The Weird World of Fan Fiction

They’re amateur writers—with millions of readers. After years in the shadows, they’re starting to break into the mainstream.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

What if Edward Cullen, the moody vampire heartthrob in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling “Twilight” series, was an undercover cop? Or a baker who specializes in bachelor-party cakes? Or a kidnapper who takes Bella hostage?

It may sound like heresy to some “Twilight” fans. But those stories, published online, have thousands of dedicated readers. They were written by Randi Flanagan, a 35-year-old sales manager for a trade publishing company in Toronto.

Ms. Flanagan writes fan fiction—amateur works based on the characters and settings from novels, movies, television shows, plays, videogames or pop songs. Such stories, which take place in fictional worlds created by professional writers, are flourishing online and attracting millions of readers.

Ms. Flanagan started writing her own takes on “Twilight” three years ago, after devouring Ms. Meyer’s vampire books. She has since written 15 stories, including some that are as long as novels. In the process, she has gained groupies of her own. Some 1,500 readers subscribe to her account on fanfiction.net.

“A lot of people don’t understand why I would devote time to this,” says Ms. Flanagan, who writes at night after her young son goes to bed. “It’s just fun.”

Fan fiction has long existed under the radar in a sort of shadowy digital parallel universe. But the form has been bubbling up to the surface lately, as a growing number of fan writers break into the mainstream.

The publishing industry’s current overnight sensation, erotica author E.L. James, began writing her best-selling book “Fifty Shades of Grey” as “Twilight” fan fiction. She began posting her X-rated take on Ms. Meyer’s tame paranormal romance online three years ago. Her “Twilight” homage, titled “Master of the Universe,” evolved into a series starring a powerful CEO and a young woman in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. The books were acquired by Vintage, a Random House imprint, this spring and have sold 15 million copies in less than three months. Now, in a sort of literary infinite feedback loop, fans of the trilogy have begun writing their own takes on “Fifty Shades,” including an inevitable parody that mashes up “Fifty Shades” with “Twilight.”

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LURID: Spanky Panky, Fifty Shades of O

LURID: vivid in shocking detail; sensational, horrible in savagery or violence, or, a twice-monthly guide to the merits of the kind of Bad Books you never want your co-workers to know you're reading.

By Karina Wilson

Fifty Shades of Grey has caused all manner of sensation.  The Twilight fanfic turned erotic bestseller has garnered column inches and thousands of fans, reignited sparkless marriages, been the subject of a Hollywood bidding war, inspired a parody (Fifty Shames of Earl Grey) and made everyone look twice at the woman on the subway enthralled by the content of her Kindle.  However, erotic literature is nothing new.  In all languages, from The Song Of Solomon to Fanny Hill, from Catullus and Plutarch to Anais Nin and Henry Miller, people have been looking to fiction for kicks since writing was invented – the earliest surviving erotic literature in existence was hand-copied, by monks – and it’s only in our sexually schizoid times that the popularity of such a book comes as any surprise.

So, why all the fuss?  Despite the ‘Mommy Porn’ hype, FSOG contains little that’s genuinely scandalous.  It’s a straightforward tale of Girl-with-low-self-esteem meets ridiculously handsome Boy, gets Boy, has lots of sex, angsts.  It’s straight outta Barbara Cartland or Danielle Steele.  In keeping with the genre, the protagonist, Anastasia, is a virgin at the outset, therefore her belief that her lover, Christian, is the Best Thing Ever to occupy her vagina is not unexpected.

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Reasons Not to Self-Publish

By Edan Lepucki

Lists and The Future of the Book

In a previous essay, I interviewed four self-published authors I admire, and I examined some of the benefits of that career path. Midway through writing the piece, I realized I’d have to continue the discussion in a second essay in order to fully explore my feelings (complicated) on the topic (multifaceted). You see, Reader, I still don’t plan on self-publishing my first novel, though I don’t deny the positive aspects of that choice.

Below I’ve outlined a few reasons behind my decision, informed by our contemporary moment. I can’t predict the future, though I’m sure I’ll remain comfortable with my opinions for at least another thirteen months. It’s in a list format, the pet genre of the blogosphere. How else was I to keep my head from imploding?

