bunch of authors, including the author of Manacled to say, “Hang on, hang on. This is kind of out of control.” Like, you know, “I know this is for a good cause, but, like, I’m not really comfortable with how much money is changing hands over my work that has nothing to do with me.” Right?
FK: Right, right.
ELM: And so a bunch of authors officially changed their policies to say “personal binding only.” Right?
FK: Yeah, that’s interesting, because it’s like, that’s in a space where it’s like, well, ethically speaking… Yeah, I’m interested in that. [laughs] That’s a curious instance. And that’s kind of—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —interesting to think about. But that’s not where it stopped, right? [laughs]
ELM: Right, and so then a lot of people did back off, and they stopped charging for it, et cetera. But, like, I think the cat was kind of out of the—I almost said the cat was out of the barn. Cat was out of the bag, horse was out of the barn. [FK laughs] Cats can leave barns.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: The selling kept going. And we’ll talk about why that’s the case in a moment, but because it kept going at such a frantic pace, I know that SenLinYu in particular reached out to the OTW and to other lawyers to say, “Can I do anything about this?” You know, like, people—you can—also, only the author or a representative of the author can issue a DMCA—
FK: Right.
ELM: —takedown notice, right? So you own the intellectual property of your fanfiction, right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: You know, the name “Hermione Granger” is obviously owned by Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowling, right? But—
FK: Right.
ELM: —the prose that you put in the story belongs to you.
FK: Right.
ELM: So you are the only one who can issue a takedown notice for a seller like Etsy, and Etsy usually does comply, because they don’t want to be—just like they comply when Warner Bros. says—
FK: Right.
ELM: “I don’t want these people selling Harry Potter pillows.” You know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: You know, there’s a lot of other shadier sites that will totally ignore that, you know? Because they know you’re not going to sue, because it’s so expensive, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so what this eventually led to, basically finding that their hands were tied, was SenLinYu announced in the beginning of February, that they were going to be taking Manacled down because they were going to pull-to-publish it, because they had come up with a magical system that was not the Harry Potter world, which was obviously the only impediment to pulling-to-publish it before, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And they wrote, I think somewhat thoughtfully, in this announcement about how important fandom was to them and the community elements and all of that. It wasn’t...it really struck me, reading it and thinking back to all the discussion in Twilight with not just E. L. James, but the other folks who pulled-to-publish, and there was a real…I mean, I know you studied this at the time, too, but I feel like there was a real attitude from some of them, which was like, “I don’t see what’s wrong. I can make money off this.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “You guys loved it? There’s going to be another audience that loves it.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Other people were like, “We were all in this together.” You know? And they were like—
FK: Right. Whereas this one seems like SenLinYu is like, has not done this. Like, [laughs] obviously could have done this years ago, given how popular the fic is, and has chosen not to until this point.
ELM: Right, right. It really seemed that way. And so I was super struck by that. So when I read that, I was like, “Oh, I’m already writing this separate story about fanbinding, but I gotta write about this, because this is such a strange development in—” And it immediately made me think of the Twilight stuff, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And how short fandom memory seems to be when that was so important and, like, I never see that stuff talked about now, right? When it was astronomically important to the history of fandom.
FK: Yeah, astronomic—like, it’s impossible to overstate. It was, I mean, friendships were destroyed. [ELM laughs] Destroyed! You know?
ELM: Well. I’ve seen friendships destroyed for sillier reasons than that in the history of fandom.
FK: Yeah, but I’m just saying, this was, I mean, it was a situation where this was a huge drama happening in the fandom, and also in fandom in general. And enormous figures in fandom who had previously been friends with each other, were suddenly, like, mortal enemies because they’d taken different ethical stances on this question, and it just, I don’t know. It was really super drama-filled. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, and the most important effect of all this, obviously, was the fact that E. L. James said, “Yeah, this was Twilight fanfiction” out loud many, many times in the press, and all of a sudden that was—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That’s the reason that a huge portion people involved in fanfiction now even know what fanfiction is, right?
FK: For sure, because it was much smaller, because people—you had to have an in to understand what it was, and you just didn’t have that in otherwise.
ELM: OK, so you know, this was the beginning of February. I pitched that story, reporting the Renegade one, we had the episode, et cetera, et cetera. [sighs] So, as I was reporting, I was literally writing the story, it was two weekends ago now, and by the time this episode comes out, three weekends ago, rhings really started melting down. Because SenLinYu had already announced this weeks prior, but suddenly, a bunch of Dramione authors started posting one-by-one that they were going to be taking down their works from the AO3 because of the illegal Etsy and other sites selling of their work. Right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And so then I was like, “What is going on?” Right? You know, it’s just like, first there was one, and then there was, like, six, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And you know, I’ll say, like, I didn’t sit there and watch 1,000 TikToks on this because I don’t think that’s a very productive way to report a story. But I know there was a lot of discussion on TikTok about people talking about the situation, and, you know, I watched one, and it was like, “Well, none of my works are being sold, but here’s my stance.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And I was just like, “OK, I guess I could do these, too.” You know? [laughs]
FK: I’ve also seen people on TikTok talking about this as though it was, like, the end of fanfic, or as though the AO3 was going to shut down, which I find somewhat funny, because, OK, if anybody is under the mistaken impression that this is going to be the end of fanfic, or that the AO3 is going to shut down about this, allow me to disabuse you of this notion. [both laugh] I feel extremely confident that neither of these things are true. [laughs]
ELM: It’s fascinating to me, too, and not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but I have been reading the notes of this piece—because I posted it on Tumblr, and it’s got thousands and thousands of notes—and it’s been interesting to see a bunch of people in the notes have said, “Oh, this must be why so many of my favorite fics had been disappearing over the last few years.” And let me tell you: That is not why. Right? [FK laughs] Like, this is a very serious situation, and it is so astronomically shitty for the authors involved. But this is limited to a very small—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —a small group of writers in mostly one ship, let alone one fandom.
FK: Right, and there’s lots of—and by the way, there’s lots of bookbinding happening and other ships and fandoms. But we’re not seeing that the same kind of situation because the bookbinding is not happening in this Etsy, Mercari, you know, monetized way as much in those spaces, right? Like, I can guarantee you that if your favorite Reylo fics have been going down, the vast majority of them, that’s not why. [laughs]
ELM: Well, that brings us to the other thing that I tied this to in the article, which is the pull-to-publish wave that’s been happening right now.
FK: Exactly.
ELM: Which has specifically been happening in Reylo.
FK: Yup.
ELM: That being said, I think that if your favorite Reylo fic—well, maybe not your favorite Reylo fic. If a Reylo fic has gone down, it’s very likely that’s not because it’s being pulled-to-publish either. People are deleting their works left and right across all of fandom, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: We’ve been talking about this for years, and there’s so many reasons why this is happening.
FK: It’s true. And if it’s older works, if it’s not on AO3, there’s a lot of works that, you know, time degrades that stuff too. Right? Like, I mean, I don’t think most people are talking about this when they’re talking about it, but I do think it’s worth remembering that older stuff, if it’s not archived, goes away over time. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s a different thing. Obviously, that’s correct, but—
FK: It’s different. I’m just saying there’s lots of reasons that fandom, you know, archiving, like, you stop being able to read your favorite fic.
ELM: Right, but I think it has been jarring for people, as it has been for me to see—you know, like, I joined my current fandom in 2018. There are fics that I remember reading, and I’ll try so hard to find them again.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I can’t, and there’s—I don’t think that’s because I don’t know how to use search terms, right? You know?
FK: Right. [laughs]
ELM: It’ll be, like, some specific thing, and it’s like, “It has to have been tagged in this way because of what it is,” right? You know? I remember there was one omegaverse fic that I wanted to—oh, I think you read it, too. I was like, “I’d like to revisit that.” The one where they’re, like, in Erik’s icy... you know, he, like, lives in a cold, harsh place. Do you remember?
FK: Yes, I do. I do!
ELM: I was like, “I actually kind of want to revisit that.” Oh, because we were doing the forced marriage—the arranged marriage one. And I was like, “Oh, that was an arranged marriage one.” I could not for the life of me find it.
FK: Huh.
ELM: And I was like, this fic was too popular.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? For me to be—I’m doing every search term and looking at many, many pages of results.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Like, any possible thing and, like, I think it’s gone. For what reason? I have no idea. I don’t know who the original author was.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Erik’s icy land. [laughs] That’s all I remember. It was cold there. [FK laughs] Anyway, anyway. So all this was going down, and then just by pure coincidence, the day that we put out our Renegade episode was the day that the piece came out. Another piece came out at the same time, talking specifically about the Etsy sellers. And this was all kind of exploding at the moment. And so unfortunately, that had the extremely disappointing result of people sharing the WIRED piece or responding to our episode, collapsing all of it, you know, and one of the very first comments we got on our episode about Renegade was, “This is so wrong!” You know, [laughs] and it was like, “Oh my God, please click through. This is not the same thing.” Right?
FK: Yeah. [laughs] Massive, huge, huge, “please click through” problem. Huge!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: [laughs] I don’t think we’ve ever had an episode that had this much of a “please click through” problem.
ELM: And it was such a bummer. And I feel really bad to have put the spotlight on them in that way, because this was just a pure coincidence, and because they are [laughs] so aggressively gift economy.
