Is Kindle Worlds Right for You?

I was recently asked to share my thoughts on Kindle Worlds and whether I would ever contribute to it. For those of you who don’t know, this is a relatively new platform created by Amazon to facilitate collaborative world-building between writers. Here’s how it works.

An author with an established series of books in a unique universe is invited by Amazon to set up a Kindle World, a platform for other writers to create stories based on the characters and world building of the original author. These new stories are sold on Amazon, with the new writer getting paid royalties for their work. The idea behind it all is to provide lesser-known writers with a means of writing stories with a broader fan-base while the author gets additional publicity for the original series. It can also be good for fans of established franchises, as they get to have more content than a single author can produce. Some people are claiming it to be a perfect marriage between the roles of a professional author and a fan fiction writer.

There are, however, some important things to note. First, unlike most fan fiction, a reader has to pay to read it, just like a normal book. It’s also forbidden to do any sort of crossover story (Star Wars meets Star Trek, Yu-Gi-Oh meets My Little Pony, etc.) preventing one of the most common tropes of fan fiction stories. Perhaps most importantly, contributing writers lose nearly all rights to their story once it’s been published through this platform, meaning (among other things) that a writer’s characters and/or story can be adapted into a film, tv show, another book, and any other type of media and the writer will not receive any payment or creative control.

While many of these facts could affect a writer’s decision about whether or not to participate, I think there’s a more subtle issue going on with Kindle Worlds. A while back I wrote an article called The Different Faces of a Storyteller in which I compared the purpose of different types of writing. I described the purpose of fan fiction as a type of goodwill gesture and community outreach to fellow fans of a particular story. It’s a way to connect with other fans and pay tribute to something that they both love, free of any limitations or restrictions.

Kindle Worlds seems less like a paid fan fiction platform and more like an easy way to create a franchise out of a series of stories, generating as many titles as possible within a familiar universe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it limits the potential audience. Fan fiction readers can go to a place like Wattpad and read a plethora of similar stories for free, while fans of the author (not the franchise) will ignore the attempts of other writers to “copy” them.

So, will I ever contribute a story to another writer’s Kindle World? No. Even as a child playing make-believe, I was more likely to make up my own characters and stories than pretend to be a character in someone else’s story. Would I ever allow a series of mine to become a Kindle World? Probably not. I’d worry that the writers weren’t being faithful to the source material while at the same time feeling bad about the many restrictions placed on their creativity.

If you’re interested in either reading Kindle Worlds stories or contributing to them, you should definitely check it out. My friend, Terry Persun, has a Kindle World dedicated to one of his series and was very generous in providing a great deal of insight as I wrote this article. My only caution to writers is to carefully read the user agreement (long as it may be) before you give Amazon your story.