A Growing Problem with Monetizing Fanfics

Fan fiction is one of the greatest gifts humanity gives to each other. People getting inspired by one person's creativity and using it to spawn whole new realities, beautiful relationships, explorations of the nature of humanity. I love fan fiction.

But here's the thing. Fan fiction is a labor of love, not money. It's possible for authors who write books and fanfic to "file off the serial numbers" so to speak, rewriting it to write out the IP of the original and create their own original story to publish.

Where it gets real dicey is when they decide to market it using the original IP and the built-in audience that a different author created. Three Dramione (that's Harry Potter's Draco Malfoy & Hermione Granger, for the fanfic-uninitiated) fics were traditionally published recently under new names, but they are marketing them as Dramione fanfictions.

Y'all. Picking up someone else's characters and world, changing them to Shermione and Dracky, and then using another author's audience to market them is theft. We can't be doing this.

Now, they couldn't be robbing a better person in this particular case (F*CK YOU, Jo Rowling), but this absolutely puts those authors at risk of lawsuits and is just a huge NO for the industry.