Amazon fan-fiction program lets Vampire Diaries author reclaim her storyline

This is kind of an amazing story from the Wall Street Journal.  Last year, Amazon announced a new program called Kindle Words, which made it permissible for writers to sell their own fan-fiction of licensed characters owned by other writers and corporations.  This is only possible with certain franchises that Amazon made their deal with.  Anything owned by Alloy Entertainment is fair game, which includes The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl, among others.

I have to admit, I have a generally low opinion of fan fiction.  If you really want to write, you'll learn a lot more by trying to tell your own original stories where you have to build a universe out of whole cloth instead of piggy-backing onto someone else's work.

The interesting wrinkle in this is that it has opened the door for a previously-fired writer to continue telling stories in the series where she was replaced.  Around 1991, a writer named L.J. Smith was hired by Alloy to create a series of vampire books for a young-adult audience.  This was the origin of The Vampire Diaries, which would go on to spawn several books in the series and get a resurgence when the CW created a TV adaptation of the novels.

Then, as the article notes, she was abruptly fired about a year ago.  Yet, the series continued under a ghostwriter, with L.J. Smith's name still appearing prominently on the books.  I'll let the article take it from here:


After she was let go, Ms. Smith shifted her focus to her other teen series—she publishes three popular fantasy series with Simon & Schuster, which have some three million copies in print—and a new post-apocalyptic novel. But the unfinished plot of "The Vampire Diaries" nagged at her. She missed writing about the characters.

Ms. Smith began publishing Vampire Diaries fan fiction through Amazon's Kindle Worlds in January. Amazon and Alloy get a cut of the sales and control many rights to the stories. 

Then, last fall, Ms. Smith's tax attorney and friend, Julie Divola, emailed her about Kindle Worlds and noted that Alloy was allowing fans to sell stories based on "The Vampire Diaries."

In January of this year, Ms. Smith started publishing her fan fiction on Kindle Worlds. So far, she's released two books: a novel, "Evensong: Paradise Lost," and the novella-length story "The War of Roses," for $3.99 and $1.99 respectively. Amazon won't disclose the sales figures for L.J. Smith's fan fiction or any other fan fiction.

"Evensong" picks up after "Midnight," Ms. Smith's last official Vampire Diaries book, and continues the story as though books eight through 12 never happened. It features the same cast of characters: the long-suffering heroine, Elena; her dueling love interests, the sexy vampire brothers Damon and Stefan Salvatore, the werewolf Caroline and the psychic medium Bonnie, among others.

Ms. Smith says that when she began publishing her Vampire Diaries fan fiction on Amazon this past January, she wasn't aware that she was giving up the copyright to those stories, too. Nor did she realize she'd be giving Alloy a cut of earnings from the new stories. But had she known, it wouldn't have deterred her, she says. "It wouldn't have stopped me," she says. "I didn't do these books for money. They're entirely a labor of love."

Amazon's fan-fiction program is allowing an author to make a little money finishing off a series she can't contribute to officially.  That's pretty cool.

Now if only we can work out something similar for Revenge so that Mike Kelley can finish out that story his way, I'll be really happy.

More on fan fiction as a way to make a name for yourself

After my recent post debating the merits of writing fan fiction under one's own name, I got an email from Susan Bridges of PendantAudio.com. With her permission, I'm reprinting it below.

I saw your blog post with the question regarding fan fiction. My husband and I are kind of in the same boat in some ways.

See, we have a podcasting company -- PendantAudio.com, which we founded back in 2004. It's not the "here's some guys talking about what they think" type of podcasts -- all the shows are scripted serials released monthly. Pendant started out as all DC fan fiction, but over time we added other original shows (and we still add the occasional fan fiction show as well, both DC related and in other genres). We also maintain a comic-type continuity among our DC shows.