FK: Which is funny, because that’s part of why we particularly wanted to do the episode about them. We were talking about how great it was to, like, be looking at a section of fandom, a little slice of fandom that was so gift-economy oriented. And so, you know, not into the pull-to-publish, make money, you know, get influence kind of thing.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And then...
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Whomp whomp.
ELM: Well, hopefully the people have been clicking through and reading and listening. We don’t have a paywall.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Also, I’ll just say, just a side note, paywalls are not that hard to get through. [FK laughs] That’s also some notes I’ve been seeing, and I’ve been very—
FK: You can give no specific advice.
ELM: Very patiently been sitting there being like, “I feel certain you could read this article very easily. But I will say no more.”
FK: Yes. I will, in respect to the fact that you’re on this podcast, I will not explain to people how to do it, but you know, [both laugh] DM me if you’re really having trouble. I’ll give you some advice. Yeah.
ELM: Anyway, you know, my basic thesis in the article was this is about context collapse, right? Like, from the research that I did talking to people, Manacled did not just breach containment, it has for some people, become utterly divorced from fanfiction. It’s not just people saying, “I haven’t read Harry Potter.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “Should I read this?” It is people who are receiving it as a recommendation as a romance novel. They are going to bookstores. I saw a tweet from a bookseller saying someone came in asking, they said, “Where do I buy it?” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And then the follow-up tweet was like, “Well, when I explained you can read it for free online,” they said, “Oh, I still want to buy a copy.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Because it’s not that they want a beautiful object. They just want to own the book, right? You know?
FK: Right, and Des from Renegade Bindery had a really good Tumblr post about this. Can I just read a little bit? Because I feel like she is saying this, but with very specific— [laughs] you know?
ELM: Yeah, so—
FK: Because she’s right in it.
ELM: So for context, Des was one of the three interviewees I had—we had Tiffo, like we did on the episode, Des, and Pip all talk to me for my article on Renegade. And then when I posted the WIRED article, Des wrote this very long response that I thought was super great and reblogged. So yeah, why don’t you read some of it?
FK: Right, so this is an excerpt from that. Des says, “I think Elizabeth is entirely accurate here in pointing at context collapse as the problem. There is, of course, two sides, the sellers and the buyers. The sellers are outright grifters. If they’re on Etsy, 90% of the time, they’re selling the same type of cheap binding you get from a print-on-demand company worth about $20 marked up to $100 or $200, the rip off of the century. If they’re on Mercari, it’s common to see people reselling books at a higher cost that they paid only materials and shipping for, back when authors were allowing at-cost bindings, which fuck that. Any bound fic in my library isn’t leaving my grubby little paws unless gifted or in my will.” So, this is not in the thing, but just in context, right? We were talking about this earlier, that at one time, authors were fine if people commissioned the bound book of their work.
ELM: Right.
FK: And this sort of changed culturally. All right, back to what Des was saying. “I really don’t think that this kind of grift would work as well if the potential buyers were more steeped in fandom culture. While I’m not in Dramione myself, the fandom is so huge, you can’t avoid seeing it. I’ve seen Manacled get recommended right alongside traditionally published romantasy in romance book clubs, sent to big BookTokers and both heard and seen people asking in comments, ‘Where can I get this book?’ because the context is not there. They don’t know what fanfic is, or even what that means, or any of the community associations with how fanfic is created. These Dramione fics are many people’s first encounter with fanfic, and if not properly explained, many of them will just think that this is a book they have to buy. The casual readers are the target of this grift. They go and type ‘Manacled book’ into Google to find where to get it and receive a bunch of Etsy listings. And there are even sellers of these popular Dramione fic titles as e-books, which is absolutely ridiculous and shows for a fact that people are just Googling titles to find something that they were told was a great book.
“Looking at the trends of what’s been targeted for profiting, I really do think this is currently centered in the Harry Potter fandom, especially the het fics. There’s very few fics that fit the bill to be exploited in this way. So while they’re very high-profile, I don’t think that most non-Harry Potter fan authors should be concerned. But I do think there’s a lesson to be learned from this, because it could happen to other fandoms. We have to make sure it doesn’t. I think this has shown us we have to be careful how we’re introducing fanfiction stories to those outside your normal community. It’s great to get validation from mainstream culture. But it’s more important to ensure we’re connecting people we’re sharing with into the fandom context web, rather than cutting fic out and presenting it to them without context. This is probably especially important on algorithm-driven apps like TikTok, where you don’t know who will be shown your videos.”
So I thought that was really insightful, particularly thinking about the way that the algorithm brings fan culture stuff into people’s context that they would never, you know? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it goes—I loved everything that Des wrote. I thought it was so great. You know, and it kind of goes hand-in-hand with…one thing that I referenced in the article is, so you’re not on Tumblr anymore. I mean, I’m certain these sentiments exist elsewhere, but it’s literally every day on Tumblr, I see a new version of this post, which is basically like, “Fandom doesn’t engage anymore, fandom doesn’t comment anymore.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it’s all connected, right? Because I do think there’s a huge portion—and I say this with a super big grain of salt, obviously, you know, I was a lurker for a very long time, [FK laughs] it’s not like commenting in 2001. You know, but that being said, I wasn’t, you know, making a TikTok about the story I read to boost my reaction to it, right? To performatively show how much I loved it without engaging with the author directly. Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: I think that that’s something that’s really shifted, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: The idea that you can—and maybe I’m old-man-yelling-at-clouding, and maybe that’s not different from writing a rec list or whatever. But it just feels like the ties are so weak, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: And the connections are so distant. And, you know, you can see how easy it is, especially if people are deleting that context, right? Like, I think that some people are encountering this in the context-free way. But I think there are other people who are kind of actively collapsing the context, right? And you know—and I think that if you were to frame it in a different way, you could say, “Isn’t that good, though? You’re removing the stigma, like, you know, there’s no difference between oh, this traditionally published romance and this fic, et cetera, et cetera.” But I think that we’re seeing a very detrimental effect that happens when you remove fanfiction—I mean, I interviewed Stacey Lantagne, who is a copyright expert, especially around fanfiction, for the article. And she had a really good quote about, like, “I think this is just what happens when fanfiction ceases to be fanfiction.”
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? You know? And it’s just like, unfortunately—and she compared it to, like, if you have a picture of yourself that becomes a viral meme, you know? “White guy blinking,” that’s gone, right? You’re the lady with the...what do you call it? The lady with the doing the math, right? I mean, I could name—listen to me name 50 different meme people. [FK laughs] Right? But, like, and they’ve talked about this. There have been articles with some of these people, and they’ve been like, “Yeah, it’s very weird.” Right? Like, “This is gone from me now. Like, my face doesn’t belong to me anymore.”
FK: Yeah, interestingly, this is making me—and this is not exactly the same thing by any means, but this is making me think about something that’s been happening in the quilting community recently, which is that—so if you know—
ELM: Viral quilts!
FK: Well, OK, right, though. So if you know anything about quilting, if you, like, have ever gone to a museum and learned about quilting—
ELM: I haven’t.
FK: —you have heard—which you probably haven’t. [ELM laughs] OK, that’s fine. But somebody who listens to this will have—you know about the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective, which was a group of African American quilters in—
ELM: I know about this because I got it wrong in my trivia league before I invited you, and you were like, “Everyone knows that!” And I was like, [FK laughs], “Flourish, I don’t think they do, I think you just know a lot about quilting.” [laughs]
FK: Well, OK, but actually, but this is relevant, OK? Because this is—
ELM: Yeah, yeah. It’s famous though, right? Enough that it was a trivia question.
FK: It’s famous enough that it was a trivia question. And it was, you know, basically this case of a folk-art situation done by people who are still alive, like, not—this is not, like, ancient quilts. I mean, some of them are, but there are still people working in this collective today. And it’s in museums, people are recognizing their work is really important, and this really important American folk art. And they have since become famous enough that they’ve had lots of opportunities to basically, like, make money. And so [laughs] there’s a Gee’s Bend collaboration with I think Target.
ELM: Wow.
FK: And the quilts that are produced there are, I assume that they’re based on Gee’s Bend quilts that existed and were handmade, but they’re doing this thing where they, like, print a whole sheet of cloth with, like, the different colors, so it looks like a patchwork and then just sew over them. And they’re made in India, and they’re definitely—the people who are making them are not paid enough for what they’re doing.
ELM: Sure.
FK: And they’re also not being constructed in a way that Gee’s Bend’s quilts are actually constructed, right? But the money is going to what has previously been a pretty impoverished community. I mean, maybe it’s, like, I don’t know what the structure of the money is, so maybe they still are, but, you know, so it’s like, that’s a good thing on the one hand, but it’s also really hitting a lot of people in the quilting world who are like, “Wait, are people going to think that these are quilts the way that the Gee’s Bend quilts are quilts? [ELM laughs] The way the quilts I make are quilts?” You know, “How does this function when they’re taken out of that context of this handmaking?” Like, it is a community.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And there’s lots of different parts of it, and monetization obviously functions really differently in the quilting community than it does in fandom. But it’s still sort of taking this, like, thing and putting it in a totally different commercial context. And really kind of destabilizing for a lot of people, you know?
