Posted on by Dunc

Be you not so stupid

Selling your fanfic on Amazon.com? Bad idea.

The above item was linked on the VIP thread on starwars.com, and a google searched turned up thenaberriegirls.com and this defense. Apocryphal’s a nice word, but so is copyright; Somebody’s getting a letter (at least!) from LFL’s lawyers.

And let it be noted, fandom has never reacted very well to this sort of thing either… You don’t take money for fanfic, folks. Period.

7 Replies to “Be you not so stupid”

  1. Holy Sh*t! I can’t believe Amazon didn’t catch this already… I’m sure it won’t take long.

    ‘Course you can buy fanzines full o’ fanfic out the wazoo at cons, but this is just a little vulnerable, methinks.

  3. Interestingly enough, you can download the entire text of the novel at http://www.thenaberriegirls.com/1933456027-text.pdf. Get it before it’s gone forever…

    I’m sure this is a case of someone using one of the Print On Demand services, one that doesn’t even review the content it publishes. With some of these places, you just upload a properly-formatted .PDF of your novel (perhaps several, one for the text and others for the covers), pay whatever prepress amount they charge, and, voila, it’s available as a printed book. And with some of these places, you can also buy an ISBN as well as a listing at amazon.com or in the whole Ingram catalogue, and it’s almost a certainty that this is what the author did.

    Whoops.

  4. ‘Course, when I say “interestingly enough,” I mean in the context of a book for sale on Amazon. not in the context of fan fic. Of course fan fic is available for downloading for free. But also of course the text of a novel available for sale on Amazon wouldn’t be. It’s an odd situation.

  5. I can see her getting away with POD, at least if she took it down ASAP after her friends/family had at it. But leaving it up for a year and sending it off to Amazon was just… idiotic. To the enth degree.

    And I think there are a few authors whose work is avaliable online. I believe Cory Doctorow has some kind of Creative Commons license on his novels, so you can DL them for free, and he’s published by one of the biggies – Tor, I think.

  6. This is SO weird. I was just talking to someone who told me about a similar situation where someone is selling her fanfic based on the Inuyasha anime.

    Hearing two similar stories so close together concerns me. This is the kind of thing that will get copyright lawyers’ attention. They’ve ignored fanfic (mostly) as harmless, but this is NOT harmless and I fear it could bring some smackdowns for everyone.

    Idiots. I mean, the sheer and utter gall is mind-blowing. It’s theft, pure and simple.

  7. Like Kelly was mentioning, the more people who try this sort of thing, the more it’s going to get the attention of the big guys, and the more that’s going to be problematic for those of us who just love the characters and want to play around with ideas or thoughts and share that with others.

    It’s just so very NOT acceptable.

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