Kindle Worlds thoughts

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

If you’re active in fandom, particularly if you work as a fanfic writer, you’ve probably heard of something called Kindle Worlds. Basically, Amazon will allow people to write stories set in the “universes” of popular shows, movies, or books that will be sold as eBooks on the Kindle platform. The book’s price, which promises to be around $5 for a novel/novella or $2 for a substantive short story (5k-10k words), will be split between Amazon, the story author, and the creator of the original universe.

To say fandom (at least my corners of fandom) are not pleased would be an understatement. There’s a lot to be concerned about here, and not a whole lot of information to go on. And that’s a big part of the problem. Amazon’s guidelines for this new project are 685 words long, according to an automated word-counter. I still have some of the old Middle-earth Fanfiction Awards FAQs on my computer, so I did a quick check. For comparison, the latest version of our nominations FAQ – the document that covered the how-tos and policies about nominations, was 3,036 words long, or nearly four and a half times as long. In addition, the MEFAs had FAQs and help documents on categorization, story eligibility, ratings, and voting/scoring, and that’s just what I personally have on my hard drive. Some might call us a wee bit excessive but my point is that the information Amazon has available to the general public is nowhere near the length you need to get across all the details of how the program will work.

That lack of information doesn’t change the fact that some people in fandom are worried. And on some points, they have reasons to worry. Specifically:

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