shipperx | Wait, Wait... What?

(Sorry for spamming. )

I'm killing time at my desk at lunch (hence the sudden patch of posting). Anyway, I hopped over to Audible.com to see if there were any new downloadable books to listen to, and what to my wondering eyes should appear...

Look at the bottom of the page. The link/advert to - Pamela Aidan - Best of Jane Austen Fan-Fiction

Wha-huh?!

I'm in no way surprised that there is such a thing as Jane Austen fanfic. I mean, I pretty much take as a given that there's probably fanfic for everything from Care Bears to the Bible. And I also realize that due to when they were written that Austen novels have no copyright restrictions. Still, this is a commercial site. This stuff is being sold. An outlet for commercial books is calling some of its offerings 'fan-fiction.' In fact, they're selling it as an audio version of fanfiction.

Does anyone think that this may set a sketchy precedent? I know that there have been a ton of published faux-sequels to Austen books, and that these Audible entries are almost certainly published "sequels. " But Audible, a commercial site, referring to published novels as 'fanfiction' makes me uneasy. You just know that there are fanficcers out there who think they can get book deals (Er, I mean other than the ones who already have. And I'm not talking original novelists who also happen to write fanfic. I'm referring to some of the craziness that's happened in the Harry Potter fandom and that crazy self-published Star Wars fangirl on Amazon.com a couple of years ago).

It seems to me that businesses attempting to blur the lines between fanfiction and commercial fiction can lead to fandom troubles. (Of course, everything always seems to, but still...) There truly are people who have weird thoughts that rather than writing Harry/Snape fanfic, they can publish (and profit) from Harry/Snape novels. Commercial companies probably shouldn't encourage such people by calling published books 'fanfiction.'

Fanfiction is for fun not profit.