: Re: 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

@Cody1607638

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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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