A moment of silence for Penn Badgley’s cheekbones. Image via New York Magazine

Did you ever have a #dark period of your life in which you wrote really scary/weird/intense/graphic fanfiction? If so, call me Amazon wants you to submit to Kindle Worlds, a portal that will pay you royalties–20 per cent for pieces under 10,000 words, 30 per cent for more–in exchange for the fanfiction you’ve never told a soul you wrote. Amazon has secured licenses from franchises like Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries to monetize while establishing flexibility and guidelines for amateur authors. Amazon has already commissioned authors Barbara Freethy, John Everson and Colleen Thompson and will be paying the original authors royalties to avoid copyright issues. 

The Verge pointed out some of the limitations of this model, including the inability to produce crossover fanfiction between franchises, as well as restrictive guidelines on pornographic, excessively graphic or violent content, which makes the genre fun to begin with. Besides, without fanfiction exercising its right to free expression, would we have ever evolved to create My Little Pony fanfiction?

[via Amazon]

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Vidal Wu is an intern at Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @vidalwuu.

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