ELM: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, yeah, I don’t think it’s a direct one-to-one comparison. Obviously, there’s a lot of different factors involved, but yeah, yeah.
FK: No no no, but just saying that, like, there’s the tension between sort of the handmade, made for a community, in community, and then, OK, take that out of its context and make it, like, appreciated by academics and artists, [laughs] and so forth, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And culturally appreciated, and then take that out of its context and put it in the world of, like, highly commercialized stuff.
ELM: Right.
FK: Like, this is something that’s happening in other small crafting and art-making communities—
ELM: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
FK: —that exist.
ELM: Sure. Right. Yeah. And I think that, like, [sighs] you know, it is interesting, I feel like, just anyone faulting them for, you know, [laughs] cashing out, you know? Because—
FK: There are, [laughs] I can tell you, in the—you know.
ELM: Sure, right.
FK: In the debate, some people are like, “I can’t believe that you would do this.” And, you know…
ELM: Right. Well, it’s interesting, because I feel like overwhelmingly, I’ve only seen positivity about SenLinYu—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —getting money for this is. You know, it’s a little bit of a weird—there’s a bit of a contradiction in the entire thing there, to be like, “I love the community, I care so much about it, and I’m pulling-to-publish, see ya!” You know? [FK laughs] It’s like, “Godspeed.” Right? But also...
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t fault them, obviously. But it is a little bit—there is a little bit of a tension there… [FK laughs] But most of these other authors are not getting substantial book deals.
FK: Right.
ELM: They’re just deleting their works from the internet.
FK: Right, they’re just saying, “I’m out.”
ELM: Right.
FK: Which I have to say, I wonder how effective this is going to be, because the typesets of these books are still out there. Having had it be out there, you can’t pull it back in. People have a text file of it. People can typeset it. And I think that all they’re going to be doing by pulling their work is [laughs] making the e-book and physical copies the only way for people to get that thing.
ELM: Right, but, you know, I’m not inside the heads of these folks. But, like, a lot of the sentiments around them were not about trying to stop it. It was like, “I’m done.” Like, you know—
FK: Fair.
ELM: “I’m very angry about what’s happened.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “And this has now been ruined for me. And you can’t—now no one can—you know, they’ve ruined it for everyone. If you like my stories, too bad.” You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: That’s very—I mean, I’m putting words in their mouths right now.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But there’s definitely an element of all these statements that was just like, “I’m incredibly disappointed, and—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “—you know, this has, they left me with no choice.” But it’s not, like, an effective—yeah, it’s, from a capitalism perspective, that’s not going to be effective.
FK: Well, from capitalism perspective, but also from a, like, actually functioning to, like, make nobody read your fic, I don’t think [laughs] that’s gonna work either, right? Like, it’s not like you’re actually able to take it away. You’re only able to make it so that you don’t get any of the benefit. Anyway, whatever. I don’t want to critique this, because I think that if someone’s emotional reaction is that they want nothing to do with this and so they want to erase it from their life and take it down—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: That’s fine. I don’t mean to say that that’s something they aren’t allowed to do or shouldn’t do.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I just think that it’s not the choice I would make.
ELM: No, I mean, but I don’t know what I would do in this situation. It’s really hard to imagine, [laughs] you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I absolutely could see myself feeling so betrayed and bitter about the entire thing, you know? And being like, ugh. You know? “You’ve ruined it for me.” You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Because it’s like, I don’t know, in some of the commentary I’ve seen, in general and in reaction to my piece and stuff, I’ve seen some very black-and white-framings, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You’ve got the ethos of folks like Renegade, and not just Renegade. I don’t want to say it’s Renegade versus everyone else or something, right? Lots of people are binding for themselves, right? Versus the grifters, you know?
FK: [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: And there’s only two genders, you know? And one of them is grifter. That erases a huge spectrum of behaviors that have been happening in fandom in recent years, right? I mean, Des brings up in that thing, right? This idea of, like, maybe people are binding it for personal use, but wanting to get a viral post about it and sharing it with people on BookTok so it can spread.
FK: Yeah, I think that there a bunch of grey areas in here. And there’s also issues of scale, right? And intention and so forth in this, and it’s kind of sticky, because I can imagine situations in which, I don’t know, it just, it seems to me like there’s probably a lot of people who are in some way touching this, who are not actively attempting to be a grifter, but are doing grifty things, [laughs] you know? I don’t know.
ELM: Sure.
FK: It just seems to me like it’s an easy space that you could get pulled into, not at scale, but that then you’re like, “OK, but are we throwing out everybody who’s ever touched, [laughs] you know, one of these copies?” I don’t know, that’s weird.
ELM: No, I don’t think anyone should be thrown out. I just think that—
FK: OK, but people on Tumblr are definitely [laughs] going on that level, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Like, I’ve seen this commentary where people are like, “Put them all in the dungeon!” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I think that’s what’s bothering me about some of the black-and-white commentary is the kind of idea of like, “These people aren’t fans.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And it’s like, I do think some of these, like, print-on-demand-ish sellers are not fans at all.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But I do think there’s a lot of people who think of themselves as fans, who are sitting in this middle space.
FK: I mean, when I think about collectors, collecting fandom, there are tons of people who we would call fans who are doing very capitalist, [laughs] very money-making stuff in that, right?
ELM: [overlapping] Oh, sure, I’m not saying that—yeah, right. Right. But—
FK: So I think that there have to be people who feel themselves to be fans who are doing this and who are seeing it just as another collectible that they can you know, arbitrage on.
ELM: Right. “Oh, I love Dramione, I’m gonna collect all my favorite Dramione works.” Right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “And maybe I’ll resell them and make more money.”
FK: Right. “This one is really cool, and I know lots of other people love it, and I’ve got the money—”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “—to get this in multiple copies, and then someday I’ll have them and I’ll sell them to people—”
ELM: Yes.
FK: “—and that’ll be great. I’m doing a service to the fandom actually.” You know?
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah. So I think that’s what brings it all back to this kind of idea of like, OK, there was never, like, oh, capital-F Fandom and everyone agreed on this, right? You know? It was really funny, at some point, someone did say in the notes like, “Oh, I disagree with the author of this piece about the idea that anyone was ever opposed to pull-to-publish.” And that was like—
FK: WHAT? [laughs]
ELM: My friend, I am sorry.
FK: Allow me to bring some facts into your life. [laughs]
ELM: A) I was there. B) I have primary sources documented here, like, of other people who were there. I don’t understand this in any way. But that’s fine.
FK: Which is not hard to find, either. But anyway.
ELM: But I think that was an interesting comment in the sense of like, “Oh, this person’s experience was quite different. They never encountered the extreme, [laughs] extreme negativity around pulling-to-publish in the 2000s [FK laughs] and earlier.” You know? And certainly, I think that, you know, and the further tags were, like, you know, it’s like, good for them. Like, sure, some people have had that stance in the past, right? But I would not say that was the majority of people.
FK: Right. But I think that this points to how much language and expectations in fandom overall have changed over time. Something that, I mean, you said it, but I know that—I think that you were quoting somebody else, was talking about how Wattpad really changed the vibe and even the terminology around a lot of this stuff, right?
ELM: Yes.
FK: That there’s an entire generation of people who encountered fanfic first on Wattpad, like, maybe never even heard the term “fanfic” while they were on Wattpad. Everything’s called a “book,” and baked into Wattpad is the idea that you may pull-to-publish, that things are maybe going to be, like, related to this capitalist context of things, which, you know, I mean, whatever. As people know, I’ve put fics on Wattpad. I don’t, you know, I have mixed feelings about this. But I do think that you are right, that this has shifted people’s understanding of, like, almost the Overton window of what’s normal, [laughs] you know?
ELM: Right, right. Or, you know, we’ve seen since Fifty Shades massive numbers of people coming into fandom because they learned about it from that—
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: —or they learned about it from, I don’t know, Vulture saying, “Hey, did you know there’s fanfiction about that Finn and that Poe—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “—in the new Star Wars movie?” Right? You know? Or there’s so many people we encounter who say, “Oh, I learned about it from some…” you know, the bleed from fic into romance and the tropes and all that stuff is leading some romance people back into fic right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And to me, the way that I think about fic, I would never call it a book, first of all, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: It’s interesting, the idea. I mean, honestly, something like Manacled is, you know, ostensibly far too long for a traditionally published book, right? So that’s always been one of the things about fic is, like, oh, the forms are too different. It’s the wrong length, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But they’ll figure that one out.
FK: And by the way, it’s long enough that it’s kind of challenging to bind. I mean, it’s not impossible, obviously. But as I’ve been, like, learning fanbinding—
ELM: It’s a big guy.
FK: I’m like, “It’s a big guy!” You know? [both laugh] Like, there’s reasons why traditional publishing doesn’t usually have things be this long.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There’s always a conversation on the Renegade server about, like, “Uh, so this is really long. How do I split it into two volumes and decide where to split it [laughs] and, like, what do I do?” You know?
ELM: That’s funny. It’s true. Yeah. I mean, like, a lot of the structures of traditional publishing are not, like, arbitrary. It’s not that someone was like, “Oh, we’re never gonna have novellas because we hate them.” It’s like, because economically—
FK: Right.
