Industry News/OP piece: Amazon’s Digital Platform for Fan Fiction

by Kristen Blank

In the wonderful world of Amazon, fan fiction steps up and takes its place among champions. Amazon has announced the launch of a new digital publishing platform dedicated to everyone’s favourite: fan fiction. In other words, this is a legal way to get your juicy short stories about Lizzie and Darcy ‘out there’ for tons of adoring fans to read before you get ‘discovered’ and your genius will be forever immortalized in the desired hardcover book. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but this basically means we are encouraging the E.L James’s of the world. I can’t imagine a world in which we need that.

The platform, Kindle Worlds, enables Amazon to profit from fan fiction. Authors will get a 35% royalty (pretty nice) for NET revenue on any work 10,000 words or longer. So get out your pencils or stylus’s and go nuts. I mean, I get it, lots of people like this stuff and boy oh boy I’m sure interested to see how this pans out. On the other hand, way to go Amazon for finding a way both to promote authors that otherwise might never be published and make money from the masses.

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