One of the latest issues coming up in the book world is fan fiction being sold and promoted as such by major publishers. Fan fiction is stories fans write using characters from existing works or set in those worlds, and authors writing fan fiction isn’t at all new. Many authors get their start in writing with fan fiction, whether actually writing it or just making up stories or playing out scenarios in their heads. The impulse to write often comes from reading or watching something and wanting either to fix it or to explore that world further. That leads to learning how to write and plot, which leads to writing their own stories. Sometimes a story that starts as fan fiction may get developed to the point it’s no longer actually fan fiction but is about original characters in an original world, or the author may be inspired by a character from another world and base an original character somewhat on that character, but with the author’s own spin. You’d only know the origins of the story if the author told about it or if you knew both the author’s interests and the fictional world that inspired them very well.

My first deliberate attempt at writing was something that spun off from mental fanfic. I’ve always entertained myself by making up stories in my head, often based on whatever TV show, book, or movie I was obsessed with at the time. Since there was only one girl in Star Wars, the girls in the neighborhood fought over who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, and those who didn’t win had to make up their own characters. I had a lot of mental stories about my character, and along the way the stories focused so much on her and less on the Star Wars universe that they became original stories, and I then realized that if I wrote down these stories, I would have a book. I never actually finished that book because I was good at coming up with characters and situations but didn’t yet know how to plot a book, so I had a fun chapter one and nothing much more. I’m sure there are a lot of other authors who’ve done similar things. I know of a few works that started as something connected to another fictional universe, but I don’t know how open those authors are about it (some of it came up in personal conversations), so I’m not going to name names here.

What’s different is that now not only are the authors being open about the origin of their works that started as fan fiction, but the publishers are promoting these books as being essentially fan fiction, actually naming the characters and series they’re based on. That already happened with Fifty Shades of Grey starting as Twilight alternate universe fan fiction (putting the characters into different lives), but I don’t think the publisher actually pushed that connection. It was an open secret, but the publisher wasn’t promoting it with “It’s Twilight, but what if Edward was a kinky billionaire and Bella was a grad student.” Now there have been a number of books that started as fan fiction that changed the character names and details of the world and are now being published as original books, with the publisher actually promoting the fact that they’re really about those other characters, targeting fans of the original series.

I’m not going to get into the legality or ethics of that. My concern is that it’s extending the growth of the “franchise” mania to books. It’s already getting to the point that it’s nearly impossible these days to get a movie made that isn’t part of some franchise. It’s either a sequel or a remake of something that’s already been a hit or it’s based on something else, like a comic book, novel, or videogame. Books, at least, had to be original. There were tie-in novels, of course, but you don’t break in with those. Those are things that established authors get chosen to write. But are we getting to the point where your book has to be connected (although unofficially) to some established franchise in order to get it published? It used to be that if you submitted a book to a publisher and said that it was really about Han and Leia from Star Wars, even if they have different names and the names of the places are different, it would be an automatic rejection. Now that seems to be what they’re looking for, something they can market as being for fans of those other series.

I haven’t read any of the books in question, but the reviews I’ve seen mention that they don’t make a lot of sense out of context unless you’re reading them with fan fiction in mind because they’re so based on that other world that you have to know the original characters and their backstories from that original world for the story to make any sense. If you don’t know it’s fan fiction and aren’t familiar with the source material, the stories don’t work.

I haven’t tried to publish traditionally in a long time, but I hate the idea that in order to sell a book, I’ll have to write the story in which Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor actually survive the battle and run off together to fight in the Rebellion, but just changing their names and fudging the details enough to not be a trademark violation.

Actually, I’d love to write that story, and I might weave something similar to the concept into my own original world, but if I do it right, no one will know that’s where I got the idea. By the time I’ve developed the characters and their world, with a history for the conflict they’re fighting in and a fleshed-out setting, there will only be the tiniest seed of the original idea left. I just don’t want to get to the point where you can’t sell a book without it being fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off enough to appease the lawyers, while still being obvious enough that the publisher can market it to those fans. Even if we can’t get original movies or TV, we should be able to get books that aren’t part of a franchise.

