Look What I Made! (Part 2 of 2)

Last time, we looked at user-created content as a force of nature. Now it's time to look at it as a force of the market, and the potential benefits that awareness of it can have on job searchers.

FanLib, as documented in my S&S case study, has been one of the more recent attempts to commercialize fanfiction. Why they felt new attempts were necessary is beyond me, because fanfiction (if we're defining fanfiction as derivative literary works created by fans of other creative work) has already been commercialized for years in a form that's doing quite well.

What I'm referring to here is tie-in novels. If you're not familiar with the concept, examples here, here, here, here, and here. Basically, they're published long-form fanfiction, though it's a point of debate whether all of them actually qualify as fanfiction (since some are commissioned to established authors rather than written by fans). In any case, they're some of the most lucrative books on the market.

The business of tie-ins is a little tricky. To publish them, a publisher naturally has to acquire the proper rights from whoever holds them--a movie or video game's production company, for instance. The rights usually go wholesale (rather than on a book-by-book basis), so anyone who wants to take their fanfiction pro needs to figure out who own what rights before making any inquiries. Unless, of course, their work is derived from something in the public domain, as is the case with Phantom.

Tie-in novels, like fanfiction, tend to be viewed as garbage. For the most part, I have to admit, that's a fair assessment. Most tie-in novels (and I've read a few) are of generally poor quality. But, like fanfiction, that's not a necessary function. Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels are (I'm told by those in the know) quite good, and one of my favorite authors, who holds a few major award nominations to his name, recently announced he's writing a novel based on Predator. Ultimately, though, the purpose of these books is to satisfy people who are looking for something very particular in their reading experience, and more often than not, they find it.

It's a bit more difficult to write on the current or potential commercialization of fan films. The business just doesn't look at itself the same way. If a movie gets made into a book, it's a tie-in; if a book gets made into a movie, that's an adaptation. Would Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings count as a fan film? How about Dagon, by virtue of coming from a smaller studio with a smaller budget and not being very good besides? If not that, then maybe The Death of Doctor Island?

Pretending that we've figured out some kind of definition, I will say that rights licensing works much the same way for films as it does with books, but add that quite a few professed fan films go forward without proper licensing. For the most part, they're viewed as relatively harmless, and though I've heard that there have been incidents of prosecution, I've never actually encountered one.

If I go into other media at this point, I'll likely be doling out more of the same. The point here is that commercializing user-created content--at least so far--has only worked as long as there's a tangible product of some value to the consumer. The Ye-Olde-Star-Trekke-y silent film I linked to in part one of this article is all well and good, but would you pay $19.99 for a DVD of it?

The online potential isn't enormous. Notice how fanfiction.net only has that one banner ad at the top of the screen? There's three problems with trying to make money off of those nifty online communities generating tons of traffic. The first problem is that people who come to those sites are looking to get something for free; try to make them pay for it, and they'll just go somewhere else that doesn't. The second problem is that it's not an expanding market. There's just not a huge demand for new fanfiction communities.

The third is: if you want to make money through ads in one of those online communities, what do you advertise? People who go there are looking for something very specific; most of what you can advertise that would be of interest to them will be things that they either already own or already know that they want to buy.

(This could be an opportunity for a little creative innovation. Cracking the code of what to cross-market where on sites like these is a valuable skill to have.)

Of course, the real answer to all this is that we don't have to commercialize user-created content because it already works for us by perpetuating interest in entertainment franchises. Star Trek, which continues to be a lucrative franchise to this day, probably never would have survived the 1960's if it hadn't been for the creation of its fan club, a source of fan content maintaining and promoting existing interest in it. The idea that fan works should be given free reign is necessarily a little disconcerting to the professional world (what if they do something that tarnishes our hard work?), but any threats it presents are no different from the ones that come from presenting any creative work to the public.

And so I'll conclude with the warm and fuzzy message that user-created content needs to be embraced and encouraged. But I'll also say that it is definitely a source of jobs and money for the industry, to an extent that is not to be discounted.