This is a pretty long post, if you don't feel like reading it all, the first few paragraphs will give you the general idea of what is being discussed and you could skip down to the discussion questions at the bottom.
So I wanted to discuss this but wasn't sure if I should...but I really want to know other peoples thoughts on it, so I'm going to.
Fanfiction kind of has a rep for being badly written, riddled with cliches and Mary Sues and author inserts and all that stuff...but in amongst all the bad stuff, there's a lot of raw talent and some genuienly good writers who create brilliant stories and write them well.
Some of those good fanfics become really popular. Some of those really popular fanfics are then removed, edited so the character names are changed then published as original fiction. And I can't decide whether I think that's okay or not and I'd like to know you're thoughts on this.
One of the former-Twilight fanfics,
Fifty Shades of Gray, was apparently self published with the name changes then picked up by one of the big publishers (maybe?) and has had movie interest and all that (even making the NYT best seller list).
Most of the other fic-turned-novels I've seen have started out as Twilight fanfics (actually, I've not stumbled across any that didn't start out as Twilight-related fanfiction) and they're usually very AU (alternate universe) and often AH (all human characters) - there's no denying that the writers have talent and that the stories are usually really original, especially in comparison to most of the fanfics floating around out there. But at the same time, the roots of the stories that inspired them are still there.
Some are definitely so AU that they pass as entirely original with name changes, but even some of the most original ones still have things in them that would not have been written had they not been fanfics first. For example: Poughkeepsie.
I read that when it was a fanfic and it was awesome, really brilliant, moving, great characters, great writing - but in the plot it had Edward be a piano playing homeless dude who was afraid to go out in the sun in case his skin sparkled (reasoning is different from Twilight, of course, but it's still obviously a reference to Twilight), Carlisle is still the doctor father figure, Rosalie has still become this broken girl because of something in her past that has left her unable to have the thing she wants most: a family, the pairings are the same.
Those things weren't created by the author entirely, they were things from Twilight and switched up a little to make the Twilight references and character types fit the new story...and that's fine, but is it wrong to just switch up the names then sell it (usually not even acknowledging the fanfic roots of the story)?
There was an author who pulled her story, claimed she was editing it to get it published but she posted a section on fanfic to go with her announcement that she was publishing it - she made a mistake though, all of the fanfic character names were still there only they'd changed to things like "BellaHannah" and stuff like that, revealing that the only editing the writer had done was hit find + replace to change the names (and hadn't even done that quite right), she didn't remove the Twilight references or anything.
It's legal...at least I think it is, so long as they remove any obvious copyrighted stuff. But something about it doesn't sit well with me.
That's what bothers me, I think - I do think these writers are talented enough to be published and deserve to cash in on that talent, but the way they're going about it...just seems kind of like a moral gray area. They usually self publish or do it through a site like
Omnific Publishing (whose writers are all former fanfic writers and most of the books were former Twifics) or
The Writers Coffee Shop - would a traditional publisher even accept a former fanfic and publish it? I don't know, so far 50 Shades of Gray is the only one I know of.

Another of the fanfics-turned-novels was actually a former Robert Pattinson fic, as far as I know - where the love interest in the story was Robert Pattinson and I think the girl was either an original character or an author insert and sexytime happens...or something, possibly...something about THAT then getting some name changes to become original fiction just seems kind of - well, I have no words (I keep imagining Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart finding this book, reading it and being all, "Oh my god, this is about Rob. This is someones fantasies about Rob. Ewww.").
The thing about fanfiction is, fanfic has been kind of a gray area in the past - most people claim it's fair use as far as copyright goes but some authors are not okay with it and say it's illegal although because of how much of a gray area it is, it's unlikely an author would really take things further if they were against it (beyond sending a C&D letter to the fanfic site or whatever).
One of the big things in the pro-fanfic argument is that these people who write it are doing it for fun, out of love of the original stories, and they do not profit from it. But taking fanfic and changing names and selling it...well, that's profiting from it, isn't it?
There are examples of published fanfics out there that are legit - they don't claim to be anything other than fanfic, they don't pass themselves off as original and they're done with permission of the copyright holders (like published books of TV shows - I own some of those for Dark Angel, Dawsons Creek and Supernatural).
