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This comment alone made me laugh far harder than it should.

“Money attracts lawyers” is a useful adage. So even if a person finds a magical trick to legally make money out of fanfiction, its unlikely to break even with all the legal fees as they get sued by those corporate lawyers. And there’s always the risk that court cases might generally outlaw fanfiction too (unless the original author explicitly gives permission). Because fanfiction is in that gray zone, it’s better for EVERYBODY to charge nothing, and keep it free – don’t be the jerk that ruins it for all. However, it’s worse with plush books, as it appears they’re STEALING the stories too, simple theft, and rebranding it as their own. Though I wonder if we should all respond by making sure that every fanfic out there is at least 5 million words...kill ‘em with printing fees.

I did take the time to look over the spreadsheet prepared by some intrepid folks, and the bulk of the works were scraped from FFN and AO3. There was nothing that was linked directly to AFF, which just goes to show that writing smut pays off in peculiar ways. My biggest concern is that many of our members cross-post stories here and on other sites, so it’s likely that someone from AFF is going to have a fic stolen. @GeorgeGlass is dealing with someone reposting his work and that of other AFF authors on a site where it looks like the poster might actually get paid for those bits of theft. What’s worse with this Plush Books situation is that fan fiction exists in a gray area of copyright law that allows the use of copyrighted material for certain purposes as long as the user doesn’t make any money from the work. The only one entitled to make any money is the owner of the copyrighted material, period. Plush Books is stealing from the copyright owner, and putting the very existence of fan fiction at risk. The oddest thing of all is that I first heard about this from the blog of a published author, Martha Wells, who writes the insanely good Murderbot novels. She mentioned it on her blog, and when I saw the article from The Mary Sue, I was appalled. But I was also kind of glad to see a NYTimes bestselling author standing up for fan fiction writers.

One trick I do is to take a snippet of my stories, run them through google (with “” around it), see what comes up in the search results..

I came across this tidbit whilst surfing: https://www.themarysue.com/publishing-house-plush-books-accused-of-stealing-dozens-of-fanfiction-works/ It looks like the alleged publisher is scraping stories from FFN and AO3, but since many of our authors also publish on those sites, I thought it might be worth posting this. It’s astonishing how low some folks will go.

Unless a fandom has a pairing that I have, or am currently obsessing over, I don’t have any interest in writing for other fandoms, generally or pornographic-wise. I’m tunnel vision locked on to the otp that’s staying rent free in my mind. Not finding what I want really fuels my drive to write. If my fav fandom is not writing the things I want to read, I just go and write them myself. This is what really sparked me to write fanfiction to be honest, too many stories that wrote about the mechanics of sex but forgot the human aspect of it. I got tired of reading, rather than experiencing the story. Felt like robots inserting parts rather than living beings with feelings, intimacy and emotion based carnal hungers having sex, and there wasn’t much about the BDSM lifestyle outside exaggerated Fifty Shade of Grey nonsense, so I had to at least try and add my two cents 😁 and don’t even get me started on the lack of NaruHinaSasu content 😢

@Wilde_Guess Oh I wasn’t necessarily saying that I am different from fanfiction writers in general. I was more responding to @GeorgeGlass’s comment about how they tend to focus on animated TV rather than live action. I don’t do real people fanfic at all. What I meant is that for instance, I’m a Beronica fan in the Riverdale fandom, and Lili Reinhart and Camila Mendes who play those characters in the TV show have done a few photo shoots together. Not to mention social media posts where they are doing behind the scenes stuff. Any time I see them together, I think about one of the plot bunnies or partial stories I plan on writing. Like you, this isn’t my real name that I’m using, obviously. I use this one for my sexual stories and my real name for the more plot based stuff, not to mention my original content. I’m hopeful that my original content, both fiction and non-fiction, will be commercially successful. Though I have been thinking about the possibility of being discovered to have written stuff on here. Mostly because I used to use this name many years ago on a now defunct website and occasionally I did have my real name come up thanks to how the site worked.

