the fanfic-to-real-fic pipeline
welcome to strong feelings! Essays by writers we love, in which they share their most impassioned opinions on a given subject. In today’s strong feelings, Abby Monteil (she/her), journalist & contributing writer at Them explores the rise and rise of the fanfic-to-real-fic pipeline.
Have you ever wondered why so many of the men on the covers of popular romance novels like The Love Hypothesis bear an uncanny resemblance to Adam Driver? You can thank the popularity of Reylo — the ship name for Star Wars characters Kylo Ren and Rey — for that. This phenomenon, powered largely by fanfiction and fan communities is nothing new, in fact, fans have been exchanging stories for decades. Take the women at ‘60s Star Trek conventions for example, or the popularity of sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3), which has over 6 million registered users. What is new is the increasing transparency with which popular fanfiction communities interact with traditional publishing, and how many fanfics are getting the “real fic” treatment.
These days, another popular ship is poised to dominate publishing in 2025: Dramione, the pairing of Harry Potter characters Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. The would-be couple are at the center of SenLinYu’s dystopian tale Manacled, which has become one of the most widely-publicized fanfictions in recent memory. Clocking in at 400,000 words and 77 chapters, this tome combines elements of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale into an alternate universe where Lord Voldemort triumphed. Manacled has broken out of its AO3 origins and made waves with readers who had never interacted with fanfiction or even the original Potter series before. (On TikTok, the Manacled hashtag has been used over 46,900 times).
Yet by the end of the year, the version of Manacled that fans know and love will no longer exist. In April, SenLinYu announced via a blog post that the fanfiction would be removed from AO3 at the end of 2024. The author will repurpose Manacled into an original novel called Alchemised, which Penguin Random House is set to publish next summer.
Even if you’ve never waded into the fanfic world, you’ve almost certainly heard of popular books created through the “pull-to-publish” method, in which an author repurposes their fanfiction into an original story. Perhaps the most famous recent example is E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which was once an AU (fanfic shorthand for “alternate universe”) on Fanfiction.net inspired by Twilight. Likewise, the After series started off as One Direction fanfiction shared on Wattpad.
Despite being some of the most popular “pull-to-publish” phenomena of the 2010s, these books — which are often, but not always, romance- or fantasy-centric — were also widely ridiculed and dismissed as soft “women’s fiction.” But in the 2020s, a new wave of books penned by authors with roots in fanfiction are challenging those perceptions. The popularity of fics in nascent communities like BookTok have pushed discussions of what the boundaries between fanfic communities and the publishing industry should be.
It’s hard to argue that sites like Fanfic.net, Wattpad, and AO3 haven’t significantly streamlined the process of engaging with fanfiction. For millennial and Gen Z writers who grew up with the internet, fanfic has also provided a tight-knit community in which they can not only express their passion for fandoms, but hone their writing through real-time responses from readers. (Plus, it’s a hell of a lot more affordable than pursuing an MFA.)
After spending a year pitching a novel to literary agents, author Gillian Eliza West got an idea for a Harry Potter fic centered on Dramione and decided to share it on AO3. As she told mixed feelings, being part of the Potter fanfiction community helped give her the writing inspiration and confidence to self-publish her first novel, a romantasy book called Ruin.
“In a fandom that is so saturated, [where] everyone has 500 tabs open in their browser, I had to learn very quickly how to hook people immediately and build out a world in as little time as possible so people stay engaged,” West says. “The immediate feedback of what was successful or not — especially in [terms of] character and relationship development — was crucial to me as a writer.”
Like Star Wars, the Harry Potter series is so culturally ubiquitous that it feels like a given for it to also dominate the fanfic sphere. As such, there are hundreds — perhaps thousands — of writers who have centered their fictions around Dramione.
Author Brigitte Knightley, who wrote the wildly popular Dramione fanfiction Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, logged out of the AO3 account associated with the fic after she finished it and was unaware of its success for months. When she logged onto the account months later, she was surprised to find thousands of messages from readers — including some from literary agents and editors at publishing houses. By then, she’d already written the first draft of what would become her upcoming debut novel, The Irresistible Urge To Fall For Your Enemy, which will be published in July 2025.
“I really do mean [that fanfiction is a] playground, because it’s about play — improvisation, discovery, joy,” Knightley told mixed feelings. “And rectifying dubious worldbuilding. And indulgence in sins, as a little treat.”
As Knightley puts it, fic also creates its own distinct “gorgeous feedback loops,” from artists creating fan art of a scene from a fanfic to readers assembling customized, physical “fan binders” merging written and visual elements. For the Potter fandom in particular, fanfiction has taken on a new significance in the wake of author J.K. Rowling’s vocal transphobia, allowing fans to reclaim the series and its characters from their original creator.
Knightley described canon — events that officially happened within a fictional universe — as “a springboard for my own creativity” rather than something to adhere to at all costs. “Canon is as much fiction as fanfiction is,” she said. “The blorbos can do whatever you’d like. Face canon and walk backwards into hell.”
