agentotter:

emjayelle:

marguerite26:

So, Amazon wants to get its greedy little fingers in the fanfic business, eh?

I have a lot of thoughts on this. Angry thoughts, to be completely honest. I’ll try to limit my use of capslock, but no promises.

I love the lack of capitalism in the creation of fanworks. It’s extremely important to me. We do it for ourselves, for each other. It is a free exchange of ideas and talents, done out of pure love and desire to create. FUCK YOU for trying to take that away from us.

I get it! Corporations just HATE that this huge, popular thing exists and they can’t figure out how to make money off it. So publishing companies scour archives for the next 50 Shades of Grey, trying to find anything that can have the ‘serial numbers’ filed off enough so that it can be resold as an original work.

They want to take something freely available, deny public access to it, then make people pay for the privilege of reading it. Isn’t capitalism beautiful?

I’m not saying that writers wanting to be paid for their work is inherently bad. Of course not! I have bookshelves full of books I paid money for. But people offering up their talents without requiring an exchange of goods in return is something I find truly beautiful. It goes against the grain of society, which teaches us ‘nothing’s ever free.’

Fandom is a small village, sitting around a campfire telling stories to each other. Anyone can sit and listen, anyone can contribute. You don’t need to pay to sit and listen – what a horrible shame it would be if someone built a fence, controlled the gate, held out their hand and denied you entry to the campfire if you didn’t have the cash in your pocket.

That is not what fanfic is about. It’s beautiful as is. Let’s not ever forget that.

AMEN TO THAT.

I would also like to predict in advance that when this thing fails (because WHY WOULD IT SUCCEED), sweeping generalizations are going to be made about fan fiction as a whole and completely off-base assumptions about fandom will be made. I’m sure it’ll be super fun.

I don’t know how many times things like this have been tried before because I have a short attention span and very little room in my brain, so anything not shiny or Very Important gets lost after a couple of months.  But I do know things like this have been done before.  I vaguely remember some kind of archive site that was for profit, like fanfic authors were going to pay these dudes to have an account and have their fic on whatever site it was.  As you can tell, that went off like fucking gangbusters — I mean, everybody’s scrambling to pay for an account on their archive, after all.

And this is just as stupid, but whatever.  My anger has been used up when it comes to this.  There’s always going to be some dickbag somewhere going, “Hey, this fanfic thing might catch on, I should make money off it!”  Sorry, dickbag, not how it works.

Sure, some authors are going to be super excited to put their shit on Amazon.  And who’s going to read it?  I have no fucking idea.  Who the fuck is going to pay for fanfic?  The best part is that it’s this giant, amorphous community of people who love fandom so much, they contribute to it for free.  They write for free, they podfic for free, they make mixes and draw amazing works of art for free, organize parties and gatherings, run websites, all for free.  And when they do ask for money, they say, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing that I’d do for free anyway, but I’ll do it specifically for you if you donate to this charity.”  And then everybody gets to enjoy it anyway, even if they weren’t the one to donate.

What the dickbags won’t ever understand is that it’s not the fanfic that holds fandom together — it’s the fans, the community, the knowledge that hey, we all fucking love this movie or this TV show, this band or this actor so fucking much that in the long run, we lose money.  So fucking what?  We buy DVD box sets and spend money on plane tickets, on multiple viewings of the movie when it’s still in theaters, on con registrations, on webhosting, on art supplies, on that amazing microphone we’ve had our eye on for months, on both digital and physical copies of new albums, on stamps because we’re sending other fans nail polish or hand-drawn cards or books.  We spend hours and hours invested in this getting nothing monetary out of it, and it’s worth it.  We don’t fucking care about getting paid for fandom because we know perfectly well that we get more out of it than we put in.  Because the value isn’t monetary.  The dickbags won’t ever understand that, so this’ll keep happening, but that’s okay.  It’ll keep happening and it’ll keep failing, and you’ll end up like me, a jaded old fandom queen, waving her hand and saying, “Oh, good Lord, they’re trying this again?  This is the fifteenth time since 1998!”

This doesn’t mean that artists shouldn’t be paid for their work.  They should.  Hi, I’m a writer and I like to make money.  But not off of fandom.  That’s just silly.

(via teslawings)