Fanfiction’s Meant to Be Free. So Why Are People Selling It?

A recent phenomenon in the fanfiction community sees physical copies of popular works being sold online, without involving edits or the original authors. Sellers on eBay, Etsy, and TikTok Shop have copied major fan works like “Manacled,” “Remain Nameless,” and “Rosemary for Remembrance,” all of which are based on Harry Potter and run more than 100,000 words long, bound them to look like “real” books, and listed them for anywhere between $90 and $600.

But, now, many of those works are disappearing from the internet—and there is a fear among fanfiction readers and writers that they’ll never come back.

Fanfiction has long been a staple of the internet, with platforms like Archive of Our Own (Ao3), Wattpad, and Fanfiction.net all sources of hundreds of works of fanfiction about Harry Potter, Star Wars, Gilmore Girls, One Direction, Twilight, Marvel, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Hunger Games, Supernatural, and countless other franchises from which fans have taken inspiration to create their own stories and romances; Ao3 alone boasts more than 12.5 million works.

Read more at The Daily Beast.