: Re: 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

@Cofer669

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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.”

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!”

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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