Amazon, Valiant Comics Ink Deal To Help Fan Fiction Writers Go Legit

If you write fan fiction based on popular TV shows, movies, etc., you just woke up to what is probably the best news you’re likely to read all day. Amazon is going to turn your work into a real business.

It has been in the pipeline for some time already. Amazon revealed its plans last month to somehow turn fan fiction into a real business without “accidentally” profiting off copyright infringement.

They signed Alloy Entertainment (a Warner Bros. division) to help fan fiction writers sell their works based on shows like The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl on the Amazon website.

They’ve apparently cracked it, announcing Thursday that they had signed other agreements with partners including comic book publisher Valiant Entertainment as well as authors Hugh Bowey, Barry Eisler, Blake Crouch and Neal Stephenson.

This means that you can write and sell your own fan fiction, so long as it is inspired by Valiant-owned characters Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Harbinger and Shadowman (whose names you probably haven’t heard since the 90s) as well as Howey’s Silo Saga, Eisler’s John Rain novels, Crouch’s Wayward Pines series and Stephenson’s Foreworld Saga.

Okay, so you can’t get paid to write Vampire Diaries slashfiction yet. But it’s a start.

To qualify, you should self-publish at least 10,000-word works in the Kindle Store. You are then eligible for 35 percent of every sale made. For writers with fan fiction between 5,000 and 10,000 words, you get 20 percent of the cut.

And it’s all legal, because the folks who own the rights to the original characters get a cut of every sale made. So basically, you kind-of, sort-of work for the publishers and creators of your fan fiction stars, and get a cut of the profits.

Do you write fan fiction? Is Amazon’s new deal good news to you? Sound off!