This is beyond horrible that this “publishing house” got away with as much as they did. In a fanfic or “derived work,” there are two entities who deserve credit and payment for the work; the author of the “original” work or universe, and the author of the derived/fanfiction work. Full stop. With original fiction, the sole entity entitled to credit and payment is the author of the work. Doing what “Plush House” did is theft, pure and simple. They should be criminally charged for it, and if convicted at trial should have everything taken from them. There is certainly some legal doubt on who should be paid for fanfiction written without a license issued in advance by the original content creator. However, there is no doubt that whomever should get the money, “Plush House” is not and never was it. For the original works, there’s no doubt at all whatsoever. Many people here have either received stacks of form-rejection letters personally, at least looked into vanity publishing, or both; and the rest of us have read of your travails in these forum posts. Plush House have stolen. They are thieves. If they had stuck to cook books, then perhaps they could have made money quietly from the “Internet semi-lazy.” Just get someone with a spatula and a word processor for editing and pizazz, and have at it. Hell, I could have worked for them doing that, at least with some cuisine types. If you publish it on the Internet, it isn’t really a “secret recipe” any more. And, a talented cook and writer can change it up just enough to call it their own. If you know how to cook, I’ve already posted a “secret recipe” in passing, and it’s just waiting to be made in your kitchen. But, being the lazy over-achievers they allegedly are, they didn’t even bother to get releases or even offer token payment. A plague upon their [publishing] house!

Hi, Deadman and all. You aren’t feeling nearly as opposite as you might think. Fanfiction by its very nature is the fanfic author telling a story the original author didn’t see fit to tell, however much of the original author’s universe you preserve in your own. Likewise, if you read a fanfic where the author took too many liberties in their own storytelling, that can also inspire you to pick up the pen as you’ve done. You’re not the only one to start writing fanfiction as a defense against fanfiction that didn’t quite do the job for you. When specifically writing erotic or pornographic fanfic literature, you (or any author) needs to overcome their own internal limits in order to make their writing readable. Your own personal “internal challenges” differ from others’ only in the details. In order to write readable prose, you must be emotionally attached to your characters, and cannot write well if you are not; whether writing erotic literature, pornographic literature, or non-erotic literature. If you’re connected with your characters and your story, you have a greater chance of connecting with the reader. Likewise, if you’re already fully connected with your reader, such as Wilbert Audrey when he first started writing the Thomas the Tank Engine series, you will quickly connect with your characters if you’re any good at all. If you imagination doesn’t go “far enough” to be able to form a “live” image from a manga, anime, or cartoon drawing of a character, that’s fine. You still have plenty to write about. Likewise, if you can’t figure out where all the “extra tentacles” go, that’s also fine. Usagi-Chan is extremely grateful for that, even if some potential readers might be disappointed. Your imagination for what you choose to imagine should be more than sufficient to entertain your readers. If it isn’t, the “next” key works just as well for them as it does for you. And if it really works for them, there is Patreon and Ko-fi, if you can’t quite go mainstream with your writing. “Wilde Guess” isn’t even my “regular” nom de plume. I use it mostly for any writing I do that is sexually explicit, erotic, homoerotic, etc. As for your reason to start writing fanfiction, that’s really close to why I started Third Time’s A Soul Bond. I was totally and thoroughly sick of poorly written, unexplainable-in-canon, and frankly insane slash pairings in HP fanfiction. Seeing very few examples of “semi-logical” slash parings, I created this pen-name just to write that story. On “St. Elsewhere.net,” it’s actually the longest story with that particular pairing. I’ve received fewer reviews on the entire story than a single chapter of the “typical” SS/DM spit-roast of the Boy Who Lived. Oh, well... Riding the Lincoln Way was originally a one shot to cleanse the mental palate from some “train-wreck-bad” “spank-kink” junk I’d encountered in passing. But instead of just posting the junk, I started asking questions. That’s never a smart thing when you expected less than five thousand words total, and thus have no outline to defend yourself from the plot bunnies putting on harness and towing your story out to places you never thought it would go. Hey Joe was the continuation in both directions of two throw-away example scene snippets I wrote in a forum post. Once again, no “outline shield.” To answer @GeorgeGlass’s post directly: I agree with 1. and 3. completely, except for if I’m writing a crack/bash/parody, then 1. will be broken by the very nature of what I’m writing. 2. doesn’t bother me so much. When I’m writing fiction, I envision the fictional character exclusively, even if the character was portrayed in film or television. In the Potterverse, I write about Ron Weasley, Harry Potter, Severus Snape, etc; not Rupert Grint, Daniel Radcliffe, or Alan Rickman. Likewise if my original fiction has historical or modern real people characters, they will never be “main” characters, and anything they do do will either be their historical actions, or non-defamatory actions they would likely have logically taken had the entire story been real life. So, if a group of musically talented kids get some help from a real-life rock star, that’s because had the kids existed in real life, the rock star in question would have helped them. Of course, if I need a fictional character to hold a real-life position somewhere, “Mr. Real Life” never existed, and the fictional character will not resemble “Mr. Real Life” in any way at all whatsoever other than having turfed them out of their jobs and (fictional) existence. This, of course, is just one of many challenges when you insert fictional characters into real-life locations and times, and why its done, but done very very sparingly on the commercial front. But it can be done without legal or other life-changing adverse consequences, as can be witnessed to by Mario Puzo or Allen Drury. Cheers!

