I didn't know that was a thing. A bit smart way to collect an initial audience but anyway, I do not think that was even the initial expectation of the author when they first wrote it.
That's news to me the 50 shades. I heard of Doujinshis before but I thought that was for amateur publishing of mangas in Comicons based on the animes I watched, it also includes fanfics?
What do you count as 'fanfic' (completely undisguised with names unchanged? Or slightly tweaked so the 'homage' isn't instantly recognisable?) and 'book' (including self-published/e-books? Or only things that have made it into hard print by a reputable publishing house)? Fifty Shades of Grey notoriously started its life as a Twilight fanfic, before it was 'revised' into an "original work" so that it could qualify for mass publication. I haven't read any version of it, but I've encountered multiple people online who testify that they read the original fanfic version and pretty much the only significant changes that were made were the names of the characters. There's mountains of Jane Austen fanfiction in publication, since she has been dead for (well over) seventy years and all her works count as Public Domain, so it's all perfectly legal. Technically any author who writes a 'reimagining' of something like fairytales or mythology is writing fanfiction... although very few of them seem to realise/admit to this.
Well, there is something like 40+ James Bond novels that has been published after the original author's death, depending on what you count as fan fiction those could fit here even if they were written under the actual copyright. Honestly there is plenty of published fanfiction if you count ones that was simply approved for publication by the copyright holders, like a lot of the Star Wars novels for example. And that is even before going into all the stuff that is in the public domain.
You’d be surprised by the amount of kpop fanfiction that has been published in paperback in my country…. And they’re mostly really cringy since they are from wattpad and the covers don’t even try to hide that it’s a kpop fanfic when *cough* kim taehyung from bts has his face plastered over it
That's a packed comment you got there. You got me mulling over new realizations haha. I never would have thought that it could have also refer to stories using folk myths 'cause they're like... old. I was actually referring to a fanfic novel that was just sliiiiiighty bit shifted from the Canon. I think it was kind of a fix-it? Quite like the story you just shared. It originated as a fanfic then published as a book. I think it would be ambiguously legal in some countries since the story really deviated from its Canon since like what I said, it was a fix-it, quite like some other authors adapting ideas from the novels they read which was pretty common in the circle. It was published by a local publishing house, I think it was a pretty famous one too. Won't they get in trouble for that? I mean, that's without licensing and permission from the artist, right?
Some of the most famous books ever written are fanfiction, or at least are effectively the same thing. The way I think of fanfiction is that these are fictional works where the author took either the characters and/or the story's events from another source. So take something like the play "Julius Caesar" - did Shakespeare come up with the characters or the setting or the events of the story? No! He just grabbed all of these from someone else and put his own spin on it. So isn't it as much a work of fanfiction as anything else out there?
Many writers "file the serial numbers off" their fanfic to have it published... here is the longest list of examples I found (I'm not familiar with most of these, and can't vouch for how accurate/comprehensive this list is); if you're looking for a specific work, it might be on there? I was actually surprised to find out just how common it is for people to (successfully) do this, suggesting it's easy to get away without facing legal repercussions (though that may depend on how powerful the original copyright holder is). I previously only knew a few of the more (in)famous ones - notably Cassandra Clare, who debuted in the Harry Potter fandom, and whose various works generated yeeaaarrrrs of flame wars disputing their originality.
There's one that I knew of. A ff from a movie that I like. The ff was real good too. The author changed the characters name if not they would get sued maybe lol
Fan-fiction is a derivative work, so publishing copyright legally belongs to the original author. The fanfic therefore can't be commercially published as a book or formally distributed in book stores due to copyright restrictions. There have been cases of fan-fic with serious attempts to publish it as a work where the fan-fic author tried to negotiate with the official copyright holder in order to publish his fan-fic story set in the universe infrastructure of that story. One such example is George Lucas who wanted to publish in the Flash Gordon universe. But he was rejected, so he tweaked his fanfic to avoid copyright problems and eventually it got published as Star Wars in both video and printed book form.
Fanfics are totally fine if they're based on stories that are in the public domain or if they're based on real events or people.
I'm from latino america, I know many (Wattpad) fanfictions that have been published too, as far as I'm concerned they only change names and kind of edit them (though the editions are not that great, there are spelling mistakes, missing sentenes/words, etc). A main publisher of them back then was Editorial Naranja, don't know if the keep going at it. They published titles such as: Far Away, La Escencia de Tu Amor, Quiero Ser Cómo Tú, Gordofobia, ¿Qué se siente estar en mi lugar?, No Soy Seth, etc. They weren't really bestselller and mostly relied on the audience they already carried, unlike the other examples given in this thread.