ELM: —a novella doesn’t make super sense, right? You know?
FK: Right. Right.
ELM: Will people pay the same amount for a one-shot, essentially, that they would pay for a full novel? Right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Probably not, because people don’t even want to pay $5 for a frickin’ novel.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, so I would never think of it as a book. And it’s so funny to me about the Wattpad thing. And also just the packaging, the publishing way of it, right? Like, it’s interesting to me, because I don’t want to—I think that, you know, thinking about Tiffo talking on the last episode, and in the article, they talked about this, too, in a really powerful way, the article I wrote on Renegade, the idea of, “I wanted to learn to fanbind because I wanted to give my friends a real physical thing to hold in their hands,” right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And I love that, and when Tiffo talks about it, I find it quite moving. But when I think about the way I think about fanfiction, and maybe you, too, and maybe this is just us in our Media Studies heads, I’m like, “Fanfiction is super neat, because it’s like, unusual electronic forms!” You know? [FK laughs] Like, “Look at the kinkmeme. Look at the story being written in the comments!” You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “Oh, look at the stories being written on Tumblr posts.” It’s not just like, “I wrote a novel, and I’m gonna package it and sell it to you the way I would any other novel,” right?
FK: Right, and yet at the same time, there is something so satisfying. Like, I once made a text adventure, and one of the things that people who make text adventures, like the little, you know, the old-fashioned video games do, is they make—it’s actually a lot like fanbinding. They make all of the sort of packaging—in fact, I won an award for best packaging.
ELM: Oh my God! [laughs]
FK: You know, which maybe should have clued me in to the fact that I would be really into fanbinding [ELM laughs] when I found it. But I made all the packaging for it. Obviously, this was a digital download file that—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —you know, people were just—and it was fanfic, by the way, also. But making the packaging and being able to hold the packaging and be like, “Yeah, this looks like an InfoComm game.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “This feels to me like a real game because I did make a real game!” You know? That felt special, and that’s—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: To me, it’s cool. But at the same time, it isn’t like an InfoComm game, because I made this in the context of all these other people who I was working with. [laughs]
ELM: No, and also it’s such an important digital form right?
FK: Right!
ELM: Like, the text-based game, that is one of these, like, foundational digital forms right?
FK: And now that community is a lot like the fanfic community in a lot of ways. They make their own—because it’s not financially—you can’t sell it, no one’s succeeding, [laughs] you know, in making these kinds of parser-based games. It’s all purely for the love, and you know, very gift economy and all of this, so...
ELM: Flourish, you’re really screwing yourself over by not watching Halt and Catch Fire, where the character who looks like you makes these games [FK laughs] in 1985.
FK: Yeah. Yeah, and is probably based on people that I—
ELM: Almost definitely.
FK: —have met or know of. [laughs]
ELM: Yes, without a doubt.
FK: I will someday watch Halt and Catch Fire.
ELM: God…
FK: Only the problem is that I will probably do it with Nick and then you’ll have to take on Nick’s—
ELM: No!
FK: —comments about Halt and Catch Fire. [laughs] Anyway.
ELM: Don’t do it.
FK: Sorry, this is unfortunately in that category of things that if I watch, I have to share with the person in my life who is the most interested in this era. [laughs]
ELM: All right.
FK: Anyhow!
ELM: All right. I mean, I don’t deny the value of the materiality, but it is interesting to me to think about. And also to think affectively about how I think about fanfiction, you know, as something... I mean, I don’t want to sound too cheesy and wax nostalgic about the glowing screen in the dark or whatever, but that is how I think about fanfiction, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? And so, like, obviously, yeah, if you bind a fic for me that I wrote or if someone else does, and I receive it, I will weep. I will be just delighted to have that object. But I actually don’t know if I could even get the kind of affective relationship that I do out of reading fic that I really love, and writing fic, frankly—
FK: Right.
ELM: —if there wasn’t a computer or a phone involved. To me, it is something you curl up with in the dark, and I don’t know. You know, I’ve read books digitally that are not fanfiction, and I don’t get that feeling, even if I think they’re good books.
FK: Yeah, I hear you. Every once in a while, I have pulled up a fanfic on a truly old computer.
ELM: Aw… [laughs]
FK: That’s from the era of when I was doing it, right? And if you turn off those lights, and you’re, like, sitting in an office chair, because that’s what you were sitting in, in this era—
ELM: You gotta be in the office chair, yeah. [laughs]
FK: Right? And it’s a text file.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? And you’re like—and it’s slightly badly formatted, [ELM laughs] and the screen is the only thing that you’re really paying attention to because you’re in the darkness of your head. There’s an entire, like, Proust-ian feeling of this. [laughs]
ELM: It’s so funny to think about too. I mean, this is very generational. I’m sure people who are younger than us are like, “This is not relatable in any way. I read it on my phone, always.”
FK: Oh, no doubt this is very generational. But trust me, children, [ELM laughs] someday, in, like, 20 years, you will be thinking about your phone this way. You will be remembering—
ELM: When you’re strapped into your AppleVision 9.0 or whatever.
FK: Exactly! [laughs] You will. You’ll be like, “Remember when we had a phone and you were—”
ELM: And just cuddled up.
FK: “—cuddled up in bed underneath the covers with a little light, and it was plugged in?”
ELM: No, but it’s also, like, you know, there’s something I think that even for people who are older than us maybe wouldn’t have gotten the same experience. Something about being an adolescent, and I don’t know. Like, being in the kitchen.
FK: Yeah. [laughs]
ELM: I know I’m not the only one who had to be at the computer in the kitchen, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it’s, like, midnight, and here I am in our frickin’ kitchen having this weird, like, revelatory experience.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know what I mean? So this is not what I thought we were going to talk about in this episode, I’m sorry. I’m just feeling some feelings right now. [laughs]
FK: No, but this is interesting to me, because I think that this brings us to something that is interesting, which is that we’re talking about this very generational, very, like, contextual thing. And you actually sent to me some interesting tags that were talking about how this clash of expectations is part of the problem to them. And this person was saying that—
ELM: I like that you’re doing all the reading, and I’m not complaining. I literally haven’t looked at the doc once.
FK: No, that’s fine, because you are talking with great expertise about the topic. And I don’t have all that expertise.
ELM: You have lots of expertise here.
FK: I’m just, like, commenting on the stuff that you sent me.
ELM: OK. All right. So just for context, I flagged this one because a bunch of people have been like, “Yes, your tags, @xcziel.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so I was like, and I read them, and I was like, “These are interesting tags.” There were a lot of interesting tags on the post. Thank you Tumblr.com for forcing me to look at all of them. There’s no way to turn that off.
FK: I am not going to read the hashtags every time there’s a new tag.
ELM: That’s fine, that’s fine.
FK: So you guys can just imagine that this is in tag format, OK? In as much as that is a format.
“ #we really need a differentiation in the western world between fanfiction written and published on the internet #and actual ‘webnovels’ as they’re labeled elsewhere #because the people who are selling paid ‘fanfic’ or y/n type scenarios are essentially just webnovel authors #and ao3 is being dragged in as a substitute for a worldwide accessible publishing platform a la jjwxc #a ‘western’ version of a similar online-only publishing platform is what wattpad is trying to be i think #and is what a lot of these people actually want: pay by chapter (for authors) pay for customization (for readers) #the west just doesn’t have the streamlined infrastructure that lets authors publish and earn simply and easily #in one or two large communities the way say the chinese media does #and that circumvents oversight and potential censorship but leaves readers and ‘content creators’ floundering #because there’s not an ‘accepted’ and normalized path from online author to the hallways of trad print publishing #so people are using every available avenue and niche and seeing what will work but the byproduct is confusion #and any time there is confusion or grey areas scam artists will swoop in and adapt like cuckoos to a new nest #i think if a single big monetized platform arises with the review community type function of goodreads #then ao3 and the gift economy side of fandom will be freed from a lot of these demands #if people want an online place where they can earn or pay for writing but don’t get that ao3 and fandom is not that space #because it’s what they have access to and there’s no widely accessible obvious alternative with built-in audience #(goodreads and wattpad should just merge and create this and then maybe those of us just out for fanfic could rest)” [both laugh]
ELM: OK, first of all, that was such a beautiful example of you know, they say the Tumblr conversational tags, you read that like it was an actual—like it wasn’t tags. Like if you had not told me that—
FK: Well, because if there had not been hashtags in there, like, it would not have been—[laughs]
ELM: Just allow me to say something nice about Tumblr right now, even after they frickin’ sold our data to Sam Altman or whatever. [FK laughs] That’s another topic I want to talk about. Not right now.
I thought this was a very, very interesting comment. You know, my immediate, like, little red flag is I do—and we saw other commentary about this, too. You know, the idea of, “Oh, a lot of these fics getting pulled-to-publish are so disconnected from the source material, they’re basically original novels already, they’re so out of character.” The idea that y/n fic is inherently, you know, belongs somewhere else, that kind of thing. And I get a little wary about that stuff, because I think there’s a lot of people writing fic who think that they are perfectly in-character, and you know, there’s—
FK: Well, right.
ELM: There’s no agreed-upon thing there, right? I’ve seen people say this about these works, and I’m not sure that that’s based on them actually reading them, but making an assumption that if you could understand this without being in Harry Potter fandom—
FK: [overlapping] Right. Right.
