Monday News: Romance Awareness Month at Open Road, Kindle Worlds a failure?, new children’s author Ben Bailey Smith, and reader-driven school supplies campaign
Publishing NewsBen Bailey Smith / children's literature / digital publishing / fan-fiction / fundraising / Kindle Worlds / Open Road7 Comments
Happy Romance Awareness Month – In addition to selling Romance novels and other romance-related books for $1.99, Open Road is giving away a free Kobo Mini and the contest ends on 9/1/14. Complete rules on the website, as well as sale titles. –Open Road Media
Amazon’s fan-fiction portal Kindle Worlds is a bust for fans, and for writers too – Rebecca Tushnet, attorney and IP expert, has written a paper on how licensed fan-generated content is not as robust or successful as content produced on strictly fan-run sites. So, for example, Kindle Worlds (which has always bothered me, for some of the same reasons Goodreads bothers me), has not been very successful at all. Among the reasons Tushnet offers are lack of freedom and the fact that the site is limited to fans over 18, which excludes a substantial cohort of fan fiction writers. Not that this is going to deter Amazon, which has apparently indicated it will continue to expand Kindle Worlds. But I have to say it makes perfect sense to me that an activity that has thrived in the literary margins would not translate so well to the mainstream, especially when the mainstream continues to be the primary beneficiary.
More broadly, on one of those sites, FanFiction.net, fans posted 100 new stories every hour across all categories. And Amazon? Its entire output for all 24 “Worlds” of content, which also includes franchises like Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries, was just 538 stories over the course of more than a year.
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According to Tushnet, a big part of the problem is the creative limits that brand owners impose on the use of their work. In the case of G.I. Joe, for instance, the villain can’t wear a Yankees cap. Characters in other works can’t use drugs or employ profane language. And gay, bisexual or deviant sexual behavior might be off-limits too. –Gigaom
Ben Bailey Smith: Zadie and I are very close. Being mixed race gives us camaraderie – Ben Bailey Smith, brother of Zadie Smith, may be less well-known than his sister, but that seems set to change, especially with Smith’s new venture as a children’s fiction author. Smith started out as a musician, especially in rap music (but he also worked with Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, and others), and now works as an actor in the UK version of Law and Order and RIcky Gervais’s Derek. He also has a children’s tv show and credits his sister with getting him into rap. His two children appear to be a huge inspiration in his new venture into children’s literature.
On the subject of fatherhood he is keen not to be “one of those people who says it’s changed me”, but it is touching. “I’m still the same reprobate I always was but I worry now. When you’re a parent you become responsible. And I can’t procrastinate like I used to. If you’ve got time you spend it with your kids and I rarely have time. I thought I understood what love was before I had children but I didn’t. Now I’m constantly concerned about the kids in a way I didn’t think about any girlfriend or even my own parents.” –London Evening Standard
Readers Unite to Raise Funds for Kids’ School Supplies – I hope Avery Flynn won’t mind me copying her whole description for this reader-driven, school supplies t-shirt campaign, since it’s for a charitable cause. The campaign still has a week to go:
It’s back to school time, but not everyone can afford the supplies needed for school. All profits from this Look Good, Do Good – School Supplies campaign T-shirts will go to the Kids in Need Foundation which provides free school supplies to students and teachers through the Kids in Need National Network of Resource Centers. Find out more here. If we sell 50 shirts, we will send approximately $400 to the Kids in Need Foundation. Come on, let’s show them what readers can do! –Fresh Fiction
I’m not surprised at all about the Kindle Worlds splat – I cut my writing chops doing fanfiction (and found my hubby through fan mail but that’s another story…) and one of the basic rules of fanfiction is writing what would NOT be approved by TPTB.
As well the clause where your ideas might be taken by the owners of the franchise… yeah, no. If my original character takes off I want to be paid for it, not giving it away for nothing other than maybe credit if I’m lucky enough.
And for the naysayers – who I saw plenty of on the original article – the Professor has been studying fanfiction for years and I’ve been honored enough to have been mentioned in her works. She’s not biased one way or the other.
Thanks for the shout out about the Give Me All The Books And Nobody Gets Hurt T-shirts! Fingers crossed we hit the 50 T-shirt minimum for the order so Teespring will fulfill the orders and we can make that donation to the Kids in Need Foundation.
I don’t get Kindle Worlds. I mean, if you are writing within parameters set by TPTB, and will have no control over your own creations, how is it different from ghostwriting tie-in novels?
And as for keeping to canon, non-heterosexual pairings… did anyone at Amazon go to ff.net or AO3?
At least, if Kindle Worlds doesn’t take off, it means less incentive to plagiarize previously posted fics.
@Maite: Yeah…. no. There’s enough people stealing fanfic and changing a few words to sell as their original stories to keep stealing from authors for years.
I wish Amazon (and their various cheerleaders) would get on the ball about finding plagiarists and getting them out of the system. As it is nothing happens because I think Amazon doesn’t care – as long as they get their money then screw the original author… :(
@Sheryl Nantus: You are so right. This stealing of a person’s work goes on all the time with sub-genres. The last tempest in a teapot I know of was about three weeks ago and was over an IR romance book where the plagiarist wasn’t even smart enough to change major things. The self pubbed book was caught by readers who already had the original and recognized the plot. Amazon needs to invest in some kind of software (or invent some) to scan manuscripts for too many similar parts/points and slow down and stop grabbing the money so fast. I remind friends of mine that Amazon and most POD publishers see their authors as customers first, whom they glean fees from, before they see them as authors. The lax treatment is telling.
But what I found to be even more eye-opening (from an article link posted on DA) was that lots of readers didn’t mind, or care, if the book that they were reading had been “written” by an author other than the one whose name appeared on the cover as long as they got what they wanted.
@Sheryl Nantus @P.J.Dean: I had a rather unpleasant experience earlier this year with a plagiarized ebook. I bought it because it sounded interesting, but I did not get around to reading it until about a month later, after the 7 day return policy. I loved the book and tried to find other works by the author, only to learn that she had plagiarized, almost word for word, from a fanfiction work. I contacted Amazon to return the book, since I did not want to support plagiarism, and they gave me a refund, and had in fact already kicked the plagiarist off Amazon. Amazon seemed to take the issue pretty seriously.
However, I do agree they could do more to ferret it out with software before making a work available online. There is already software out there being used on college campuses by professors to combat plagiarism, I would think it could be adapted to work with full length novels.
I agree about the software possibilities. I have used the same software that my college provides for plagiarism checks to check pieces of fiction, and while it’s imperfect, it works. (It’s imperfect for student papers, too.)