I've written fanfiction in the past (a lot of which has now been pulled and hidden deep in some cringe-worthy file on my laptop) and yeah, it feels good when you finish it and feels like an accomplishment...but I'd never want to take it and try and pretend it was entirely orginal. Instead, I started from scratch with stories that were brand new and I kind of wish these other fanfic authors had done that too - they definitely have the talent for it, they have more than one story in them.
Maybe it's because for me personally, I know that the way my fanfic ideas start and my original ideas start are different. Fanfics (for me, at least), start as, "Well, what if this happened instead of what happened in the book?" or "What if this character fell in love with this character?" or "What if all the supernatural characters were human and then this happened...?" - all of those are sparked by the book or show or movie they're a fanfic of and it's just changing things that are already there or taking what is already there and making it happen in a different way, but original fiction is different.
For me it's original from the start, it's more: "Well, what if there was a character who...?" or "What if there was a world like this...?" and I start from scratch with the characters and their world and relationships to each other. And that's different to me, I couldn't just change the names in fanfics and pretend it wasn't inspired by something else.
Last time I checked, Omnific Publishing doesn't even acknowledge on their site that their books are former fanfics, not sure if TWCS does either (haven't checked).
And the readers - are people really buying and liking these stories because they're genuinely good? Or is it because they still view the characters as the characters from the fanfic they read? Or because they already loved the fanfic? (From comments I've read about Fifty Shades of Gray, the majority I've seen mentioning the movie interest are saying Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart should play the characters - the characters that were fanfic characters of a story they already starred in, so clearly a lot of the fans of FSoG haven't cut all the ties between that book and it's TwiFic roots.)
That's one of the reasons I've been reluctant to buy any of the published versions of the fanfics - I don't know if I would judge them as books in their own right, or if I'll still be viewing them as the fanfics I read and loved over the years (because the ones that I haven't read the fanfics for? Genuinely no interest in reading the books after reading the summaries).
That's another one of the issues I have... it almost seems like some of these writers are using popular books like Twilight to launch their own stories. They post fanfiction, then once they gain a following, they pull the stories from the fanfic sites and publish it as original fiction after changing the names - if they had just published it as original fiction from the start, finding readers wouldn't have been quite so easy.
Seriously, I've written bloody awful fanfiction in the past and ended up on the favourite author/author alert list of like a thousand people and got thousands of reviews and all that, but my original fiction that is genuinely better writing... I'm lucky if those stories get 5 reviews outside of a writing community I'm a member of, and that's because with fanfiction, a large part of the reason people read and like the story is because they're projecting characters they already love onto it.
Basically, these writers are either taking something they viewed as fanfiction and intended to be fanfiction then deciding to pass it off as purely original, or they're taking their original fiction and passing it off as fanfiction to gain an audience... neither of which sits well with me.
I think maybe I'd feel be less reluctant to read these books if they had undergone serious editing and rewrites before being published instead of name changes.
Before I get to the discussion questions, I just want to be clear: I'm not judging the people that do this (except for maybe the "publishers" because I've read a lot of shady stuff about them, including stuff about their contracts being unfair) and I understand why they would do it and I think these authors have real talent and do deserve to be published...I'm just on the fence about whether or not I think it's right to publish fanfics as original fiction.
So what are your thoughts?
Discussion questions:
1. Do you think it's right for fanfics to be published as original fiction? Why?
2. Would you ever buy any of these books that used to be fanfics?
3. What do you think of the possibility of them being optioned as movies?
4. Do you think it's worse when the fanfics are based on real people (like the Rob Pattinson one)?
5. What are your thoughts on publishers like Omnific Publishing, who only seem to search out successful fanfics and then publish them?
6. How would you feel about these books being reviewed on the blog? And do you have any other thoughts on this whole topic?
Feel free to disagree with any of the stuff I've said in this post, I'm unsure of my thoughts on the situation which is why I wanted to discuss it so I'd like to hear from people who are pro-fanfics-turned-novels too.
Later.