ravenna_c_tan

**Deadline is passed! Thank you all for playing! I’ll plan to make this offer again in a few months!**

The fanfic roots of my Magic University series are pretty clear, I think: who in Harry Potter fandom didn’t wonder what college would be like for wizards and witches? Although I have all original characters and an original magical system, the MU books are by a fan (me), for fans (*waves to LJ flist*), and happen to be liked by lots of other readers, too.

One of the most exciting and important developments during my time in HP fandom has been the creation and growth of the OTW: Organization for Transformative Works. If you’re not familiar with the OTW, you should be. The OTW, plain and simple, fights for the rights of fans to create fanworks. They are a bastion against the mishandling and misconduct that corporations and literary estates are prone to as they overreach on what copyright entitles them to. (Did you see that the Doyle estate finally was forced to accept that Holmes and Watson are in the public domain?)

And fanworks are in the news a lot these days (you might have noticed that 50 SHADES OF GREY, which began life as a fanfic, turned the publishing industry completely inside out last year, while AFTER, a One Direction fic from Wattpad, sold to a NYC publisher for six figures…). I believe that as corporations realize there is money to be made and material to be exploited, the right of fans to create transformative works is one that will need to be defended even more zealously than it was when they were just calling us “pirates” and “molesters” for doing it.

The OTW also operates The Archive of Our Own, a fanworks and fanfic archive. Anyone who has ever had a fanwork TOS’d or DMCA’d off a site like YouTube or Livejournal knows the value in having an online repository that is owned by us, not by some tech company.

I’ve been a paying member of the OTW for years. This year I decided to go a step further, and with the blessing of the OTW’s membership and development folks, I cooked up the following plan.

**Deadline is passed! Thank you all for playing! I’ll plan to make this offer again in a few months!**

Join the OTW or renew your membership for $10 or more before 12 noon eastern time tomorrow and I will give you a free ebook copy of THE SIREN AND THE SWORD, the first of the books in the Magic University series. AND, the first five people who respond with a donation of $25 or more will get either a signed copy of the book in paperback OR a free audiobook download from Audible.com! Your choice!

To participate, go to the OTW website (http://transformativeworks.org/support-otw), go through the Paypal button there to process your donation via credit card or from a Paypal account. Then forward your Paypal receipt, which you should get in email, to me at ctan.writer @ gmail dot com. That’s it! I’ll reply with your reward!

Please feel free to spread this offer around to anyone you know who might enjoy a magical new adult erotic romance, or who might enjoy supporting the rights of fans to create fanworks, or ideally both. :-)

Remember! Deadline is tomorrow, Friday November 21st at 12 noon! (Eastern US time!)

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

My Statement on Fan Fiction & Fanworks
by Cecilia Tan

A slew of authors lately are speaking out against fanfic.

Everyone is entitled to their feelings, of course. I wouldn’t try to impose my feelings about fanfic on other writers any more than I would try to impose my polyamorous, kinky lifestyle on a monogamous vanilla couple. (Even though I feel certain they are missing out, and even though they may feel my very existence may undermine all the values they hold dear.*)

As you might gather from my tone, I am not one of those who is against fan fiction. I am wholeheartedly for fan fiction and other ways fans can engage their imaginations with the stories I tell. Isn’t that the whole point of writing fiction? To create a world inside the reader’s head, instead of just keeping it here in my own head?

This debate in the blogosphere is hitting at a very timely moment for me, as I recently stumbled across some actual fan fiction “in the wild” based on my Magic University universe and characters.

Some years ago I attended a panel on fanfiction and fanworks on which several lawyers sat. The audience was mostly fans, but I asked the lawyers the question, what can writers do if they want to encourage, rather than discourage, their fans, and what should a writer do if she discovers people writing fanfiction in her universe?

The advice I was given at the time was

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Circlet Press: Welcome to Circlet 2.0.