1. I Guess I’m Not a Hater
People love to talk about how traditional publishing is dying, but is that actually true? According to The New York Times, the industry has seen a 5.8% increase in net revenue since 2008. E-books are “another bright spot” in the industry, and the revenue of adult fiction grew by 8.8% in three years. (Take that, Twilight!)

Of course, the industry has troubles. The slim profit margins of books; the problems of bookstore returns; the quandary of Borders closing and Amazon forever selling books as a loss-leader; how to make people actually pay for content, and so on. Furthermore, the gamble of the large advance strikes me as ridiculous — and reckless, considering that editors and marketing teams have no real clue which books will be hits and which ones won’t. (Still, what writer is going to kick half-a-million out of bed?) And there’s the always-chilling question: With mounting pressure to turn a profit, how do editors justify publishing an amazing book that might not speak to a large audience? Talented authors — new and mid-list — are bound to get lost in this system.

And yet. And yet. I read good books by large publishing houses all the time, books that take my breath away, make me laugh and cry and wonder at the brilliance of humanity. I trust publishers. They don’t always get it right, but more often than not, they do. As I said in the piece that started me off on this whole investigation: “I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.”

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Neil Gaiman on His Simpsons Appearance, Teen Lit and Trolls

The Simpsons

By Josie Campbell

On Sunday a special guest star will lend his voice to his yellow-skinned Springfield doppelganger on The Simpsons: bestselling author and comics writer Neil Gaiman.

Speaking with Spinoff Online and other members of the press about his role, Gaiman began by admitting that although the episode, “The Book Job,” centers on Homer’s attempt to write a young-adult novel akin to Twilight, the author has never read Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular books.

“I am a terrible person because I still have not read the Twilight books, and I’m the only one in my house,” he laughed.

Explaining that his daughters loved the series, Gaiman said the last time someone asked his opinion on the popularity of teen literature was shortly after he won the Carnegie Medal for his children’s fantasy novel The Graveyard Book.

“I said I thought there were too many vampires around, it was probably time for something else — and the universe obviously agreed with me because zombies turned up by the busload at that point,” he said. “Now I’m just waiting for the next thing with absolute fascination to see what it is.”

With a laugh he added, “In The Simpsons episode we did I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say Homer decided it was trolls!”

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Young adult novels heating up the charts

Writer Elaine Dimopoulos attributes the books’ appeal to being deep inside the protagonist’s head.

Publishers, stores embracing trend

By Meredith Goldstein

Employees at the Brookline Booksmith kept getting the same questions, over and over.

‘‘Where’s ‘Twilight’? ’’ Or ‘‘Where are the Stephenie Meyer books?’’

The staff response: ‘‘Young adult books are in back.’’

Staff members noticed that, curiously, most of the inquiring customers were not young adults at all. Many were middle aged. And that led to a revelation: Young adult books are no longer for that audience alone – and, as a result, sales are often outpacing grown-up bestsellers, sometimes by millions.

The Booksmith now keeps its best-selling young adult titles in the front of the store, displayed prominently on tables among the adult bestsellers and new releases.

It all began with the “Twilight’’ series, which has the first of its two final movie installments, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1,’’ hitting movie theaters this weekend. The book ignited a publishing industry trend that continues to see adults purchasing books written for teens.

The market shift is considerable. An example: Jonathan Franzen’s much-anticipated novel “Freedom’’ has sold more than 600,000 hardcover copies since it was released in August 2010, according to Nielsen BookScan, while Suzanne Collins’s “Mockingjay,’’ the third book in her “Hunger Games’’ trilogy – released that same month and geared to young adults – has sold more than 1.3 million single, hardcover copies to date.

Hardcover copies of books for young adults (known as YA books) are a few dollars less than adult releases, but the huge sales numbers still have the books earning more money at the register. As of last week, all three books in Collins’s “Hunger Games’’ trilogy were on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list. They beat out “The Help’’ and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’’

This reader-driven trend has changed the scope and priorities of the publishing industry. Six years after the release of the first “Twilight’’ book, literary agencies have restructured themselves to account for strong young adult sales. Publishers continue to increase the number of YA acquisitions.