These authors aren’t the first popular Dramione fanfiction writers to capitalize on their AO3 roots. Julie Soto, who also gained a following for writing about the ‘ship’, published her debut novel, Forget Me Not, in July 2023. But outside of Manacled’s viral success, SenLinYu’s decision to directly rework her fanfiction feels particularly notable because it was influenced by a practice that has become a growing issue in online fandoms: illegal fanfiction sales.
“It has grown clear that as a transformative writer, I have limited options in protecting my stories from this kind of exploitation, but I wasn’t sure what to do,” SenLinYu wrote. “I didn’t want to just take the story down, in part because I worried that might only exacerbate the issue, but I didn’t know what other options I had.”
Unless a written work is in the public domain, fanfiction authors couldn’t legally sell their stories even if they wanted to. That hasn’t stopped readers from profiting off their work on sites like Etsy and Mercari. Apart from standard merch, you can also find bound copies of popular fics, which often sell for hundreds of dollars. This so-called “fan-binding” has historically operated under a “fandom gift economy” structure, where fans create and distribute these physical copies of fanfiction without any formalized expectations that they’ll receive something in return. Illegal fanfic sellers, on the other hand, are making a profit off popular writers’ work without their consent.
In response, a growing number of fanfiction writers impacted by these illegal sales have chosen to remove these works from the internet altogether — including West herself, who pulled her first-ever Dramione fanfiction, Mon Couteau Aigusé, from AO3 in February.
“I would really love for there to be more open discourse in understanding that fanfiction and traditional books differ in many ways, the biggest being that one is a gift and one is a commodity exchanged for money, especially with new readers,” she told mixed feelings. “You would never rate and review a birthday present, or demand that your friend give you more of that gift, then sell that gift with a 400% mark-up just because you could. Fanfiction should be treated the same.”
In the hyper-consumerist, capitalist hellscape that we call 2024, fandom spaces sometimes feel like the lone corners of the internet that are driven by creativity and common passions, with no expectation of profit. Unlike, say, TikTok and YouTube content creators, your favorite fanfic writers aren’t being compensated for their work — they’re doing it because they love it. Yet as fanfiction inches closer to the mainstream and gains new generations of readers, traditional fandom etiquette has been forced to contend with monetization.
“Growth is uncomfortable, no matter the space or sphere it’s within,” West said. “I can only hope that as fanfiction becomes more popular, readers within that space will be open to learning the respect that needs to be given to a [fandom] space.” Knightley pointed out that on her social media site of choice, Instagram, she has seen a spurt of “Fanfic 101” content to help people entering these spaces for the first time.
But what about the publishing of it all? Squaring traditional publishers’ overlap with fanfiction can be complicated, to say the least. In a digital age where so many aspiring authors have been involved with fanfic at some point in their lives, it’s nice to see writers being able to speak openly about how their fanfic background has influenced their work without fear of stigmatization from publishers. But traditional publishers are for-profit companies and fanfiction communities are definitionally the opposite — AO3, for example, was founded in response to the creation of a website called FanLib, which was created with the goal of monetizing fanfiction.
The question remains: how can publishers appeal to their very-online readers’ love of fanfiction tropes without inadvertently feeding into the unregulated monetization of fanfiction that’s threatening fandom spaces? While the “Big Five” publishers — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan — aren’t particularly open about how they scout fanfiction authors, other companies are opting for transparency.
831 Stories, a self-described “romance fiction company,” has a tab on its website titled Fan Fiction, where readers can find commissioned original fanfiction for all of their published books. Co-founder Claire Mazur told mixed feelings that the idea came from speaking to romance readers at book swap events, many of whom told her that Potter and Twilight fanfiction had introduced them to the genre.
Mazur and her business partner, Eliza Cerulo give writers free reign to write whatever fanfiction they’d like about an upcoming release, which is then added to 831 Stories’ AO3 tag. For example, one fic serves as a prequel to the company’s debut novel, the celebrity-normal person romance Big Fan, in which protagonist Maya unknowingly meets her boy band crush Charlie at a Halloween party years before the book takes place. Although these are paid writing gigs, 831 Stories’ staff doesn’t interfere with the actual works.
“We don’t edit it. We publish what they send us back, which we think is more consistent with what we understand the spirit of fanfiction to be,” Mazur said. “We think of [our] books as the beginning of these big universes that we hope to build, and so commissioning fanfiction felt like a way of getting the engine started.”
Another 831 Stories fic centers on Big Fan supporting characters Kate and Leah’s queer meet-cute. It’s a change of pace considering how relatively slow publishers have been to embracing stories based on popular ships that aren’t white and straight — despite the fact that the top 10 most popular pairings on AO3 last year were all queer.
For now, this more well-publicized era of fanfic and publishing overlap is still very much a work in progress. One good rule of thumb? When in doubt, leave it to the experts.
“I’m always conscious that no matter what we do, I think there’s going to be a little bit of a feeling of being interlopers,” Mazur added. “I think the best way we can approach it is by working with people who have been a part of this community for a long time, and letting them steer and guide us.”
AO3 wasn’t formed due to monetization of fanfic, it was formed because of censorship on other platforms.