ELM: —then it must be out of character and not really connected to the source. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. This isn’t what they’re saying. But it is something that I just want to flag.
FK: Right. Well, and I think it’s particularly relevant, because in the case of Manacled, which is only one of the many stories that this—that’s only one of the many pieces of what this person is talking about in their tag. But in the case of Manacled, SenLinYu clearly was not wanting to be part of a webnovel context, right? [laughs]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: SenLinYu wanted to be a fanfic writer, and to do this, and then the people who came to their work brought with them some of those desires, maybe, for you know, being able to just buy a story, and being able to, like, have it that way, right? So I think that it is important to note that it’s not just that, like, there are authors who want to monetize their, you know, writing online in the way that that is much easier to do in China. It’s also that there are people who want to consume writing this way, and they are coming to the AO3, or maybe I should say, coming to fanfic seeking that, even when the authors are like, “This is not—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: “I am not part of this.” [laughs] You know? Like, “Do not include me in your conversation here.” Right?
ELM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the flip side, though, is we’ve encountered [laughs] plenty of people who write in fandoms that are very popular at the moment so they can get a lot of views.
FK: Yep.
ELM: They write tropes that they know are hot.
FK: Yep.
ELM: Those people would be extremely well-served by a webnovel platform. Right?
FK: Definitely.
ELM: You know, because if your main goal is to write something that gets a lot of readers—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? And if a lot of people who are like, you know, “I just want to read fake dating stories.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “I don’t know who these two guys are, I just want to read a fake dating story.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? Put them all in a space together, you know?
FK: Right.
ELM: Those are—that’s actually, yeah, that’s a complete perfect match, right?
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: “I want lots of people to read my fake dating story, and—” You know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: I don’t think Wattpad or Goodreads is going to do it here. One is owned by Amazon, one is owned by—is it Naver, right? Bought Wattpad? Right? It’s, like, one of the giant Korean—
FK: Yeah, one of the big—yeah.
ELM: I think it was Naver, and I don’t think that that’s in the cards.
FK: No.
ELM: But it is interesting. It’s interesting, too, that I think this is happening on the AO3, and it’s developed in a place that’s, like, totally free, and has a super-free ethos, right? There have certainly been attempts to create spaces like this in the Anglo…sphere.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But they’re not coming at it with that totally free ethos, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And so they’re putting weird structures on it, or weird assumptions of how they’re gonna make money, people running these websites.
FK: Right.
ELM: That don’t actually align with what readers want. You know, “If we just get the best tentacle porn out there, we’re gonna be able to get them to pay by chapter!” Right? You know? And it’s like, it’s so top-down that you can see why they don’t take off.
FK: Right, and there’s also a question—I do have a question here, which is, people are not wanting to pay, again, in the Manacled case, and I think the case also of other fics that are having this, like All the Young Dudes, et cetera, we’re not seeing people demanding to pay by chapter in that context. We’re seeing people who say, “I’ve heard about this as a book. Can’t I just buy it for my Kindle?”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And we already have that, right? That revolution already happened in romance publishing—
ELM: Yeah, with e-books.
FK: —where people can—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —produce e-books that way. I’m not positive that the pay-by-chapter thing is really what we’re seeing the demand for here, although certainly not saying that it couldn’t work, [laughs] you know?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: I just don’t know whether, like, Western consumers already know about this in general.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I don’t think that if you asked the average person, they’d be like, “Yeah, I wanna pay for customization,” or “I wanna pay by chapter,” because I don’t think that they know that there is a paradigm in which they could do that.
ELM: Right. But you could imagine a world where there was, like, a version of this, on an English-language site, and anyone could publish—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —and if it got popular, you could hit a button and say, “I want a beautiful copy of this.”
FK: Right.
ELM: And then the site takes a cut, and then the author gets a cut—
FK: Yup.
ELM: —and the person gets an object that they then get to go on BookTok and say, “Have you guys read this beautiful book?” You know?
FK: Right. Totally.
ELM: Yeah. I mean, it is true. I think that the people who have been making websites trying to tap into this market have often misunderstood readers over the last 15 years, and we’ve seen, yeah, exactly like you’re saying with romance publishing, that’s coming from the authors, right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: And they’re using a very imperfect system of the Kindle publishing world, right? You know? They have so many complaints about—
FK: [laughing] Yes.
ELM: —Amazon.
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: But that is the only bed in which they are allowed to lie, realistically, right? You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: In the hero of my billionaire romance, Jeff Bezos… [FK laughs] Did we ever do that one on the podcast?
FK: I don’t know that we did, but I still hold forth that I would pick Bill Gates.
ELM: The question was, if you had to be the protagonist in a billionaire romance, and the billionaire was, I believe the four choices were Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates.
FK: Yes, and to me, the answer is obviously Gates, because he is the only one of them who I could envision actually having a conversation with and not wanting to murder by the end of the conversation.
ELM: See, you’re just not thinking genre enough, and this is why I picked Bezos, because I want the most classic billionaire. Like, he is bald and efficient. He has got the world on a string.
FK: You’re right, you’re right. I am thinking of this as fuck-marry-kill.
ELM: [laughing] Yeah.
FK: And you’re thinking of this as—
ELM: [laughing] From a story perspective.
FK: —the actual genre, from a story perspective. I mean, Elon Musk would also be a good choice from a story perspective, to be honest.
ELM: No, he’s such a buffoon! I’m sorry, he’s—
FK: Oh, but in the story, they’re all buffoons.
ELM: No! No, I’m sorry. Have you ever—
FK: How many billionaire romances have you read? [both laugh] They’re all actually idiots.
ELM: No, but are they ever dumb stoners? That’s not romantic.
FK: Well, OK, maybe not in the billionaire romance, but they are definitely sometimes dumb stoners in the “Regency romance where somebody has more money than God” context.
ELM: No, he’s too much of an immature buffoon, I think, to ever—you wouldn’t want to tame him.
FK: That’s…that’s true.
ELM: [laughing] OK.
FK: But it could be a hate-to—you know—
ELM: No.
FK: The thing is, I think the thing with that is he would have to redeem himself in some way by the end, and I’m not sure how you get there.
ELM: God, God. All right, all right. To be clear, also, this is interesting that we’re revisiting this—I brought it up—because the question initially came up years ago, and it is interesting to see how truly stupid he seems now.
FK: It’s true. My opinion has not changed, and neither has yours, I don’t think.
ELM: Oh, no. But my opinion of Elon Musk, I didn’t like him before, but now—
FK: Now it’s cratered.
ELM: Now it’s like…oh, that’s actually what was going on the whole time. This dumbass? You know?
FK: Zuckerberg also seems much worse than he ever did.
ELM: No, he always seemed worse to me. He was so embarrassing.
FK: He was always embarrassing, but he has not redeemed himself in any way.
ELM: The problem with Zuckerberg is he’s so adjacent to the world, he literally is adjacent, when you’re, like, two degrees of separation away from each other.
FK: That’s correct. That is correct.
ELM: By fancy Massachusetts colleges and being almost the same age, so… [laughs]
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. I mean, I feel the same way about him, that it’s like, we’re the same age, like, in general, like, you know, this is all—no, he’s a guy that you can’t. OK, but—
ELM: All right, getting into bed with billionaires, literally and figuratively, aside.
FK: Yeah, OK. All that aside, all right. There’s one more thing, which, we got one more anonymous email, which I thought was making a really good point—
ELM: Oh—
FK: —so I want to read it and talk about it.
ELM: Yeah, we should say, we got a bunch of emails of folks bringing up this situation to us, so we really appreciate everyone who wrote in.
FK: Right, this is not the only one. This is just the one that I particularly wanted to raise. [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, this is the one that had a lot of questions.
FK: OK, this is from someone anonymous.
“In my corner of fandom, some fic authors have made their fics available as physical copies through print-on-demand, self-publishing presses. This allows readers who want the physical books to purchase a copy at around the same price as a commercially available hardcover book. However, due to the scandal regarding unauthorized selling of fanbound books, some authors have recently removed any links to the physical books from their social media, and have distanced themselves from the practice to avoid being lumped together in the backlash.
“I feel that this is very different from the aforementioned scandal, because the authors themselves are putting the books up, and generally have permission for any artwork on the cover or inside the book. The authors are also basically making no profit off the books. Most charge only 1 cent more than the cost of printing, which is the minimum allowed by the platform, and are in fact putting in extra work in typesetting and uploading their fics.
“Though I have seen arguments against this practice regarding the legality, issues of copyright/trademark, and the general panic that comes with any whiff of potential profit for fanfic writers, I am not personally against it, because it allows readers who really like the fics to more easily purchase a nicely bound copy, without having to get into the fascinating but often time-consuming and sometimes expensive hobby of book binding themselves. Also, I don’t think it really hurts or exploits anyone, as long as there is permission from all the involved creators. I see it as most analogous to fanartists who make merch of their fanart and sell it to other fans.
“On the other hand, I do see how this practice is a lot less personal than fanbinding, and probably more questionable with regard to copyright, as I have seen authors have their books taken down by the publisher before. But fandom has always existed in a kind of legal grey area, especially when involving tangible, physical things like merch and fan books.
