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The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.
Here’s what we talked about in this episode:
I (Johnny) gave everyone the rundown on my currently-running Kickstarter campaign for my new book Gore Point (ends 9am ET on 4/5/24), the best descriptor of which is “it’s very interesting.” I told everyone about how it reframes my entire approach to selling books and to my reader fandom … and how the hoops I needed to jump through to create the campaign end up opening new avenues that wouldn’t be possible if the situation hadn’t “forced” me to try new things. It’s also a way of allowing me to be professional: allowing my truest fans to get what they most want from me in exchange for funds that end up buying assets that make my books better. Everyone wins!
The entire rest of the show was taken up discussing our moral and legal questions about fan fiction. Before we delved into the core of it, though, Emma raised a question that made me double-take: On the extreme end of the spectrum, is it possible that ALL stories are technically borrowing from other stories? I had thoughts on this as well, because all of my stories, to some degree, remix elements from popular culture and other stories as homage. But where it the line?
Most of the discussion about fan fiction centered on a bit of Harry Potter fan fic brought to us by Emma called Manacled, for which the author recently got a big book deal. What’s theft of IP and what’s original creation? None of us knew where exactly to come down on the issue, but the discussion around it was fascinating. Shit also got real when we asked the question, “How would we feel if someone borrowed one of our worlds and our characters … and then got a book deal for themselves based on them?
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