: Shared World licensing fees I have a world/universe that I wish to open up to other writers. However I am unsure how I should structure the licensing fees and rights of ownership over the

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As Patches noted, play first, pay second.

I launched a shared story world commercial entertainment property, and I curate examples of others. It is possible to make money from a shared world, but the hurdle is getting folks to want to play in the world first.

You'll need to build a compelling world, lay out the rules clearly about how rights and revenue will be shared, and seed the world with quality content first. Money coming in your door is second (and may take many months before it actually does occur).

Take a look at the worlds listed at sharedstoryworlds.com and examine how they structured their legal agreements, revenue sharing, and copyright terms for some ideas about how your world could work. Look at how they have structured their world and the content inside it.

Also, take a look at Into the Far West. I know the creator behind that world, and he's pushing for something close to what you're describing (i.e., an entertainment IP people pay to play in). He hasn't fully rolled out that portion of it, but I want to point out how much he's already done to build and blow out the world.

Hope this helps, and good luck with your project!

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Licensing fees
Do you own the rights to, say, Starwars or Forgotten Realms or Hunger Games or Twilight or anything that big? 'Cause if you don't, no one's going to pay you to use the universe. Think about it -- why should I, the poor starving writer, give you what little money I have, or have coming in, for something I can do myself for free? There's only one reason -- BFB. That's right, Big F-ing Brand. A brand that can take my piddly sales and jack them up to a couple hundred K worth of books sold, and put my name on the map. And all 'cause it has that little brand stamp on the cover.

I think you're thinking about it the wrong way. This isn't something you can make money off directly. What you can do is make a killer open source** world and an even better site that by game-izing it (like stackexchange did), draws in tons of writers to develop & use this open source universe.

**Note: do some kind of creative commons license that allows individuals to commercially use the universe, but corps have to pay

Rights of ownership -- wrong question again. the right question is:

How to manage Canon?
For that some ideas:

Everything published by a reputable publisher is cannon
Everything self-published that has greater than X # of sales is cannon
Something approved by the titans of your awesome-site-of-shared-world-building is cannon
Something with X # of non-titan cannonize votes on said site is cannon

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