“I am interested in where you think this falls in the fandom gift economy, and what the differences and similarities are compared to fanbinding. I am also interested in what you think of things like zines, which are increasingly professional these days and often involve professional printing as well. As fandom grows more mainstream, and as a lot of previously professional services grow available to the public, how do you see the balance shifting between making things like physically bound fics more accessible and not drawing too much attention and potential legal consequences to fandom?”
ELM: These are some great questions. Thank you very much, Anonymous.
FK: Yeah! And I have so many thoughts. [laughs]
ELM: OK, let’s start by just running through the law as we know it. So as I said, I talked to Stacey Lantagne, who is a copyright law professor with a focus on fanfiction, for the article. I’m gonna say it one more time: I think at this point, if you’ve listened to Fansplaining, you know what fair use means, but I’m gonna describe it one more time.
FK: There are people who are dropping in from—who have just heard about this from our Renegade Bindery episode, so…
ELM: Well, yeah, all right, sure, sure.
FK: Some of them maybe don’t.
ELM: All right, so… Well, they probably know what fair use is, too. So basically under U.S. copyright law, you know, you are the rights holder, you create a character, Joe Schmoe. I then use Joe Schmoe and his whole world in something that I create. I am technically infringing your copyright, because I’ve taken your character Joe Schmoe and put him into my story, but I, for whatever reason, whether it is because I am not charging any money for my work, maybe I’m doing it in an educational capacity—it’s not for whatever reason, there are literally a set of reasons, right? There’s a bunch of exceptions that fall under the term “fair use,” right? And one of them is, you know, transformative, where the Organization for Transformative Works gets its name from, right? Where it’s like, “I have done enough with Joe Schmoe and his world to make it substantially different enough—”
FK: Right.
ELM: “—from your original Joe Schmoe novel,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Parody, educational things, right? And the biggest one, in my view, is the money one, which is, not just the—fandom always is like, “Fair use is about how you can’t make any money!” And it’s more nuanced than that. First of all, it’s case-by-case, right? But second of all, it is about you profiting and damaging the market for the original rights holder, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: So the famous Harry Potter Lexicon case, it was predicated on the idea, when J. K. Rowling sued him, because she said that she was going to be making a version of what he made.
FK: Right.
ELM: And so the idea that there would be hers and his on the shelf was potentially taking away sales from her future version. That she never made.
FK: Right. And I think—which I’m still, [ELM laughs] I guess I’m not bitter about it, because I wouldn’t buy it now, but on some level I’m like, “Come on.”
ELM: I would have bought it in 2009.
FK: I would have bought it back then before I knew you were a TERF, lady! [ELM laughs] I think the other important thing to note that people maybe don’t know is that fair use is something that is a defense. It’s not a law that you’re allowed to do it, right? So any time you do something in fair use, someone can sue you, and then you use that as your defense. It’s not a situation where, “Oh, they can’t sue me, because—”
ELM: Right.
FK: “—I’m doing X thing, right?” So inevitably—
ELM: What was that quote from—was it Lawrence Lessig who said that fair use means, like, time to call a lawyer, or something like that? [both laugh] He was like, “That’s how you define it.”
FK: Right!
ELM: Right? Because it’s also super case-by-case and contextual, right?
FK: Exactly.
ELM: So this idea of, like, “Oh, I think we’re fine. I think we have a fair use case here.”
FK: Right.
ELM: “We’re gonna argue this is OK as they sue us.”
FK: Right, which means that it’s not really possible to make blanket statements and say, you know, “This is 100 percent and definitely fair use and nobody can sue you for this.” That’s not how it works, right? So when people say things like, “You just can’t, money can never change hands with fanfic—”
ELM: Right.
FK: “—and then you’re OK,” that is a false hope, [laughs] that’s not true, and it’s quite likely, in fact, it’s fairly well established, that there’s lots of cases where money is changing hands, with regard to fanfic stuff, and nobody is suing. Nobody thinks that it’s a strong enough case, right, [laughs] that they’re going to do this, right?
ELM: Yeah, interesting—someone in my mentions, I will not say their name, [laughs] I will not put them on blast, said, you know, “Fanfiction started in Star Trek zines, and there was no money exchanged there.” And I regret to inform you, in fact, people were literally exchanging money.
FK: In fact, they were exchanging money in exactly the way that this anonymous person is describing, with the professionally printed fanfics. They were exchanging money only up to the point of the cost of production, right? So they’re not making a profit from it, because obviously if you’re making a paper zine, you have to pay for the paper.
ELM: Right.
FK: You have to pay for, like, you know, a lot of times those zines were being taken to a copy shop. Remember copy shops? And you know—
ELM: You don’t remember copy shops in the ’70s, Flourish. You didn’t go to those.
FK: I don’t remember the ones from the ’70s, that’s true. But I do remember them from the ’90s. But they were taking them to a copy shop. They were taking them to a printer, and actually having them printed, you know?
ELM: Right.
FK: At the time, there were a lot more small, local places that could print things in that way. Of course, there were some that were doing mimeographs at home, or whatever.
ELM: Right.
FK: But my point being that then, yes, they were selling them, because they needed to get $5 a copy, because otherwise they couldn’t pay the $200 that they were going to be paying at the copy shop to get the physical thing made.
ELM: Right, right, but I think even bringing in that historical example here is interesting, because if you look at Star Trek fanfiction pre-internet, also, there was this kind of, like, tacit, looking the other way element, or even tacit approval, from Gene Roddenberry, right? About Star Trek fic, right?
FK: Oh, he—yeah. They knew. [laughs]
ELM: They knew, they were like, “OK. All right. You know, lookin’ the other way.”
FK: They were literally at these conventions. [ELM laughs] They could see the merch tables, you know?
ELM: Right. But contrast that with the action that George Lucas took—
FK: Right.
ELM: You know, in the late ’70s, early ’80s, actually threatening legal action, right? You know?
FK: Yes, George Lucas [laughs] did not want them doing that.
ELM: Not a chill guy.
FK: He also saw the merch tables and was like, “Screw you!”
ELM: Don’t want that, right? And so this kind of idea that there’s some sort of—I think that that actually is a really helpful example of what we see now, right? So the idea that fanartists are allowed—I mean, go back to “The Money Question” part 1, which didn’t have a fun subtitle, right? Was from five years ago or whatever, and it was about why is fanfiction for free and fanart is for making money, right? And part of it is, fanartists are risking something, because they are literally getting issued takedowns on a semi-regular basis, depending on what fandom you’re in and what kind of things you’re making and trying to sell. And I think it is a weird—there are some weird attitudes in fandom that that’s not happening, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Fanartists know that’s happening, right? And there are certain ways that they try to work around it.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it’s basically what the rights holders care enough about to come after, right? And so I’m a little bit like, there’s all these people in notes right now on this post being like, “If you keep doing this, they’re gonna come after fanfiction!” And I’m like, I honestly don’t know. I mean, I’m interested to hear that people are getting takedowns from rights holders in this person’s fandom, because I would be surprised if, like, Warner Bros. was coming after Dramione. [FK laughs] I don’t know if they care, you know what I mean?
FK: Well, in this case I suspect that—I actually have a theory about what’s happening here, having been in some conversations about takedowns like this on that side.
ELM: Yeah, tell me tell me.
FK: And my suspicion is that they don’t care so much necessarily about the—well, there’s two things. One of them is, there’s often a blanket idea of like, “As long as it’s for free, we don’t care, and if you have to pay for it, period, we’re sending a takedown notice.”
ELM: Sure.
FK: Which may or may not be sensible legally, but they don’t care because they’ve got the money for lawyers and they can always drop something if they don’t, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: They have no consequences for sending a takedown notice. It costs them nothing, whatever. But the other thing is, it’s probably not so much that they care whether you, the author who’s put this up, is making the money, and probably more that they care that the publishing platform is making the money.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because for them—I mean, the publishing platform does have profit built in, even if you only have one cent of profit that you’re receiving, right? That is their business model, is that they offer this service, and there’s profit built into it. And I would imagine that the people who are sending the takedown notices are concerned about this issue of, well, the publisher is making money off of our characters and so forth. So I just think that it’s not—in that case, I don’t think it's, like, personal. I don’t think they’re sitting here going, “Ugh! This fan!” [laughs] You know? I think they’re sitting here going, “Ugh! This company that publishes a lot of different things…” You know?
ELM: I do wonder if some of this is kind of colored by past eras in which it was personal also, right? This kind of idea of—
FK: Oh yes.
ELM: “Oh, think of the children, what if they see Harry Potter kissing another boy!” You know?
FK: Ahh! [laughs] Yeah.
ELM: Also, side note, did you happen to see while all of this was melting down, J. K. Rowling’s best TERF friend got caught reading Dramione smut on a train?
FK: No!
ELM: To write an officious article about Harry Potter fanfiction?
FK: I did not see this, and this is the funniest possible, like, little tag onto this entire situation.
ELM: While this was blowing up, it was, like, a British side note that was happening, yeah. It was like—
FK: You’re kidding.
ELM: Well, she wrote this article that was literally straight out of, like, 2003, that was like, “There is this thing called fanfiction, I’ve learned about, and are you aware—” And then one of her big takeaways, which I was cracking up at, because she’s right and it’s not bad, was that slash turns people trans. [laughs]
FK: Ha!
