Can I offer paid commission for stories on AFF?

[Melrick]

I’d like to offer paid commission for stories here.  Is that allowed?

No.  That’s the short answer.  And now a more detailed answered for those of you who don’t have the attention span of a hyperactive 2 year old.

Firstly, let’s be clear what we mean by ‘paid commission’.  Basically, you want someone to pay you money to write a certain kind of story.  The commissioner might have the exact details in mind, or they might only supply you with the very basics and leave the rest up to you.  We don’t allow these.

There’s an extremely good reason why we don’t allow paid commission on fan fiction: It’s illegal!  Always has been, always will be.  You can’t profit from someone else’s copy-written works; that’s just simple legal facts 101.  Doing so could land you in a lot of trouble for doing it in the first place, and us for hosting it.

But what about commission on original works?  The answer is still no, I’m afraid.

There’s no law against that, it’s true, but it’s still against our Terms of Service.  Adult Fan Fiction isn’t an indie publishing house; it’s nothing more than a story archive.  Work written on paid commission becomes the property of the person for whom it was written.  Given that you accepted payment, our Terms of Service would prohibit your posting that work under your account.  Similarly, the person who commissioned the work could not post it, because it is not their work, any more than a novel I purchased for my Kindle would be mine for the purposes of posting it online.  We just don’t want to go down that particular road.  Everything here is free and we want to keep it that way.

There are other story archive sites out there that couldn’t care less about this, so if this is important to you then I’d recommend trying one of them (and crossing your fingers, if you’re offering commission on fan fiction).  But for us, it’s not allowed and will be shut down the moment we see anyone advertising paid commission services.