‘Alchemised’: Harry Potter fanfiction lovers might not be too happy to see one of them become a book

The upcoming publication of Alchemised, a fantasy romance book that began its life as the Harry Potter fan fiction story “Manacled” by Sen Lin Yu, is part of a relatively small, but curious trend of fan fiction (amateur fiction writing by fans) being rewritten and published as original work.

Perhaps the most famous is Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fan fiction called “Masters of the Universe” in 2009, but there’s evidence it may date back to 2007. The great success of Fifty Shades has turned publishers’ attention to the wealth of stories found in online fan fiction archives. These stories sometimes have huge loyal readerships. “Manacled”, for example, is a whopping 74 chapters long with three epilogues. It has a huge ongoing readership since it was published between 2018 and 2019, a readership publishers are hoping to tap into with Alchemised.

However, not all of those readers are ready to celebrate their favourite story going pro.

Fan fiction uses the characters or world from an established, usually copyrighted work of fiction. Romance stories that pair up characters who are not romantically involved, like Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger in “Manacled”, are probably the best-known type of fan fiction.

But these works come in every shape: from Old English poems about the Starship...

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