ELM: And I was like, “Yeah, are you new here? Yeah. This has been well documented. We have a lot of evidence.”
FK: [laughs] Slash does, in fact…
ELM: [laughs] Not for everyone, and perhaps “turning” is not the word we’d use, but it in fact allows transmasc people—
FK: [laughs] It cracks some eggs right there! [both laugh] It is a known egg-cracking device.
ELM: But she got caught. Someone spotted her on a British train a while ago, while she was researching this, and she had in giant letters, and it was a Dramione smut fic that she was reading. I don’t know why, because she was researching slash, but I guess she went for what she really wanted.
FK: Oh my goodness.
ELM: The unfortunate coda to this is then people, in the way that of course they did, started doing this sort of pseudo pearl-clutching, being like, “I don’t think it’s appropriate for someone to read material like that about children on a train.” Trying to, like, gotcha her, and I was like, “Maybe the takeaway from this shouldn’t be—”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “—that you can’t read smut in public.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Anyway.
FK: Although really, if you need the letters to be that big, at least turn it toward the window or something, friends. [both laugh] But that’s politeness, that’s not pearl-clutching. That’s like, I don’t need to be drawn in to whatever you’re reading. [laughs]
ELM: I agree, I agree. So that’s the news from TERF Island.
FK: Great, thank you for bringing us that news. But back to the copyright issue, and the legal issue here, because I think that this is, you know, one of the things that has been freaking—maybe “freaking out” is too strong of a word. But one of the things that has been bothering me the most in here is how fandom inevitably turns into this, like, [laughs] echo chamber of bad information about legal situations.
ELM: What was it that Casey Fiesler said she researched for a project? Oh, people on YouTube stating that fair use was a myth. [FK laughs] And it’s like, it is very vibes-based, I’m not gonna lie. But, you know, so is a lot of our law, honestly. [laughs]
FK: Right, but vibes—there are a lot of things that are vibes-based.
ELM: You know it when you see it.
FK: Yeah, it does bother me to see people making, again, back to these strident statements about, you know, black-and-white grifters and good guys, and that’s one thing, but then I often see people basically framing this as any time you do anything, anything, where money changes hands, that’s not sanctioned by an enormous corporation—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: —then you’re wrong! And I find that actually, like, quite problematic. [laughs] Just because it’s not sanctioned by an enormous corporation does not mean that you are doing anything ethically or morally or legally wrong, and I really am troubled by the idea that the people who are pulling to publish are on the side of the angels because they’ve been blessed by some large corporation.
ELM: Mmm.
FK: But those people who are doing, you know, [laughs], small-scale, you know, merch/fanart/fanzine creation are evil and profiting, you know? I find a very troubling undertone to some of the conversation.
ELM: I think that’s a great point. It’s weird to me too, because I feel like the lines are very arbitrarily drawn. I can’t get over the different standards for fanartists. I don’t understand it.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I mean, I guess there are plenty of people who are like, “I don’t think anyone should do that. I don’t think fanartists should do that.” Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: But a lot of people who are saying these things about fic—and there’s just as much of a litigious history around fanart as there is around, you know—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —Anne Rice and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, with fic writers, right? I don’t really understand how these kind of parallel narratives have diverged so much, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: It feels very ahistorical to me on both sides.
FK: Mmm hmm.
ELM: But yeah, I don’t know. It feels like what you’re describing, and I absolutely agree, is an element, you know, in the article for WIRED, I linked to and mentioned Aja’s article, Aja Romano, that they wrote in 2014 about the Twilight fan presses.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t go from LiveJournal to Random House, right? You know?
FK: It was self-published first.
ELM: Yes, and so the Twilight folks started a bunch of fan presses, right? And there have been a few other examples, including one that Gav and some other friends of mine were involved in, that published a few, like, it was original works by fanfiction writers, right? Around that time.
FK: Right, so some of them are original works, and some of them are pull-to-publish sort of file-off-the-serial-numbers versions. But the point being that they’re all small presses that are doing these things out of, like, scouting talent from fandom.
ELM: Right, right. Exactly. And doing it yeah, from within there, and Fifty Shades of Grey was, like, mostly women? You know? It was women publishing, writing for women, et cetera, all this stuff, and you know, still huge backlash from some corners, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And obviously there was huge backlash when Fifty Shades got published too, but there is an element of kind of very classic, tall-poppy sort of like—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: “How dare you, you know, charge for this thing that the rest of us are lovingly doing for free?” Whereas when it shifts over into an official, corporate-sanctioned space like a publisher, yeah, yeah, there is an attitude of like, “Well, you really, you made it.”
FK: Right.
ELM: As opposed to…I don’t know. I mean, maybe a part of that is I do have this deep-down kind of idea of, like, of course I wouldn’t want to—I like that fanfiction in my world is free. I like writing it for free. I like writing it for fun. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I don’t think my time writing fiction could be spent better writing original fiction.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: At all. And so I get that.
FK: Yeah, and to be clear, when I’m complaining about this, this is not a critique of say, like, the Renegade code of ethics, which is about not charging for this stuff, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I’m not saying that not charging is bad, and in fact, there are many instances where I think charging for things is bad, [laughs] you know? I just think that it’s complicated, and I would hate to see a situation in which the accepted norm was basically that fanfic and fan culture in general got colonized by the mainstream ways of buying and selling at scale for enormous corporations. I don’t want that.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I don’t want that. That’s what I don’t want. [laughs]
ELM: So, I mean, this is, like, not a very fair choice to ask you, but would you—so you would rather have a world in which fanfiction writers were selling their own work than a world in which some of them were plucked up and pulled-to-publish?
FK: Hmm.
ELM: [laughs] You don’t have to answer that, because it’s kind of a…
FK: Yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that, but I can say that I think that we know what a world in which people are plucked up and pulled-to-publish looks like, and we don’t know what a world in which people are selling their own work looks like.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I don’t know that that world would be better, and I don’t have a problem also—I’m not angry at any individual who pulls-to-publish. In fact, I’m very proud of some people who I know who have done so. I’m just uneasy with that becoming—with the default becoming that you sort of graduate into this corporate context.
ELM: Yeah, yeah. But then you think about, like, look at all the, yeah, the norms of that creeping into this. People write works that are like full novels, that could be easy to turn into novels, right? You know?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: People call them books, people, you know, have this very pro presentation, right? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: I don’t know. I feel like to some degree that’s already happening. A lot of people are already priming their work for that, because they know that there’s a path to it.
FK: Definitely.
ELM: I guess that’s what they were doing in Twilight, too, so…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s funny how much people just…it’s like…
FK: Same as it ever was!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Same as it ever was. [laughs]
ELM: I mean, the funniest thing about all this to me—no, maybe it’s not the funniest thing, but a funny element to me, is this is Dramione. This ship has been around since what, like, 1999—technically, I mean, you could have shipped them from age 11—
FK: Oh, it’s been around forever.
ELM: —if you wanted, right?
FK: Yeah. No, I don’t remember the first thing I saw about this, but it was a long, long, long time ago.
ELM: I went on the, um, the old FictionAlley ship list name—
FK: Uh huh.
ELM: —to go see. “Leather and Libraries.”
FK: Yes.
ELM: [laughing] That’s, sorry folks, as basic as I thought it was gonna be.
FK: Yes, that’s right. No, it’s funny to me also because Dramione was not even, like, a major player in the Harry Potter ship wars [laughs] of the early 2000s.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So it’s like, coming on the home stretch! [both laugh]
ELM: Dramione with a folding chair! [laughs]
FK: Exactly! [laughs] You know?
ELM: Well, you know what actually is quite funny, you know I was curious, because I was thinking about fandom contexts, and this is related. I went to look at the AO3 top ships for 2023. It is not even the top Harry Potter ship, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: The top Harry Potter ship is Remus/Sirius, which, of course it is. [FK laughs] And then Harry/Draco, and then James/Regulus, which I suspect is—I haven’t investigated, but I suspect maybe a side ship, or one that just gets paired within—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —Marauders stuff. Not something that was happening in the— [laughs] when I was in that ship in the 2000s.
FK: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, the ascendency of Regulus is a really interesting situation.
ELM: That’s an interesting fanon-created character. But then Dramione, it falls somewhere in the low teens of the top 100, so it’s not a—
FK: Which is what I always sort of would have sort of—I’ve always thought of it as kind of like a “yeah, that’s popular” but not one of the titans.
ELM: Right, it’s interesting, and so I guess there’s a lot of—hearing from folks in the romance world that there’s now people who are like, “Well, I really liked those books that used to be Reylo fic, and so now I’ll check out Dramione, like it’s the new Reylo,” right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And that’s interesting. And so that does lend further credence to the kind of idea of, this is not a fandom-wide problem. In fact, this is a problem of a few ships. And I think that if you are a het writer in juggernaut het ships, then this could be coming for you. But I mean, I know we were super over, this is very long, but I will quickly say, and I put it as an aside in the thing, and actually had someone accuse me of not knowing anything about fanfiction, because I didn’t talk about how many queer people were involved, and I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
FK: [laughs] Yeah, yeah—
ELM: I’ve literally devoted my life to this—the last 15 years of my life to this topic, so I’m not sure what to say to you right now.
