Fan fiction authors will be able to publish and sell some titles in the US via new e-book platform Kindle Worlds.

Many know that bestseller “Fifty Shades of Grey” began as erotic “Twilight” fan fiction, but it never could’ve been successful unless author E.L. James rewrote it into a completely original work. Copyright ...

Fan fiction, in which aficionados of existing books and movies write characters into new storylines, has long been popular fodder on Internet forums -- but stories based on copyrighted works are essentially impossible to sell. Amazon wants to change that with its new "Kindle Worlds" program.

Fan fiction stories based on copyrighted works are essentially impossible to sell. Amazon wants to change that with its new "Kindle Worlds" program.

Fan fiction authors can get a cut of the profits from works sold on Amazon's Kindle marketplace.

The first trailer for the science-fiction film "Europa Report" has been launched onto the Internet, and it just might be the most realistic — and harrowing — depiction of space travel on the big screen in years.In "Europa Report," an intrepid crew of astronauts leaves Earth behind for Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, on a private space mission to seek out alien life. As the first two-minute ...

Reading and writing fan fiction is a pastime I've enjoyed for years, and I'm not the only one: Fanfiction.net, a clearinghouse of fan fiction from across dozens of television shows, movies, and books, has millions of stories in its ever-growing repository. Once considered the domain of science fiction fans (although much older than that) now spread over non-genre television shows such as House ...

(Credit: Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET) People who write fan fiction could find a paying market for their work courtesy of Amazon. Unveiled Wednesday, Kindle Worlds is a new publishing venture from Amazon that promises to reward both writers and the original rights holders for new fiction based on existing stories and characters. Related posts Amazon proposes a colossal biospherelike Seattle ...

50 Shades of Grey, which started out as Twilight-inspired fan fiction, raised a few copyright questions that didn’t stop it from selling millions and millions of copies. But when a work is more directly based on another author’s creation — using the same characters and setting, for instance — the legal hurdles can be greater.

In a funny way, fan fiction is the purest form of literary art there is, the one most untainted by commerce. It's hard to make money from it because someone else owns the intellectual property (unless you change the details just enough, in which case you can make quite a lot of money on it. Just ask E.L. James.)