Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.

In a provocative piece at The New Republic, Marc Tracy traces the rise and decline of the blog, a form that has essentially conquered the distribution of information online, but whose ubiquity has made individual personalities less important:

When he started a blog, it was on his own—other than a small handful of strange, Web-only creatures, in 2001, what magazine wanted a blog? By 2005, the answer to that question had changed, allowing Sullivan to ensconce his blog in larger institutions—Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, in chronological order. This was the golden age of the personal blog: The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands (Media Decoder was launched in 2009, and finds its roots in TV Decoder, a blog that was started when the Times poached writer Brian Stelter, who like Sullivan, Klein, et. al had built a following on the Internet as a personal brand). Meanwhile, readers interested in reading the best that had been thought and said on the Internet had no choice except to follow along—the best they could do was to use RSS to focus on the feeds they tended to find interesting.

But today, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.

What Tracy really means, he clarifies, is that “What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.” Obviously, it’s true that the first-mover advantage for blogging is gone, and that fewer people are coming on line as individual bloggers. When I started working at ThinkProgress two years ago, it was already evident that this was a way that fewer and fewer people were getting full-time writing jobs. And what was even clearer was that publications like The Atlantic and the Daily Beast that were hiring lots of individual bloggers were doing so as a way to populate channels. The key technology now is less the publishing platforms that let people write short posts and publish them in a continuous stream, and more the ability to cross-post, so a piece can live both on an author’s individual page, or in the feed on a relavent subject or for a relevant section.

Or as Michael S. Rosenwald, who wrote a blog for the Washington Post called Rosenwald, Md., put it: “We’ve been rethinking blogs here at the Post. Many of us bloggers are moving over to personality pages. In one place, you’ll be able to find all my stories for various sections of the paper (Page One, Metro, Outlook, Sunday Business) as well blog posts about life in Maryland and the rest of the region. Click here for the link to my personality page, which you can bookmark for easy access.”

And I think this is a situation that signals less the decline of blogs than their evolution. Readers can continue to follow the feeds of individual writers they prefer, or whole sections that they find interesting, depending on whether they’re interested in a particular perspective or a larger news feed. If blogging started out as a way to accomodate the way writers wanted to publish their work, it’s now come to serve a different end in giving readers flexibility in how they curate what they want to read, and publications the ability to accomodate them. That’s not death, precisely. It’s more like metamorphosis.

The announcement today that, at the end of its contract with The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan is taking his Daily Dish blog independent, and plans to support it with a metered subscription costing $19.99, has been treated, with some justification, like a major development. It’s rare to see a blogger who’s been fortunate enough to make it into the mainstream publishing apparatus decide to leave it and return to the independence and risk of the early days of the blogosphere. And Sullivan’s decision will be an important test case for what price readers assign to his site, and how many of them place a specific monetary value on the Dish at all. But it’s important to recognize that, while it’s a big deal for this particular blog, the choice to take the Dish independent and what happens afterwards shouldn’t be overinterpreted.

“People form an emotional relationship with the site and have a sense of belonging and take pride in being able to support something they enjoy,” Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova told the Guardian last week of the reason she relies on subscriptions rather than advertising to support her site. “It’s the same reason people have been donating to public libraries for centuries.” But that emotional connection that allows some sites to survive, that allows Louis C.K. to make an enormous amount of money from independently distributing a special and selling tickets for his tour, or that allows certain projects to be funded almost immediately on Kickstarter is also a reason that many publications won’t be able to get by solely on the passion of their audience. Or, as Time’s James Poniewozik put it on Twitter, “Less interested in whether ppl willing to pay for @sullydish blog than how many total blogs they’d be willing to pay $20/year each.”

It’s great for Sullivan and company, whose support this blog has benefitted a great deal from over the years, to go independent, and I heartily hope they succeed. But I hope their business model becomes sustainable not because I think we need it as a sole light forward in a dark publishing landscape. Rather, I think we need a lot of models, so new entrants into the market have lots of paths to sustainability. Some products that have been prestige for the entire run of their existence, like The New Yorker, will be able to flourish in their walled gardens without ever venturing out into a more open marketplace. Others, that have both passionate and casual readers, and perform the services both of delivering basic news information and offering up longer, more proprietary analysis, like the New York Times and the Dish will do well with metered models. Projects like ThinkProgress and Pro Publica, which want a certain amount of independence from corporate interests and protections from the vicissitudes of the advertising marketplace, will successfully justify their necessity to a variety of non-profit funders. Rather than aiming to be among the most privileged and valued of products and individuals from the start—a position that guarantees financial support, but that doesn’t clarify the nature of the product they’re distributing—publications and content distributors would do better to know the fundamental nature of their business, and to choose a revenue support model based on that.