FK: [laughs] Elizabeth, go do your research, please.
ELM: I don’t know if you know that gay people write fanfiction, but—about gay characters. But it is interesting to me, All the Young Dudes is a Remus/Sirius fic. It is the most popular fic on the AO3. It is being bound and sold at a fast clip. It has 13 million hits, so almost twice as many as Manacled, and it seems to not be a part of this conversation at all, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And I haven’t seen other slash juggernauts, right? That’s the one, right? That’s the one that’s breached containment for slash.
FK: Yup.
ELM: And that’s very interesting to me, and I think says something about the involvement of the publishing industry in particular in this, right? I feel like…I don’t know. There’s huge slash ships. There’s so much you could be yanking and ripping people off with, right?
FK: [laughs] Right.
ELM: There’s so many stories, and there’s so many huge slash stories that would be very easy to turn into romance novels, and I don’t know if that reflects—if there’s just way—if I’m just so skewed by fandom that I assume that there are as many queer romance readers as there are het romance readers. Am I just vastly underestimating—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —the sheer size of the het romance space?
FK: You are. Yes.
ELM: That’s so funny!
FK: I hate to say it to you, but you absolutely are. The het romance space is way larger. Like, the queer romance space has gotten larger. But the het romance space is absolutely massive in a way that is, like—
ELM: This is—OK—
FK: I mean, it just has such a big, like, head start.
ELM: OK, you, het romance expert, you tell me this, too. I think it is very notable. I mentioned in the article that all three of these ships—Bella/Edward and these other two—are het. [laughs] But if I were to be super frank, I would say they also, all three of them, have a certain…dynamic.
FK: Yeah, which is classic in het romance.
ELM: Right, so that’s what I was gonna say, too, and I think that you don’t have that in slash, because—or in male/male romance—because there’s a lot of different vibes in male queer—in female/female too, obviously, right? But you know what I mean? So, like—
FK: Yes.
ELM: But the kind of dark, controlling, you know, and he needs to be—yeah, we’re back to Beauty and the Beast again, right? I mean, you’re the Reylo, you tell me, right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, for sure. No no.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And this is, I mean, it’s not the only kind of romance novel that is out there by far. [ELM laughs] But it is a very large—
ELM: [laughing] I know.
FK: —chunk. So, you know. Yeah! I think this is very real. But I do think that if you’re coming from within slash fandom, in particular, it’s easy to underestimate the size of traditional romance readership.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Het romance readership. And frankly, there’s a lot of very sophisticated consumers within that group, and there’s also a lot of very unsophisticated consumers.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And I think that we see, if you’re online, you see the most sophisticated consumers of that, but when you get into BookTok and so forth, you start seeing some of the people who are not as well-versed in all of the stuff. They’re just there to read some books! You know?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: And that’s a lot, a lot, a lot of people, which you could discover by going to Half Price Books or whatever your local, you know, used bookseller is, should you have one—not a fancy used book seller, like a just standard-issue used book seller—and wandering down those romance aisles.
ELM: Yeah, it is such a revelation when you go to, like, a charity shop or—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: Like a Goodwill, or whatever.
FK: Welcome to Star Trek novels and romance novels!
ELM: [laughing] I’ve never seen a Star Trek novel at one of these places.
FK: You’re kidding!
ELM: Or like a—
FK: This is how I get all my Star Trek novels. [laughs]
ELM: That’s really funny. Yeah, at a bookstore, but in the book section of, like, a Goodwill?
FK: Oh yeah, sometimes they do.
ELM: Or, like, I was visiting my friend, and in their village there was a little, like, a free—
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Like, a bookshelf in the train station.
FK: Yup. Yeah.
ELM: And I was looking at it, and I was like, “Whoa, this is a world—” Not just romance. It also had, like, solidly commercial fiction, right? You know?
FK: Yes, and solidly commercial fiction, and some inspirational, like, nonfiction inspirational stuff. This is the—I used to go up to Maine for vacation a bunch, and I would never bother to bring many books, because I would go up there and I would be like, “Behold! The used bookstores of Maine and the little free libraries of Maine have all of the vacation reading that I could possibly want. [ELM laughs] It’s from 1997. It’s all romance novels and occasionally a Chicken Soup for the Soul, and that’s where I’m at right now.” So, on that note…
ELM: [laughing] I forgot about Chicken Soup for the Soul. [both laugh] Man.
FK: You know? Yeah.
ELM: I remember those books.
FK: Absolutely. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, baby. Yeah.
ELM: OK, big takeaways here. I’ll quickly do some. It is defensible under fair use to write fanfiction.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It is defensible under fair use—I’ll note this, because Stacey, in the article, used very lawyerly language, said it is likely [FK laughs] legal. It is likely that your, that you, the fic writer, hold the copyright to the original material in your story. She says “likely” because there have been no cases testing this.
FK: Right.
ELM: Right? It is likely legal that you can print out fanfiction and do whatever you want with it for your personal use, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: She said that also encompasses paying someone else cost. Material cost.
FK: Right.
ELM: To do the same thing, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And then, when you cross out of the fair-use realm and you’re into the profit realm, that is when it is not. So I saw a lot of people in the notes who apparently didn’t click on the article and read are saying these things, that they worry that fanbinding itself was not legal.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And that they were worried, and that they wanted to try it, and I really regret that any of this, or any—our part in confusing anyone, in the sense of—
FK: Fanbinding is legal!
ELM: That is—
FK: What you do with the thing you bound could possibly be not legal. But fanbinding itself, definitely legal, and you should enjoy it.
ELM: So I suspect the people who, in this last letter are selling their own works at-cost, I imagine that is also defensible under fair use.
FK: I think so, too. I would not have a single qualm about buying one of those.
ELM: Right, and so whether that’s something that fandom is willing to accept as a thing that we’re doing—again, gonna bring up the double standards around fanart—is another question, right? But that is something also that I know has been going on for years. I’ve seen examples of that in years past, too.
FK: Yup.
ELM: So it’s not like that’s a new development. Obviously the technology just gets easier. You know, it’s easier and easier, there’s more companies that do this, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So that’s all fine. It is the profit element, and I would urge fans to not use catastrophic language about how you are going to destroy fandom if you charge a single cent for anything related to fandom, because we know that’s not true. We receive some portion of money for this podcast, and it has to do with fandom, right? There’s a lot of different ways that money is changing hands, as you eloquently said, and there isn’t some magical law saying that—I mean, you also have people collecting revenue on YouTube videos that are talking about fandom, or on TikToks that are talking about fic, right? You know? There are people profiting off fic by making ad revenue from monetized platforms.
FK: Yup.
ELM: So it is what it is, right?
FK: Yeah. It is… [laughs] It is what it is.
ELM: Pretty solid conclusion, I think.
FK: Well, I am interested in seeing where all this goes, and I am also going to report that I am excited to bind my first fanfics! So, you know…
ELM: Oh, I thought you weren’t going to do that until you uh…had your child.
FK: Well, realistically I won’t.
ELM: Oh. [laughs]
FK: But I’m still excited to do it when I do. [laughs]
ELM: Teasing!
FK: I’ve been typesetting, [laughs]
ELM: Teasing!
FK: No, I’m excited to do it, so, yeah! Long live fanbinding, is my feeling about this, and let’s not long live using other people’s works in ways that are ethically bad. The end.
ELM: Let’s not long live that.
FK: [laughs] All right, clearly we’ve been going on too long, because I can’t make a coherent sentence, Elizabeth.
ELM: All right.
FK: We’ve gotta wrap this up.
ELM: Well, speaking of money and fandom. [FK laughs] Fansplaining—no. Patreon.com/Fansplaining. Keeping it short and sweet, that is how we—I mean, we don’t make much of a profit, I’m not gonna lie. It is mostly to pay our transcriptionists to have transcripts with every single episode, it’s to pay our hosting costs—
FK: Yeah.
ELM: —for our website and for the audio, so we really appreciate everyone who supports us there. We have a series of rewards, [FK laughs] like special episodes, tiny enamel pins, and Tiny Zines for folks. That is the Patreon spiel.
FK: And if you do not have or don’t want to give money to us, you can also support us by spreading the news about Fansplaining existing, about our full transcripts. You can do that, and you can also write in, as so many people wrote in, and helped basically give us things to think about and talk about in this very episode! You can do that by emailing fansplaining at gmail.com. By going to our website, fansplaining.com, there’s a little form that you can fill out there. We have an ask box on Tumblr—that’s fansplaining.tumblr.com. Or you can give us a phone call and leave a voicemail message, at 1-401-526-FANS, and we will play that on the air.
ELM: All right, super long episode, but I think a kind of astronomically…astronomical, it’s a real asteroid of a topic, you know, that kind of just slammed into fanfiction fandom in the last few weeks, so…
FK: Seriously.
ELM: I mean, full disclosure, we’re recording this a week before it comes out. Lord knows what’s gonna happen. [laughs]
FK: [laughing] Yeah whatever it is, you know, all right.
ELM: Cross your fingers that it’s nothing newsworthy.
FK: OK, I’ll talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK, bye, Flourish!
FK: Bye!
[Outro music]