Kindle Worlds and My Take On It

You may not have heard, but Amazon released something that's shaking up the world of fanfiction a little this morning. It's called Kindle Worlds and it means you can download fanfiction in certain genres straight to your Kindle...by paying for them. The low-down is that WB has given up some of the creative licenses to things like Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, which means that writers can professionally publish fic based on those shows. It will be content controlled, it looks like, but there haven't been any guidelines released yet (no pornography is one of the guidelines, but this is also the publisher of 50 Shades of Grey, so take that with whatever boulder of salt you find necessary).

And on the surface, it looks great, right? Getting to pay your favorite writers for fic that they write! The chance that other fandoms may follow in suit! WB has rights to Chuck and Fringe, after all, so some fandoms close to our hearts might be involved very soon!

Except...well, John Scalzi puts it way better than I can about why this might not be such a good idea for writers. Plus, when I wrote Fates, W11, W&T, SSD!, and my other fandomly works, I didn't write those for pay but for love of the characters/show/writing itself. Providing these for free wasn't taking any money from anybody else (except for lucky47, who used to buy internet on a cruise ship to read Fates), which is the way I ethically justify playing with characters that are not my own.

So, in the future I might change my mind, but currently, I won't be doing this with any new Chuckfic or other genre, should the opportunity arise. But I appreciate everybody that has pointed me to it! It warms me all the way down to my soul that you're looking out for me like that.

Sincerely,
Frea

PS - It's been a crazy couple of weeks, so there hasn't been much fic from me, but I did manage to write a really short piece about Steve Rogers acclimating to the future over on my Tumblr. You should check that out. And get ready for a long fic from me soon!