The success or failure of the Daily Dish’s meter model will tell us something about what kind of support a site with that sort of brand, longevity, and audience can expect to muster, just as the Times’ paywall has given us similar data for large, long-established newspapers, and Talking Points Memo did for the reported news site that grew out of Josh Marshall’s blog and discussion community. But it shouldn’t have to be a litmus test for the future of online journalism. Instead, this should be a reminder that we’re at the beginning of a long period of developing new business models out of the decline of one old one.

This morning, Newsweek editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced a change to the magazine that seemed both seismic and inevitable: the December 31 issue of the print edition will be Newsweek’s last, and the publication will continue as a tablet and web publication. “Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context,” they wrote. “Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

That language, and the task at hand, sounds strikingly similar to the way David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, talked about his vision when he and the editors who worked for him re-conceived the magazine when Bradley moved it from Boston to Washington, cutting fiction and devoting more space in the magazine to long-form reporting on policy. In 1999, Newsweek actually discussed the question of how The Atlantic could adapt itself to the internet age:

Every magazine has its ideal reader, and for the “thought-leader” category The Atlantic belongs to, that reader is the lay intellectual. Reflective lawyers, like federal Judge Richard A. Posner, are ideal readers. So are military intellectuals such as Col. Harry Summers, author of “On Strategy.” But the number of such people is small–no more than a million Americans, by the estimate of John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, The Atlantic’s chief rival. And with a number of magazines carving up this constituency–not only The Atlantic and Harper’s, but also publications like The New Republic, Commentary and The National Interest–the commercial prospects for any one of them don’t seem bright.

How often does a thought-leader magazine spark a controversy outside its core readership? It does happen: Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated proclamation of “The End of History” first appeared in the National Interest in 1989. And in 1993 Foreign Affairs printed Samuel Huntington’s argument that cultural fault lines–based on differences of religion, language and tradition–would be the battlegrounds of the future. The Atlantic itself found broader readership for a 1993 article supporting two-parent families, perhaps less for its content than for its title: “Dan Quayle Was Right.” These are, however, rare events…

Still, every problem is an opportunity. Michael Kelly, The Atlantic’s new editor and formerly editor of The New Republic, argues that “It’s the smog aspect that makes [publishing] work for magazines like us. We have a culture of a ratcheted-up bombardment of everyone, a great wash of talk, blather, chatter… and it’s all sending the same message: ‘You have to pay attention to this right now. The zeitgeist is changing from what it was two minutes ago, and you don’t want to miss it’.” The Atlantic, he says, should be an “antidote” to media overheat, “the absurd topicality of everything.”

The Atlantic ended up embracing “the absurd topicality of everything” with not just its booming core website but news aggregator The Atlantic Wire. But it also revitalized the magazine’s buzz quotient by thinking somewhat more narrowly about what kinds of stories “lay intellectuals” would want to read. Where once that might have meant the same broad subject palatte that magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s still publish, The Atlantic doubled down on the kind of stories about the future of family and foreign policy, and the snappy cover lines, that Newsweek said served the publication well in 1993.

Newsweek has an advantage that The Atlantic didn’t have in 1999 when Bradley bought it: a strong web arm of the publication that boasts established internet-native writers (rather than traditional print journalists who are in the midst of transitioning to learning to write comfortably for the web) who do a mix of reporting and commentary. But it also has two deficits. First, it remains a very general interest magazine, which means it’s competing with everything, even when it can’t necessarily do, say, food coverage better than a specialist magazine like newcomer Lucky Peach, which caters to exactly the kind of wealthy, sophisticated readers the new, digital readers Newsweek would like to lock down. And even worse, unlike The Atlantic’s brand at the time of its reinvention, which may have been somewhat dry, but was definitely positive and respectable, Newsweek has degraded its own editorial reputation in a mad, and as it turns out final, rush to sell issues and generate traffic. “Final Newsweek cover: Why Barack Obama is the Worst Gay President to Ever Breastfeed Muslim Rage,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted this morning. Certainly, Newsweek has had covers in the past that look unattractive today: the July 30, 1945 cover with the tagline “The Jap: How Long Can He Take It?” is less than attractive. But the magazine has seemed exceptionally cheap lately, recycling sexually provocative stock images for shock value, in marked contrast to, say, its shattering cover photo for the feature on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, or fanning Islamophobia rather than substantively dissecting the attacks on American diplomatic facilities.
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The invaluable Saul Tannenbaum passes along a tale of editing malfeasance, in which Barnes & Noble’s formatter, converting War and Peace for the Nook from a Kindle edition “changed every instance of ‘kindle’ or ‘kindled’ into ‘Nook’ and ‘Nookd’”:

