: Can fanfics be bestsellers? Fanfiction is somewhat of an uncharted territory, which few actual writers/critics take serious note of or are very enthusiastic about. It has been long asked and established
Fanfiction is somewhat of an uncharted territory, which few actual writers/critics take serious note of or are very enthusiastic about. It has been long asked and established whether publishing fanfics is even legally possible at all. Yes, it is possible as long as the work in question doesn't violate copyrights and the plot line isn't too dependent on the original novel it was inspired from. But have there been cases where works that count as fanfiction to some degree have been literally successful and turned out as bestsellers?
Of course, I understand that it isn't very fruitful or wise for a budding writer to work in this genre. One will just be wasting their time and talent. I just feel that having examples of the exceptional bestseller fanfics at hand would be useful for all of those writers out there.
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@Cofer669
Yes, unless you decide that a commercially-successful story can’t be called “fanfic.†The debate seems entirely to be about whether we call books that can get legally published, “fanfics.â€
There have been a lot of bestsellers that everyone would agree were “fanfic†if they’d originally been posted for free on the Internet, or even were. Some well-known liminal cases: officially authorized (Spock Must Die, Heir to the Empire), or based on works in the public domain (West Side Story, and for that matter, Romeo and Juliet).
Or where the author directly stated that they changed the characters’ names so they wouldn’t get sued. This is perhaps most blatant when a fanfic openly gets rewritten into an “original†novel with the characters renamed. Fifty Shades of Gray famously started out as an explicit “All-Human†fanfic of Twilight, in more than one sense. David Brin’s The Life Eaters was a rewrite of his novella “Thor Meets Captain America.†There are a lot of modern fanfics that essentially try to re-tell a famous story from a different perspective—usually the villain’s. Gregory McGuire’s Wicked, John Gardner’s Grendel, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Mary Gentle, for example, has said:
And then there’s Grunts!, which is my take on fantasy—genre fantasy, I should say, and fantasy war-gaming, and how "fantasy" ends up being portrayed in the media. And Tolkien. Ursula Le Guin said reading Lord of the Rings made her want to go out and form the Hobbit Socialist Party. It’s very difficult to disagree with that. I’d had my “proud, noble, orcish warriors†story in mind since I was about fifteen... but it only really jelled when I realised it was going to be a black comedy, best imagined in animated form; and the “proud noble warriors†told me they were more like “mean motherfuckers with big guns!â€
The Star Trek anthologies Strange New Worlds are another instance where even the authors receiving royalty checks seemed to get confused about whether they were writing “fanfic†that didn’t count as professional publication. I remember, shortly after the first one came out, reading a conversation on Usenet where one of those writers bemoaned that Paramount was only taking pitches from published authors, and someone from Paramount replied: Oh no, we published you ourselves in Strange New Worlds, so you’re welcome to pitch to us again.
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@Cofer669
The 50 shades of grey book was originally written as Twilight fan-fiction. When it came to publishing just some of the names where changed, so yes Fan-Fiction can be tremendously succsesful!
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@Hamaas631
I am not sure if this one counts, but there are several works that call themselves fanfiction of the original Holy Bible [1]. And surely they do not encounter copyright and other problems that other fanfics usually have to deal with.
Some of these works managed to be quite successful. Such as the ones listed in here, or, maybe Dante's the divine comedy .
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@RJPawlick285
Star Trek Strange New Worlds was a yearly publication of a book of short stories of fan fiction sanctioned by Paramount Licensing. Considering at least some of the prize-winners within these books went on to publish individual Star trek books and the vast number of Star Trek-related books by previously unknown authors, I would say these count as "fan-fic" writers.
Of course, whether any of these can be classified as "best-selling" is dependent on your definition, but they are certainly professionally published and endorsed.
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@Goswami879
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" did quite well - well enough to get a fan audiobook, fanfiction of it's own, a Wikipedia page and reviews in The Washington Post, VICE and The Atlantic.
There are no sales figures I'm aware of.
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@Deb2945533
The main obstacle to fanfics flooding the market is copyright. As long as the original author holds the copyright for their work, fanfics can only live as free stuff on the internet. (Or, as Kirk points out, they can be "reskinned", "retooled", so they're not obviously recognisable as fanfic. In which case, it all depends on how good your lawyers are compared to the lawyers of the original writer.) I personally think that making money off somebody else's work in this fashion is sort of stealing. Cervantes notably was extremely unhappy about someone publishing a Don Quixote fanfic, and went on to publish his own Don Quixote II, in which he mocked the fanfic. But such moral considerations are beside the point.
Once the copyright is over, the work you wanted to write fanfic about is either long forgotten, in which case the fanfic loses its point, or it's become a classic, in which case judgement of your fanfic is going to be rather harsh: what can you, unknown modern writer, add to the time-honoured classic? Such works do exist, but are less common.
And then, when a work is old enough, it turns out that yes, you do have something to add to it. Enough time has passed that retelling the same story in a different way is now original, interesting, respected, literary. Once and Future King and Mists of Avalon are both Le Morte d'Arthur fanfics. Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia is an Aeneid fanfic. Except that at this point they are no longer called fanfics.
What differentiates your run-of-the-mill fanfic from works like Once and Future King or Wide Sargasso Sea that you mention, is that the former aim mostly at producing more of the same, with some measure of insert-fic and/or doing things to the original book's romances. Whereas works of the latter kind seek to engage with the source material, and using it, say something new, unique. In this fashion, they outgrow the "fanfic" definition.
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@Alves689
For a while, Amazon ran a program called Kindle Worlds where writers could write "fanfic" within the world of subscribed authors (Hugh Howey's Wool series, for example) within certain original author-established parameters. I wrote and published a story in that system, and it sold better than I expected (several hundred copies, maybe), and I had, over the course of a few years, a couple hundred extra dollars. No bestseller, but I can see how one could come out of a situation like that.
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@Ogunnowo420
Why wouldn't it be possible?
Yes. Fifty Shades et al are Twilight fanfics. Note that you may have to reskin a work (change characters, names, settings, etc) to get far enough away from the original work.
Let's try this again: Is Sherlock Holmes on the BBC fanfic? Yup.
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@Cody1607638
Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind.
It cannot exactly be considered a fanfic, given that it was a direct result of the writer's disagreement with Bronte's unflattering portrayal of a certain Creole character. Madwife Bertha of Jane Eyre is almost antagonistic, in the sense that it is one of the forces that hold the titular protagonist from fulfilling her dreams and hopes.
But it can be called a "rip-off" (for the lack of a better word) of Jane Eyre, based on one of the central characters from the same. (The story line doesn't rely too heavily on Jane Eyre though.) And it's a classic in that and can be thought of as a bestseller by extension. I don't suppose the messages and themes in it would have been too popular in those times and that they would have sold either. But it is not unheard of now and definitely critically acclaimed and a fine piece of work in my opinion, serving as an elegant response (or you could see it as a payback) to the subtle literary degradation of the Creole people.
Jean Rhys might have been a fan of Bronte's work in general, but this one surely didn't sprout from any especial feelings of admiration towards her. She just took the liberty of taking an almost antagonistic character (whom she renames "Antoinette") from Jane Eyre and explaining her backstory from a completely different angle. And that is to convey that Antoinette had been unjustly shown as a mere mad woman with animalistic instincts who is simply incapable of being sympathised with. She literally fleshes out that character and walks us through her fall (one that she makes us realise is very human).
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