KJ

I figured that after "50 Shades of Gray" became a success, we'd get more attempts to monetize fanfiction, but I didn't see this latest one coming. Kindle and Amazon Publishing announced today that they're going to offer a service called Kindle Worlds, that will publish fanfiction for certain licensed properties. Submissions will be vetted to ensure that they follow a set of content guidelines (no erotica, no crossovers, etc.) and that they measure up to some baseline of quality. Authors won't get to retain the rights to their work, but they will get a cut of royalties, either 20 or 35% depending on the length of the story. It's a smaller percentage than they would for get for self-publishing original material through Amazon, where the cut is around 70%.

Still, the idea of making any money at all through writing amateur fanfiction is a big change in how the fan community has traditionally operated. It used to be a cardinal rule that you never, ever monetized fanfiction, because that would be stepping on the toes of the original content creators, and their right to create derivative works like sequels and spinoffs. Now three Warner Brothers television shows aimed at young women, "Vampire Diaries," "Gossip Girl," and "Pretty Little Liars" are the first franchises to grant licenses to create legal fanfiction for sale though the Kindle Worlds platform. There have been officially sanctioned fanfiction and other fanworks for quite a few different properties over the years, particularly for contests, but this is the first time I've heard of anyone granting permission to go try and make a profit with them.

Now, is this a good thing for fandom? As always, it's very hard to say. The big worry is that if Amazon and Kindle do make money with this service, they'll have a better argument that non-licensed fanfic is infringing, and be more motivated take steps to shut down everyone else's fanfiction that isn't being written for profit. The worst case scenario is that your "Vampire Diaries" fanfiction, posted on Tumblr or Archive of Our Own, becomes viewed as a competing product, and suddenly there's going to be a real incentive to end the benign neglect that has allowed the fanfiction community to flourish online over the years. However, the argument can be made that it's in the best interest of the properties involved to keep turning a blind eye. Fanworks essentially operate as free advertising, and they're a part of the fandom experience that has become much more visible and accepted over the years. Also, enforcement has always been notoriously difficult, and risks alienating fans.

Fanfiction writers aren't the only ones who are going to be affected. A couple of years ago, I remember there was a notorious published author who would write up these spectacular, hyperbolic tirades against the existence of fanfiction. Lots of people poked fun at him, especially since his name was on several tie-in novels for television shows. Tie-in novels and fanfiction are essentially the same thing, except that tie-in novels are licensed and they're written by professionals. If Amazon and Kindle can start making money off of work that's being generated by amateurs, and get away with paying them less, where does that leave the pros? A lot of notable science-fiction writers depend on the money from tie-ins to keep them going during lean periods. Is the market for this kind of work still going to exist after legal fanfiction? The delineation between fanfic and pro-fic is going to get even blurrier.

Of course, this is all assuming that Kindle Worlds is going to take off, which is not certain at all. Fanfiction has been around for a long, long, time, and the readership is used to getting it for free. The culture around it has often been strongly anti-commercial, and that may be difficult to change. Personally, I can't imagine paying for fanfiction, especially the kind of safe, friendly fanfiction that Amazon and Kindle seem to be the most interested in. I prefer all the subversive, weirdo, boundary-crossing stuff that would never make it into print in a million years. As far as I'm concerned, that's the appeal of these amateur stories.

I may be the exception though. The nature of media fandom has changed considerably since I first got involved, over a decade ago. Fanfiction is slowly but surely becoming more legitimate content, and eventually people are going to find ways to use it to make money. Kindle Worlds may not be successful, but it's a pretty bold idea. Unlike past efforts, such as the short-lived for-profit Fanlib Archive, Amazon and Kindle are actively addressing some of those thorny legal issues and they're willing to share a piece of the revenues too. I never thought I'd ever see this happen.

Kindle Worlds launches in June.
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Spoilers ahead for the latest season of "Doctor Who."

The much-anticipated 50th anniversary of "Doctor Who" is coming up in November, and a star-studded special has been commissioned to mark the happy occasion. This most recent series of "Doctor Who," however, particularly the back half that featured Jenna-Louise Coleman as the newest Companion, Clara Oswald, often felt too much like it was setting things up for the big event. There was a lot of time talking up the big, plotty mysteries and series mythology, and not as much on the individual adventures. I liked fewer episodes this series, and didn't feel like I'd gotten to know Clara very well, but whenever we have any kind of format change on "Doctor Who," that's normal in my experience. I didn't like Amy much until Rory became a regular companion, and the last two Doctors each took nearly an entire series each to grow on me.

It wasn't a bad stretch of episodes at all, though understandably not as emotionally charged as the goodbye tour of the Ponds that came before it. My favorites included "The Bells of Saint John," "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" and "The Crimson Horror." "The Name of the Doctor," which left us on a big cliffhanger going into the special, was kind of a mess, but also a really fun and tense installment that neatly answered all the questions about Clara and will hopefully give her character a chance to grow from here on out. It's not that Jenna-Louise Coleman isn't doing a perfectly good job, but there really hasn't been much to Clara except being "The Impossible Girl." I'd like to see her given more substance, or at least her current situation as a live-in nanny fleshed out more. The point of Clara may be that she's ordinary, but she shouldn't feel so generic.

Matt Smith continues to impress. He's gotten so well situated into the role of the Eleventh Doctor, that I'm having trouble imagining anyone else in the role now. I've really grown to like this version of the character, who can get emotional and dark and lose control of himself, but there's always something a little otherworldly and a little inhuman about him. Where the David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston Doctors were very good, they always seemed to be very advanced humans instead of truly alien creatures. There's something about Smith that is always off-kilter in just the right way to remind us that he's an alien being doing his best impression of a human, and not the genuine article. And even though he's the youngest actor to play the part, he comes across as having a much higher mileage on him. He's the only reason that some of the weaker scripts worked this year.

