Blood will Flow

I'm interested to see what it does to the tie-in novel arena - whether this will replace the hiring of professional writers to produce books that (IMO) generally fall well short of the quality of top-notch fic, or whether the two can/will exist side by side.

The copyright issues folks are questioning also exist in the tie-in arena. I wrote two of the Quantum Leap tie-ins, was paid a flat sum ($4,000) for each of them, and then had NO say about much of anything. I was told that if I wanted to promote or market the books in any way, I needed to obtain prior permission from Universal Legal. And of course, I have no right to post any of the material online, even though the books are now long out of print.

I think it comes down to a situation of "What do you WANT from your work?" I suspect a noticeable number of fic authors would be very interested in making some dough from their fic - and in gaining the additional notoriety that publication via Amazon would provide. I do think it would make sense for any author to have someone familiar with contract law take a look at the details of this arrangement before they sign up and submit their work.

Then, too, I would hope that Amazon has a staff of people ready, willing, and able to reject anything that's... crap. (Even though they're already selling a shitton of Kindle e-books that are absolute garbage.)

I'll mention this, too - I got stuck with paying Self-Employment Tax to our good friends at the IRS, which ate up HALF of the $4,000. Turned out to be a *lot* of work (writing 80,000 and 114,000 words) for about $2,000 apiece. In my experience, there just isn't a big pile of money to be made with this stuff, unless you grab the gold ring (a la the 50 Shades of Gray author).