Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.
Content Guidelines for Kindle Worlds
Pornography: We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts.
Offensive Content: We don’t accept offensive content, including but not limited to racial slurs, excessively graphic or violent material, or excessive use of foul language.
Illegal and Infringing Content: We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their content doesn’t violate laws or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights.
Poor Customer Experience: We don’t accept books that provide a poor customer experience. Examples include poorly formatted books and books with misleading titles, cover art, or product descriptions. We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience.
Excessive Use of Brands: We don’t accept the excessive use of brand names or the inclusion of brand names for paid advertising or promotion.
Crossover: No crossovers from other Worlds are permitted, meaning your work may not include elements of any copyright-protected book, movie, or other property outside of the elements of this World.lol Amazon.
My reactions to this are varied. Of course there’s the initial reaction of “what no why”
Followed by the “no porn, no crossovers? obviously they don’t understand fanfiction,” quickly replaced with, “wait, Amazon gets the copyright?”
But then more important things start coming to mind. Like, “so they’re authorizing only certain types of fic?” and ”won’t that only give legitimacy to the argument that unauthorized fanfiction is illegitimate and irrelevant?”
And a major concern for what this means for fanfiction writers of those other types of fic: “this also suggests that unauthorized fanfiction is all pornography and crackfic, and furthermore that those are lesser than other fanfiction!”
I have trouble seeing this as a good thing. There’s a whole other side to this involving the material and rights of the original writers (which presently remain unclear in Amazon’s press release), as well as Amazon’s broad language (“offensive,” “excessive”), which I haven’t even touched on, but overall, especially as a fanfiction writer, I cannot call this a good move.
obviously they don’t understand fanfiction
is pretty much all of my feelings about this
what’s confusing me is the section on offensive material—you would never refuse to sell a novel published by an author if it had offensive material, so why are fics not allowed to have it? part of what makes fics and fiction in general more interesting is its ability to play with offensive ideas like racism or violence and give the reader a deeper understanding of it
this just sounds like a dumb idea and i don’t really see many people wanting to contribute to it if there’s going to be so much censorship
wait if cameron wants to legalize marriage equality and the opposition says sure but only if civil unions are extended to heterosexual couples…what’s the issue? that sounds like a win-win situation???
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/05/201352020124355115.html
![world-shaker:
[leaves this here and backs away]](http://i.imgur.com/f7JypS0.jpg)