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

The unwitting hilarity of a publisher doing a “find and replace” and accidentally changing the text of a canonical work of Western thought is alarming. Many versions of e-books are from similar outfits, that distribute public domain works formatted for Kindle or Nook at the lowest possible prices. The great democratizing factor of the ebook formats – that anyone can easily distribute – can also mean that readers can never be quite sure that they are viewing the texts as the author intended.

It is nice for books to be cheap, available in a format that’s transportable, and portable from device to device. It’s not nice for them to be produced so cheaply that the text is altered in a way that ruins the integrity of the art the reading experience. There are some parts of producing any kind of art that can be made less expensive with technology. And my understanding is that many publishers now do less editing than they used to before books reach the market. But incidents like this should be a reminder that there’s a hard floor it’s not worth crashing through to make products cheaper.

I always enjoy reading Clive Thompson’s columns at Wired, so it was fun to see him defend fan fiction in those pages this week:

Why would worldplay make you more creative in your career? Probably because, as the Root-Bernsteins point out, it requires practical creativity. Fleshing out a universe demands not just imagination but an attention to detail, consistency, rule sets, and logic. You have to grapple with constraints — just as when you’re problem-solving at work.

This is why I’m so bullish about our teeming world of participatory fan culture. We live in a golden age of paracosmic play. As fandom scholars like blogger and USC professor Henry Jenkins have documented, today’s young people routinely build off their favorite cultural universes — writing new stories, creating game mods, shooting fan videos. It’s not sui generis creativity — they’re working with preexisting worlds — but it exercises the same creative muscles. I suspect society will reap the benefits in decades to come.

I’m of several minds about this. There’s no question that fan fiction’s been a valuable platform for authors like Cassandra Clare, whose Mortal Instruments fantasy series is about to be a big-budget movie, or E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction and has become a smash that’s headed for a film adaptation of its own, to cut their teeth before putting their work up for sale. Like most of us, I get a lot of joy out of mashups and supercuts and remakes, which can be acts of analysis and criticism as much as they’re works of art. And I’ve read After the End, a novel-length sequel to the Harry Potter franchise more times than I am actually willing to admit publicly.

But I’m genuinely curious about the effects of creating a world as opposed to playing in a world created and governed by someone else. Does the impact of the kind of creative work Thompson is talking about come from playing with the characters, or creating the boundaries and rules and keeping track of them yourself? Is there a difference between the maintenance of a private universe that you have to sell other people on, and participating in an established fandom where everyone is on board with not just the rules of the world but the broad riffs on it that most people participate in? I think it’s silly to denigrate people who write fan fiction or read it, but I’m also curious about it as a specific phenomenon, how it intersects with the rise of self-publishing and the decline of book editors, and what it means that we want to spend so much time in these fictional worlds not of our own creations.

There’s something fitting about the fact that Tor, which publishes a lot of books in which people think about what the future might look like, has decided to remove digital rights management protection from their ebooks. From the company’s press release:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

I don’t think that all DRM protections are inherently evil, though I think the limits on the number of devices on which you can consume content from Amazon and Apple could be higher to be responsive to consumers’ needs. But ditching DRM is a sign that Tor trusts its customers and wants to meet them where they’re at. More signals like that would be a welcome thing from the entertainment industry. Something like the movie industry’s Ultraviolet effort to bolster DVD sales by packing discs and digital copies together are sort of missing the point. They’re trying to create a new space rather than going to the cloud lockers and the means of distribution and consumption their consumers are already using day to day.