This series also brought to the forefront a trio of new sidekicks who won me over in a very short time: the reptilian Silurian detective, Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), her plucky wife Jenny (Catrin Stewart), and their butler Strax (Dan Starkey), the potato-shaped Sontaran warrior. The three of them have been hanging out in Victorian England, meeting up with the Doctor whenever he happens to be in their time period. Aside from Madame Vastra, I don't remember how these characters were introduced, but they make for wonderful secondary heroes, and Strax is especially good comic relief. I love that he continually screws up genders and still retains a love for carnage that keeps getting him scolded. I've been hoping for a little more variety in companions, and this is the next best thing. I'm firmly with those who have been calling for a spinoff series to feature this trio.

Disappointments? There weren't any major ones that stuck out on the level of some of the episodes from previous series and previous Doctors. I can't point to anything specific that outright failed, but a few things I was hoping would be really exceptional, turned out to be just all right. The Neil Gaiman episode with Warwick Davis and the Cybermen? All right. Richard E. Grant as this year's Big Bad, the Great Intelligence? Sorely underused, but all right. The return of Alex Kingston's mysterious River Song? All right. The mystery of The Impossible Girl? Fine. It's likely that the anniversary special is going to turn out the same way, even with the promised appearances of so many past actors plus a bonus John Hurt.

However, I've got to say that I'm really impressed with where Stephen Moffat left us with the big cliffhanger. It may end up being a tease, as so many of these things are, but there's the potential for some really serious delving into the show's mythology coming our way. Even if the special in November doesn't deliver, it'll be fun to watch them try. And I'm happily attached enough to this particularly grouping of characters that I don't mind if we hit a few more bumps in the road going forward.
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Big news over the weekend. Yahoo has announced a deal to acquire social networking site Tumblr for over a billion dollars. They see it as a great new platform for selling ad space, a move that is probably going to make its core user base unhappy, including a significant chunk of media fans who use it to share various contributions. However, I'm fairly ambivalent towards this news because I never got into Tumblr, though not for the lack of trying.

I think I may have fallen victim to a generation gap of sorts. When I was really active in media fandoms, the major activity was fanfiction, and the bulk of fandom interaction was centered around message boards, mailing lists, private sites, and finally some of the social networking platforms, specifically Livejournal. I migrated from one platform to another over the years without many problems. Then, a couple of years back, we saw a major shift from Livejournal to Tumblr, where the fanwork became more graphics based, centering around artwork, memes, icons, gifs, and videos. Tumblr, classified as a microblogger site, was great for sharing this kind of content, but I found it difficult to hold any kind of conversation there, and I couldn't make heads or tails of the navigation. Tumblr is closer to Pinterest or Twitter than a traditional blog, and it's all about finding similar content through various tags. While you can leave comments on individual items or posts, these can be difficult to follow from one to the next, and usually requires digging through a lot of links.

I think the appeal of Tumblr is that it's quick and simple to use, and participation is easy. A significant amount of user activity amounts to "reblogging," posting interesting items to your feed that other people have uploaded to Tumblr, the way people use Pinterest boards. This is easier to do with simpler fanworks like pictures than it is with multi-chapter fanfiction or long, involved, analytical discussions about the character development on "Doctor Who." A couple of months back, someone commented on my blog that I ought to be using Tumblr, because I'd get a much bigger audience that way. However, I don't think that Tumblr is a good fit for me, because my contributions are almost entirely text-based, and many of my posts run over a thousand words apiece. Tumblr is better suited for smaller, bite-sized chunks of text information, like quotes and snippets of chatlogs. There are plenty of other places and spaces online for the kind of fandom activities I prefer, the reviews and meta, which is why I've decided to stick to Blogger and Dreamwidth. I think if I were to use Tumblr, it would be similar to how I use Twitter. I'd just post links to my blog entries.

Initially it bothered me when Tumblr became so popular, and the Livejournal and Dreamwidth-based fandoms started to shrink. Sure, the blogs weren't the best places to have good discussions about media, but at least they were pretty good about attracting a significant number of likeminded fans to the same places, so they were worth keeping an eye on. The problem was, or course, that these little communities became insular very quickly, and there were high barriers to entry. If you didn't have a good grasp of writing or you weren't good at socializing, it was difficult to get involved. Tumblr removes or significantly lowers a lot of these barriers. You can follow the tags instead of specific users or carefully delineated communities, and you don't have to interact much in order to be an active user. The kind of Tumblr content that is the most popular often involves remixing or manipulation of existing media, activities that seem to be easier for younger fans to pick up. Tumblr is made for a different kind of media fan than the ones who prefers the older blogging sites, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Anything that keeps the fandom world going should be supported in my book.

I am a little bit worried about the Yahoo acquisition having an impact on the Tumblr fandom community. It's not the ads, but the potential changes in management and oversight of the content that may have the most negative impact. Fandom is notoriously anti-commercial because of the difficult IP issues that monetization usually brings up. Changes in ownership were among the major reasons that Livejournal and Delicious fandom user bases both fell apart. If the Tumblr-based fans move on, though, as fans inevitably do, my guess is that they're going to pick another microblogging service, since that's kind of interaction this group is used to now. Or they could pick something radically different. Even the people most heavily involved in fandom have no idea where fandom is going. That's what makes it so exciting to follow.
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