This weekend I went to a talk on the history of bookselling in the United States, given by Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (a book on the topic), and it brought up so many thoughts. He led into the talk by telling about a particular bookstore that sounds pretty much like the Central Casting vision of a bookstore, all cozy and quaint, run by friendly people, with customers and staff who are like a community, the staff knowing the customers’ tastes and knowing books well enough to recommend just the right book to them. He talked about how there’s an emotional bond between customers and bookstores in a way that there isn’t with other retail, like hardware or grocery stores. After his book was published, he got a lot of letters from people telling him about their local bookstores (dismayed that he hadn’t mentioned them).

I realized while listening to his talk and seeing the pictures he showed of bookshops, that, as much as I love the idea of that kind of bookstore, I haven’t really had that kind of relationship with a bookstore. The closest may have been a used bookstore in the city near where we lived when I was in high school. That area was something of a book desert when I was a teenager, which was a huge culture shock to me (we moved there just before I started high school). The small town we lived just outside of didn’t have a library at that time. The school library was pretty much pointless. Of course, there was no bookstore. I don’t think we even got Scholastic book orders (we definitely didn’t have a book fair). We eventually found that we could buy a membership in a nearby town’s library, which was better than nothing. In the nearby city, there was a B. Dalton in the mall, where you could get current releases and bestsellers and a small selection of mass-market paperbacks. And there was a pretty big used bookstore.

Up until around the time I graduated from high school, it was located in an old strip mall. It occupied a couple of the storefronts, and they seem to have also moved into what would have been the back part of one of the shops. That meant there were multiple rooms, with little passageways and steps in between sections. It was the kind of bookstore where you could easily get lost, possibly even find yourself in a magical realm. The man who ran it looked like Santa Claus, but sometimes his wife (who would have made a good Mrs. Claus) was working. I don’t recall it being the kind of bookstore where the booksellers knew their customers’ tastes and hand-sold books or made recommendations. They did know their customers, but they let customers browse on their own and make their own discoveries. The shop was near the hospital district, so whenever I went to the doctor and found that I would have to stay home from school, we’d make a stop at the bookstore on the way home to stock up on reading material. I remember one time when I’d completely lost my voice due to a tracheal infection and was being sent home to rest after seeing the doctor, we stopped for books, and I found a book that was a sequel to one I’d read, but the only copy they had was a trade paperback, which was out of my price range. I was disappointed, but then Mrs. Claus declared that it had water damage and marked it down.

It probably did have some water damage, as the old strip mall was located just under a hill and tended to flood. Late in my senior year of high school, they got a new building in a different part of town. It was nicer, but it was less convenient and less atmospheric. I understand it closed a few years ago. The owner died, and the people who took it over said they weren’t getting in a lot of books. I guess the rise of e-books meant a decline in books being sold to used bookstores.

I know we’re supposed to hate the big chain stores, but I loved it when Barnes & Noble came to town. They felt like cozy bookstores, with their big, comfy chairs, but they were big enough to have a lot of stuff. And they had coffee shops! I don’t like coffee, but I really tried so I could properly hang out in a B&N cafe. I used to take my copyedits for the first few Enchanted, Inc. books to my neighborhood B&N to review. I could spread out on a cafe table, have a cup of tea, and it was near the reference section in case I needed to look something up. Alas, that store got closed down and later demolished so they could expand the nearby Kroger.

Now, I live in a town with one of those “right out of a movie” bookshops. It’s in an old downtown shop, complete with the display window in front and wood floors, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Mostly, I don’t have room for more books in my house. I mostly get my books from the library or as e-books. I only buy print books I’ve already read and know I want a “keeper” copy of. Books are too expensive for me to do my exploring in a shop rather than a library.

However, our library is also pretty atmospheric. It’s in an old (early 1900s) elementary (or possibly junior high) school building, with those front steps like in movie schools, tall windows, and the wooden floors on the main level. When you go up and down the stairs between levels, you can almost hear the ghost footsteps of kids running up and down the stairs.

I’ll have to read this book about bookstores when I finish my current stack of books. It sounds like good cozy fall or winter reading.