elizabethminkel:
As promised! I wrote about the illegal fanbinding that’s led to writers deleting their works recently, how that connects to the current pull-to-publish wave, and what happens when the rapidly expanding sphere of fic readers starts to get disconnected from *fandom*:
The ever-increasing reach of fanfiction has inched the practice away from text-written-in-community to a more traditional author-reader relationship—and the context collapse that’s come with viral works being treated like any other romance novel has spurred clashes between different types of readers with different sets of expectations.
In the past few years, fic authors across all corners of fandom have increasingly complained about shifting attitudes from readers who treat them like any other content creator, demanding the next chapter as you might demand your favorite influencer’s next video. But unlike on creative platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the fic writer doesn’t get revenue from their new installment.
We’ll also talk about this in some capacity on the next episode of @fansplaining! (In contrast with today’s episode, on the non-monetized, gift-economy practices of many fanbinders, whose hobby is also imperiled by the people selling and buying fic.)
This is really a fantastic article, and I recommend reading it!
While the timing of the Renegade Fansplaining episode and the increased discussion of illegal selling of fic in Harry Potter circles was unfortunate and has caused some confusion, it’s also reflective of how the last few years have gone. Renegade Bookbinding Guild in its current form does not exist in a vacuum. (Please note I am not speaking officially for Renegade here).
@armoredsuperheavy gave us a firm foundation in anti-capitalist sentiment in Renegade, but as Renegade grew larger fanbinding also grew more prominent in other spaces besides ours. Some of those spaces were profiting off of the selling of HP fic. Direct confrontation seemed to work out best from inside of the Dramione fandom, so we turned to look at how we could affect things more indirectly, and how we wanted to impact our community. I watched volunteers in Renegade brainstorm events that would center a celebration of the authors and promote the gifting of author copies, how to best promote our ethos and the fandom gift economy on social media, determine how best to protect and manage typesets kept within the group, and dedicate time to teach and lower the barrier for entry into fanbinding so people could just do it themselves rather than buying it.
In 2022 we formalized the Renegade Code of Conduct, directly motivated by the profiteering we saw elsewhere. The ethics in the Code of Conduct weren’t new - they had been common topics of conversation within Renegade - but it’s much easier to have something to point to as things escalated.
But why has illegal selling escalated so much in Harry Potter and Dramione fandom? (conversely I have literally never seen a single one of the fics I’ve bound listed for sale, and some of them are hugely popular).
I think Elizabeth is entirely accurate here in pointing at context collapse as the problem. There is of course two sides - the sellers and the buyers. The sellers are outright grifters of both sides - if they’re on Etsy, 90% of the time they’re selling the same type of cheap binding you get from a print on demand company (i.e. worth about $20) marked up to $100-200, the rip-off of the century. If they’re on Mercari, it’s common to see people reselling books at a higher cost that they paid only materials and shipping for (back when authors were allowing at-cost bindings). Which fuck that, any bound fic in *my* library isn’t leaving my grubby little paws unless gifted or in my will.
I really don’t think this kind of grift would work as well if the potential buyers were more steeped in fandom culture. While I’m not in Dramione myself, the fandom is so huge you cannot avoid seeing it. I’ve seen Manacled get recommended right alongside trad-pub romantasy (in romance book clubs!), sent to big booktokers, and both heard and seen people asking in comments “where can I get this book?” Because the context is not there! They don’t know what fanfic is or even what that means or any of the community associations with how fanfic is created. These dramione fics are many people’s first encounter with fanfic, and if not properly explained many of them will just think it’s a book they have to buy. The casual readers are the primary target of this grift - they go and type “manacled book” into google to find where to get it and receive a bunch of etsy listings. Case in point:
And there are even sellers of these popular dramione fics titles as ebooks, which is absolutely ridiculous and shows for a fact that people are just googling titles to find something they were told was a great book.
Looking at the trends of what’s been targeted for profiting, I really do think this is currently centered in the Harry Potter fandom (especially the het fics). There’s very few fics that fit the bill to be exploited in this way, so while very high profile I don’t think most non-HP fan authors should be concerned.
But I do think there’s a lesson to be learned from this, because it COULD happen to other fandoms, so we must make sure it doesn’t. I think this has shown us we have to be careful about how we are introducing fanfiction stories to those outside of your normal community. It’s great to get validation from mainstream culture, but it is more important to ensure that we are connecting people we are sharing with into the fandom context web, rather than cutting the fic out and presenting it to them without context. I think this is probably especially important on algorithm-driven apps like tiktok, where you don’t know who will be shown your videos (though as I am not a tiktok creator I don’t know the best way to address this).
I’ve seen a lot of people on Instagram in fandom working very hard to try and spread some understanding of fanfic culture to new fandom members, and I think that’s a great start. But to help really shut down the problem, I think it has to be included as part of the first introduction to a fic - and the way they read that fic should probably be directly on Ao3. Of the articles I’ve seen about the problem, I think this one hits the nail on the head best for where we might be able to address how things get off the rails. I have hope that this is a problem we can keep isolated as the dramione fans work to contain it (efforts are underway that I’ve seen!). My heart goes out to the authors that have been affected like this, and I know there’s been a lot of anxiety. Let’s do our best to create a positive environment for our fandoms and give our authors positive engagement instead.
(I interviewed Des and a few others for a piece about Renegade which should be out any day now (?? this is not in my control). The timing on all of this has been unfortunate for sure—I reached out to Renegade to profile them at the start of February, before all this other stuff really started melting down.)
I strongly agree with everything you wrote—and I think in addition to sharing within that “fandom context web” another thing that will help is strengthening that those webs. In the piece I mention the posts we all see here on Tumblr regularly (like this one that passed my dash this morning) about no one commenting, reblogging, etc. anymore. I say this with a grain of salt because I was a lurker for my first 15 years in fandom—tons of people don’t participate! But if you are up for participating even a little, there are a lot of small ways to fight fic shifting towards a pure author-promoting-to-readers situation, like commenting and leaving prompts in fests and making rec lists and just, like, befriending writers in your fandom.
I do think this is getting harder and harder—over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time on Fansplaining talking about the shortening life cycles of fandoms. How do you create ties between fans if people only stick around for six weeks? I don’t know how to solve that; it’s the changing entertainment models, it’s the platforms, it’s the new learned behaviors…. But thinking about all this helps me be a better member of my own fandom, imo.