Obviously, fan fiction cannot be copyrighted or sold because it’s a derivative work of licensed content. I know all of the legal bits regarding the direct profit from the work itself.
But are there any other methods for generating even a little money? Is begging for Patreon or some other tip service the only option?
Kinda
The problem is that you have to either divest identifiable parts of the original, and do so in a way that’s so severe it essentially becomes something other than fanfic; or you have to be doing custom writing on commission.
You aren’t going to get many commissions for standard fanfic though, so I hope you’re good at erotica.
Sadly, the market for that collapsed hard about fifteen years ago, and the prices dropped you insulting levels as well.
Regular fanfic, at best you’d get a trickle. Erotica, believe it or not, used to be a niche for not just fanfic, but in general for writers willing to do a one-off. The problem was/is that it’s a one time sale, no royalties. You do the job, hand it over, collect the final part of the pay, and that’s it.
Unlike regular fanfic, the erotica fanfic, you could charge serious bucks because it was a seller’s market.
Like, typically, if you’re getting 50 cents a word for your custom writing, you’re doing very well indeed. On average, you’re looking at under half that. But custom erotica? A dollar plus per word was not rare. At one point, I wouldn’t waste my time for anything under that, it just wasn’t worth my time, even if all they wanted was something quick and easy.
You get a request for something novella length, and you’re looking at some decent chunks of change, with the right customer. You gotta think, a novel can be maybe 50k words at the low end. Novellas are less than half that, but still over 15k words.
You have to back off on your per word rate with bigger stuff like that, but $10,000 for a decent length, multi chapter story happened back then. You get a customer that really likes your work, and you might get requests for that level of thing yearly, or twice a year, with requests for shorter work thrown in between. The car I have now, I bought off the sale of one of the longer pieces I did, but it wasn’t fanfic.
But nowadays? You aren’t getting that. Nowhere close. There’s too much free out there, even if the quality is lower than you’d get with someone that’s practiced at the craft. Last time I got a request, it would have come out to five cents a word, and that’s a fucking joke. Not worth the time and effort, even for a short story a few pages long.
You might be able to set up on patreon and get a trickle going though. I don’t personally know anyone making a living that way, but it apparently can be enough to be worth doing in your spare time, if you’d be writing anyway.
I’m writing it for my kids, who enjoy the spurce material. There will be mo erotica, since it’s PG-13 at worst.
The story can’t really be divested of the source material because it takes parts directly from it (like 100% of the world and 75% of yhe characters). I’d have to do serious tweaking to make it standalone.
I might just toss it out there and ask for donations if people like it.
Once you start asking for money, you run into risk. Most of the time, publishers and other rights holders don’t mess with fanfic, but when they do, it’s almost always because someone made that mistake.
Tbh, it doesn’t even matter how much you lift in that regard. You could win the resulting lawsuit over your mouse with gloves named Brickey, but you’ve still had the hassles, and you can’t predict with full certainly which IP holders are going to be aggressive like that.
Most likely, they’d cease and desist you first, but that’s not a guarantee.
I’d just leave it as being for your kids, and if you want to share it, don’t even ask for money at all.