Start Your Own Fan Fiction Blog
I am currently in the process of building another blog that will feature fanfiction. The tricky thing about fanfiction is that you cannot charge people for your content because you do not own the copyrights to the characters that you are using in the stories. From what I understand about this, using original characters is a small loophole, but this only works if you also use different locations from whatever story you’re writing about.
Now, like I said, you’re here because you want to make money from writing fanfiction. But how do you do that without charging your readers for the content? You make the content free and make your money from ads. there are plenty of fanfiction websites across the internet. One of which that has gained massive popularity is Wattpad. On Wattpad, full-length novels, poetry, and fanfiction, are fed to readers chapter by chapter at no cost to the readers. So how do they make money giving away free stories? With ads.
By implementing this chapter by chapter publishing schedule on your own blog, you too can make money from writing fanfiction. Those Wattpad does offer and authors program that pays writers a percentage of the ad Revenue their stories make, it is difficult to say how popular your stories must be before you start seeing that money. For the patient soul, this might be perfectly fine to you. For me however, I say hell no.
I say this because by owning my own website, and have full control over the design and placement of all the ads, and I also use space within my stories to advertise my e-books and music on Spotify, Kindle, iTunes, and Google Play. From my research about marketing, I gather that you need to use Inception 1 readers to help raise your book sales.
If a reader is coming back weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to read the new chapters of your story, that is multiple chances that they have to see your books and music albums located conveniently right inside your content.
Writing for Wattpad
Though I have my own reservations about writing on Wattpad, millions of other writers are doing it and some people have even gotten publishing deals or writing contracts for movies or TV shows after being discovered on Wattpad. This is also a good option for anyone who does not want the daily trials of running and maintaining a blog (it’s not easy and I will not lie and say that it is). Your stories on Wattpad are much more likely to get heavier traffic than running your own blog as everyone on Wattpad is there to discover free stories.
Pull a Fifty Shades of Grey
The multi-million dollar book and movie franchise, Fifty Shades of Grey started off as a fan fiction story about another other multi-million dollar book and movie franchise, Twilight. Now, if you’ve actually seen or read Fifty Shades of Grey then you’ll know that there are no sparkling vampires, hot werewolves, or fantasy elements to the story at all, unless you define “fantasy” as in terms of sex, which I am not currently doing. I point this out to underline the copyright issues that are involved with writing fan fiction which is why you cannot publish stories using the same characters or world-elements of another copyrighted work.
Now, Fifty Shades of Grey is hardly anything like Twilight except for maybe having two women who are both clumsy, kind of mousy, and generally shy/awkward. It is fair to make the comparison that both Christian Grey and Edward Cullen warned their respective love interests that getting involved with them was a bad decision for their health and safety, and, clearly, all parties of both stories ignored those warnings. But, to get to the point, Twilight already had a well-established fan base to write fan fiction for, so, there were already people who’d likely be interested in Fifty Shades of Grey before it was ever written.
Like I said, there are only slight similarities between Fifty Shades and Twilight that can be seen in the finished works. Though, I have absolutely no idea what Fifty Shades looked like before an editor got ahold of it, but I’m assuming that if it was actually fan fiction, that it underwent some serious editing before it became what the world now knows as the Fifty Shades of Grey triology.
As I go through my own journey with writing fan fiction, I will update this post with more ideas and such. Until then, happy writing and may creation be ever in your favor.
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