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Vampire vs Tokoloshe: the battle for the hearts and minds of young South African readers

By Fiona Snyckers

Click to buy

As fiction for teens becomes one of the most profitable areas in publishing, it has also become a hotly contested terrain among those who seek to manipulate or control it.

This impulse to control what young people read is not a new one. In 1797, the Monthly Mirror published an article entitled Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity. The author of this cry from the heart argues that the habit of reading novels during her formative years will render a woman unfit to be a wife and mother when she reaches adulthood. The problem with novels was that they glorified romantic love and the individual’s right to choose her own romantic partners. This was regarded as dangerously seditious at a time when marriage was regarded more as a commercial transaction between families than as a route to personal fulfillment.

The sort of novels that would have troubled the Monthly Mirror author include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolfo. These highly lurid gothic romances boasted plots feverish enough to challenge today’s most bosom-heaving vampire novels.

The 20th Century might have brought a cloak of respectability to the novel, but it didn’t put a stop to the adult desire to meddle in what children were reading. Today’s parents are more inclined to jump for joy than to shake their heads if their children start reading Enid Blyton, because books like The Magic Faraway Tree, and the Famous Five are now regarded as classics of children’s literature. They might be surprised to learn that the BBC effectively banned Enid Blyton from radio and television for thirty years. The BBC recently released archived correspondence between its officials which show that a conscious decision was taken to exclude all Enid Blyton stories from its children’s programmes, on the basis that they had no literary value and “too many pixies”. Blyton was described as a second-rater and it was decided not to give her airtime at the expense of “really good children’s writers”.

Later on in the 20th Century Blyton’s stories came under fire from parents who didn’t want their children exposed to the golliwogs and greasy foreigners who make up the villains in her fictional world. Today, the golliwogs have been replaced by goblins but the greasy foreigners remain, yet most parents count themselves lucky if their children go through an Enid Blyton phase.

It’s when they graduate to Harry Potter that the trouble starts again. For every parent who steers their child towards J K Rowlings’ series, there is another who forbids it on the grounds that it is satanic and full of witchcraft. This is despite the Archbishop of Canterbury famously stating that he would encourage children to read the series because it presents the struggle between good and evil in such an accessible light. The Vatican has equally famously flip-flopped on the issue – warning against the books in 2003 on the basis that they “undermine the soul of Christianity”, only to change its position in 2009 by praising the series for “drawing a clear line of demarcation between good and evil and for promoting the values of friendship, altruism and loyalty”.

It’s when children outgrow Harry Potter and move on to the likes of Twilight and the Vampire Diaries that the controversy really hots up.

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It doesn’t matter if it’s downmarket or digital – it all helps to sell books

We shouldn’t be too precious about readers’ preferences since it’s those profits that help keep the industry alive.

Teenage girls grab another dose of Twilight in a New York book store. Photograph: Brad Barket/Getty Images

2010 will go down as the year when books really began to go digital, when ebooks took off and the e-reader (Kindle, Nook and iPad) became the Christmas gift of choice. Here in the UK, Gail Rebuck of Random House boasts that the company has made an 800% year-on-year increase in ebook sales. This, she says, is a “tipping point” in digital publishing. Perhaps she’s right. In America alone, ebook sales are now nudging $1,000m (£647m), per annum, an almost 200% increase on 2009.

And what is the preferred ebook genre of our transatlantic cousins? The answer, according to the New York Times, is romantic fiction, novels with titles like Maybe This Time and The Lion’s Lady. The trade in heaving bosoms is the “fastest-growing segment of the e-reading market”, mainly, it seems, because the e-reader is the electronic equivalent of the brown paper wrapper: digital equals discreet….read more

The year’s bestsellers

John Dugdale assesses the winners and losers of 2010.

Alexander Orlov . . . flying the flag for humour

At first glance this year’s Nielsen top 100 is unrelievedly dispiriting. Too many of the strongest fiction performers are musty, movie-sustained pre-2009 titles – from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (1) to Eclipse (6), Twilight (7) and New Moon (9) – that this year’s paperbacks were too feeble to overthrow. The entire chart contains just one new, ie hardback, novel for adults, Martina Cole’s The Family (58). Throughout there’s a reliance on cinema to sell novels and TV fame to sell memoirs and cookery titles, a sense that books are helpless without a piggyback ride from another medium….read more