Noted: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad (Kindle) World

[djonn]

I've seen a good deal of reaction over the last couple of days to Amazon's announcement of its "Kindle Worlds" program in which it aims to solicit and publish licensed (!) fanfiction set in a handful of franchise universes.  Both the fanfic world and certain corners of the professional writing community are rising up in mutual astonishment, mostly to point out the holes in Amazon's logic.

At the same time, both the fans and the pros seem cautiously convinced that the program is actually going to work -- that is, that people are actually going to make money on the deal.

I'm not.  I think the odds are against anyone -- writer, licensor, Amazon -- turning a significant profit on the venture.   Let me explain....

The project will need writers -- but I expect most fan writers to balk at paying setup and administrative fees in order to post their work.  Amazon is virtually certain to charge such fees (it has costs to recoup, about which more in a moment), but while fan culture might not blink at letting fanwriters make money at their craft, it will blink at Amazon taking a piece of the pie up front.

The project will need editors -- because Amazon and licensor Alloy Entertainment have imposed content restrictions on what they'll allow to be posted, and someone will have to see that individual works comply with those rules.  That's going to impose a cost on Amazon in addition to the usual overhead associated with self-publishing ventures, and the money to pay those editors will have to come from somewhere.

And the project will need readers -- but the works posted on Amazon will be competing with free-access fanworks posted on sites like Fanfiction.Net and the Archive of Our Own, and the free-access works will offer greater variety and range (crossovers! smut!  both forbidden by the licensors' content constraints).

With only the licenses so far announced, I don't think there will be enough material to kick Kindle Worlds over its critical-mass threshold.  Fanfic casts a very wide net -- but mostly it's a wide net over a shallow pool.  There are a very few mega-franchises in which there's enough supply and demand for fanfic to generate a significant revenue stream -- but those are exactly the franchises least likely to grant licenses for Amazon to open up their sandboxes.

Comments

[msagara.livejournal.com]

What do you think the likelihood is that Amazon will attempt to shut down the free fan-fiction sites for properties it’s licensing, given the shift?

[djonn]

That's an interesting question. On one hand, it's the sort of thing you'd ordinarily expect big media to do -- but I actually very much doubt that Amazon will try.

The thing is, they can't actually shut down a site like Fanfiction.Net or AO3 in a case like this, because too much of the content on those sites falls outside direct competition. FF.Net might blink and drop the licensed fandoms, but the last thing Amazon needs in this situation is to rouse the wrath of the Organization for Transformative Works (the group behind the AO3), because the OTW is liable to actually fight back.

That would be dangerous on multiple levels. It would cost Amazon anything it might have built up in the way of fannish goodwill for Kindle Worlds, which could sharply reduce the inflow of content. It would begin costing them significant money for litigation, which would affect the profitability of Kindle Worlds (which is only a moneymaker if it actually has contributors and customers). Moreover -- and this is the big one -- it's an axiom in legal circles that you only want to litigate issues where you know how the case will go down. And thanks to the OTW and the long-standing benign corporate neglect that has allowed noncommercial fanfiction to thrive on the 'Net, there is no real guarantee that a lawsuit on the specific facts would be resolved in Amazon's favor.

For all that much of the pro writing community regards fanfic as "illegal", there's very little settled law that squarely addresses the non-commercial distribution of fanfic -- both fanfic creators and big media have been content for a long time to avoid confronting the issues in open court. One of the reasons for this is almost certainly that it isn't certain how the courts would rule...and it would be disastrous for big media if they decided that noncommercial fanfic was actually permissible under fair use.

Essentially, it's a lose-lose for Amazon to litigate. If they lose, they lose for all of big media...and even if they win, the cost in legal fees and Kindle Worlds customers is likely to kill the project.

[seawasp]

You may be right; Amazon probably needs at least one of the really heavy-hitters' licenses to make this go, and the real big boys (or girls) aren't likely to give those licenses at a price that Amazon can afford.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't see this flying at all. I think it ignores a lot of the motives behind fanfiction, most of which are not easily monetized.