Current mood:	OMGWTF
Entry tags:	fandom failures, fandom: star wars, fanfic, self-publishing

Whoa. I didn't know anyone had balls like this!
EDIT: I didn't realize there was another wank about this topic until after I'd hit the submit button and this went into the fandom_wank queue. By then I couldn't delete it because it was in the approval queue. Sorry everyone!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933456027/qid=1123612981/sr=2-/103-6073320-0586259

Someone decided she didn't like how George Lucas wrote the first Star Wars movie, so she decided to rewrite "Star Wars: A New Hope" (and according to the reviews, did so very poorly) and decided to sell it on Amazon!

The reviews are quite the panoply... ranging from "OMG PLAGIARIZM!!1!" to "HAY WTF?! COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!" to "Not only is this illegal, it's SHITTY!" I'm even more amused by the lack of grammar and spelling of the reviewers than I am at the thought of this bitch Lori Jareo getting her ass handed to her by Lucas's attorneys (hey, maybe she's got herself one of them intarweb lawyers!)

I want to know why Amazon is allowing this in the first place! I mean, one bloody glance at the entry page on Amazon was all I needed to know exactly what this is -- without even reading a single actual paragraph of the "book"!

This isn't just plagiarism -- it's bloody copyright infringement on arguably the largest fiction franchise out there! (Star Wars ranks right up there with Lord of the Rings, but I don't know if it's bigger than LOTR, just cuz LOTR has some twenty or thirty years on Star Wars).

Well, methinks George Lucas is gonna hafta SMACK A BITCH soon. Holy shit.... exploding splooge!

*sits back to watch the wank unfold*

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History of zines

lasha
2006-04-25 11:25 am UTC (link)

As a person who used to publish zines (Highlander), I guess I will jump into the mess at least to clarify a few things for the newbies.

Zines have been around for 30+ years, since Star Trek days. Gene Rodenberry knew about them and didn't have a problem with them. Since we didn't have the Internet back then, people mostly published stories in a bound format to pass around amongst their circle of friends so everyone could read about Kirk doing Spock. Something you didn't see on the show. Me, I love the pretty pictures. *drool*

Zines were never made for profit, in fact most publishers never broke even, they lost money! Zines were put together as a labor of love for the fandom. However, in recent years with the creation of the Internet, zines are becoming more and more obsolete. I think that in 5 years unless you are doing an art-centric zine, they will have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Zines = making profit has been another issue that has been debated for the last 15 years I've been in fandom and it's so nice to see it debated again. It warms my cynical, battered heart to the core. *eg*

However, to clarify, Agent With Style is a zine distributor --yes, she publishes her own zines -- but mostly she agents for other zine publishers. She takes a commission for her work. (And no, I am neither for or against this practice, just stating a fact.)

Now, $60 to me is extreme for a zine, especially one that is at 300 pages unless it has tons of colored artwork. My last Highlander zine came in at nearly 400 pages with at least 6 pages of colored art and was sold for about $30, which was the cost of printing. That is half of what the HP zine is being sold for. Unless the HP zine has every other page full of art, I am very skeptical why such a high price is being charged.

In my experience, the author usually sets the price, but in this case Agent With Style could of -- I don't know. As for the assertions that the author is not getting paid, unless she has something set up that all the profits go to charity (which is what my Highlander zine did per it's authors wishes), then the author is getting paid by Agent With Style after she takes out commission.

I now get to use my K/S icon. *whee*

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	Re: History of zines estrella 2006-04-26 12:23 am UTC (link)
	Thanks for posting this. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Re: History of zines
(Anonymous)
2006-04-26 12:44 am UTC (link)

In my experience, the author usually sets the price, but in this case Agent With Style could of -- I don't know. As for the assertions that the author is not getting paid, unless she has something set up that all the profits go to charity (which is what my Highlander zine did per it's authors wishes), then the author is getting paid by Agent With Style after she takes out commission.

Do you mean the author of the fic that AWS publishes herself or do you mean the editors that she usually agents for?

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