I’m looking forward to the site being back up. Quick update for everyone! I now have 12 chapters waiting to be uploaded Wish it was more but hopefully the quality will be worth the wait.

My potter fanfic makes Harry’s time in canon… a cakewalk. I do stray a bit OOC because I do have the death eaters effective in their designs and plans. I also let myself get bogged down in the details, but that captures the grind that Harry would experience in this, as he steadily becomes persona-non-grata throughout the wizarding world, unable to stop the slog of negative press slandering him. It’s enjoyable to keep writing here, because the narrative is so addictive for what comes next; even on the rewrite, despite knowing, it’s still enjoyable. For other fandoms, I occasionally do get thoughts, mostly of the mary/gary sue variety, nothing worth writing about TBH, because original works is where the rest of my fun writing is at.

It has to interest me for example one of my first fan fics. Was a Skynet X John Connor. Alot of people tend to forget before everyone saw marvel bring multiverse to the public consciousness you need a really stacked out world built first and people use it very wrong. Just like that latest abomination of terminator. For John Connor is supposed to be a constant just as Skynet is inevitability bound intrinsically together. They are Judgement Day. Sarah Connor isn’t just John Connor’s mother. She’s also Mother of The Machines but I’ve gone on long enough on my tangent on the misuse of multiverse. I do want to LOTR fic eventually finally getting comfortable with writing smut.

Hi, Deadman and all. Not really. The better fanfics out there provide interesting counters to canon, and if the canon itself is good, allows for the better appreciation of both. As for what I write beyond what’s posted here, I tend to write “slice-of-life,” “Peggy-Sue” (never to be confused with Mary Sue,) and crossovers. By their very nature, those types of stories are not usually written by the “original” authors. But, even in commercial-land; crossovers, and even character migration can and do happen. And hopefully “Wide Stance” also enjoys this discussion, once they catch up with the tag. 😜 (I’ve done it too, and I’m laughing with you...) Cheers!

@Sessakag@Wide Stance Do you ever find yourself getting less interested in fanfic if you get what you want in the canon? For instance, I find that because I tend to focus on femmeslash stories, if I’m watching a TV show that introduces an FF pairing of some kind, I have less interest in doing fanfic for that fandom. It’s not impossible, but I was recently watching a show where the main pairing is FF, which is cool, but it made me less interested in fanfic.

Here’s some “ear-worm candy” for all of you to go along with mine. A very newly formed teenage rock band performs a cold-read “spite-set” during a live appearance before an audience because the band’s leader totally misunderstood a criticism offered by a performer he invited in to listen to them. The set consists of: Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin,) Nights on Broadway (Bee Gees,) Immigrant Song (Led Zeppelin,) Babe I’m Gonna Leave You (Led Zeppelin version,) transitioned directly into 25 or 6 to 4 (Chicago.) The band hasn’t performed any of these songs as a complete band before, and have no sheet music in front of them. They literally put the set together in a two minute conversation before playing it live. Yet they’re good enough that only the few people who know the band pulled the set out of their asses on the spot even realize that the set was anything other than a well-rehearsed performance. This was their second set of the night. The first set, which the band leader didn’t think they rehearsed well enough, was also very good and well received by the audience.

I think one of the most overlooked benefits of writing fan fiction is how often it leads to incredible original fiction.