Anna Todd recently signed a six-figure book deal with a Simon & Schuster imprint for her One Direction-themed erotic fan fiction. That sentence will have many different meanings for different people, but consider this: The cover of Todd's book After boasts that the online work from which it's drawn has been viewed a billion times via a service called Wattpad. Given Fifty Shades Of Grey's roots as Twilight fan fiction, and given that Fifty Shades has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, it's not hard to understand why the publishing industry has taken an interest.
So I pulled aside NPR Books' resident fan-fiction expert, Petra Mayer — don't miss her piece on After for Monday's episode of Morning Edition — to ask for her thoughts on fan fiction, "slash fiction," ways writers interact with their readers, After and its impact on the future of publishing. And, because it's Petra and Petra is awesome, we couldn't let the discussion pass without a few recommendations: She's especially fond of these books by Naomi Novik, who got her start in fan fiction, and this work by a writer called Doyle, who she says mashes up Doctor Who and Black Adder for a story worthy of both.
ADDENDUM: Petra just emailed us to say, "I realized in horror this morning that I had named the Leaky Cauldron as the Harry Potter fanfic site, when in fact, it is the Sugar Quill. Accio bag to hide my head under!"
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