While no one who works on Pendant shows is paid, it's, well... huge. We have writers, editors (including a continuity editor who focuses on all of our DC universe material), actors, directors, producers, and promotions people from all over the world. As far as podcasting companies go, we're very well respected, and nobody else puts out material on deadline so consistently -- we haven't missed a scheduled release date in years. We're also popular -- right now we are slated to have over 3 million MP3 files downloaded this year.

Currently we're leveraging Pendant to get in with comic companies. We've got some comic proposals put together with the help of some of our friends, and I mention to them that Pendant basically produces scripted original serials. By having some business cards and explaining a bit about Pendant, I managed to get our proposals to editors at IDW and Aspen. So I'm using Pendant to gain some leverage and set us apart from other unpublished writers, even though much of Pendant is fan fiction related. Whether or not it'll really work... well, it's too soon to tell, I suppose.

So perhaps I spoke to soon and fan fiction can be a legitimate way into mainstream writing. Time will tell, I suppose.

Playing with someone else's toys

When I was 10, my parents bought a video camera and, knowing my interest in film, they encouraged me to play with it and perhaps make a movie or two. Naturally, I did what any aspiring filmmaker my age would have done – I shot a fan-film for a movie series I loved, casting my friends in the iconic parts of that franchise. The plot was thin, and basically an assembly of some of my favorite moments and lines of dialogue from that series and there were maybe about two ounces of originality to it – my own mistakes.

So it’s not that I don’t understand the compulsion to remake a favorite movie, or to make a sequel to a favorite film. And I’m hardly alone in my urges. When he was 14, Len Wiseman apparently shot a backyard version of Die Hard. The thing is, that kind of fan fiction has a time and a place. When you’re ten, it’s no big deal to invest your time in writing and/or shooting your own James Bond or Star Wars sequel. But if you’re trying to break into the business, writing a sequel or a remake really isn’t the way to go about it.

When you’re writing a screenplay, presumably you want to sell it, and logically that means that you want to have as many potential buyers as possible. Just by way of example, an action-comedy with original characters is the sort of script you can take to any producer and any studio in town. But what if you decide you want to write the next Star Trek movie. Do you know how many potential buyers do you have in that case? One – the studio that owns the rights to the series, which in this case would be Paramount. And do you know what you are if Paramount reads and feels they’d like to “go in a different direction?” Screwed.

If you don’t hold the rights to what you’re writing about, don’t bother. Amazingly, I’ve seen several scripts over the years where wannabe writers have ignored that advice. Possibly the most ridiculous violation of this rule I saw was a script that was a misguided attempt to continue a 30 year-old action franchise by crossing it over with another 40 year old film! One of those films featured an actor long dead, and the other featured an actor who likely would never return to this signature role. Out of respect for the writer, I won’t post the specifics, but it was sort of like crossing over The French Connection with the original Gone in 60 Seconds. It would have been difficult enough to do a sequel to just one of those films, but with a crossover, this writer was putting himself in a situation where he couldn’t make a sale unless two completely different sets of producers and rights-holders signed off on the concept. This would have been a legal nightmare even if someone like Steven Spielberg or J.J. Abrams was determined to make it.

And let’s be realistic here – in the case of franchise films like those, the studio never is going to buy the latest sequel as a spec. Those kinds of tentpoles already have specific producers attached, and they’ll have considerable say in the hiring of a writer. Even if you manage to query the producers, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d be receptive to a script from an unproven outsider, and again, there’s still only one guy you can take that script to. As a writer, the franchise film isn’t something you can really go after until you’re inside the club. Then, either your agent will lobby to get you onto, say, the next Superman. Or the producers or studio behind said movie will come to you and say, “How’d you like a crack at Superman?”

If you don’t have any script sales to your name, you’re essentially an unproven writer and no one hands a franchise movie to those guys. It’s like writing for the school paper and then expecting to get hired as the main political writer at The New York Times. It just doesn’t happen.

So consider all that before you invest six months of your life writing a live-action adaptation of the 80s cartoon Jem and the Holograms or GoBots. In the end, you’re going to need your own idea and your own characters in order to break into this business.