“I’m just really hoping that they’ll look at me and be like, ‘Gosh, she barely gets anything, it’s fine,’” Li said.Ĭrafts that were listed for purchase on Li’s Etsy shop have been taken down because of copyright violations, she told The Verge. Li, a new fanfiction binder who operates an Etsy shop where she sells other artwork, said the legal consequences are rarely world-ending. Bookbinders and fanfiction writers join other artists who sell unauthorized merchandise and face the threat of takedown notices. Photo by Sarah Lesureįan-inspired works can be tricky to market online.
The reason it doesn’t come up is because if somebody is only recouping costs, they’re unlikely to generate a lawsuit.” “And when I say virtually no law, I mean no law. “There’s virtually no law on whether recouping costs qualifies as commercial or not,” Betsy Rosenblatt, a professor of intellectual property law at the University of California Davis and a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, told The Verge. But bookbinding poses further issues since there’s usually an exchange of money between two parties. For decades, nonprofit groups like the Organization for Transformative Works have spent time defending sites like AO3 from studios, publishers, and other groups that have tried to use copyright laws as a way to have works taken down. When selling a book, Lesure and Sam recoup costs for materials and shipping, but neither says they make a profit off their work out of concern for the legalities surrounding fanfiction.įanfiction by definition toes the line of copyright law, with advocates arguing that most freely available stories technically fall under “fair use” provisions. “There’s virtually no law on whether recouping costs qualifies as commercial or not.” “It all snowballed to where I am today - 30 books currently in process and orders up to April.” “I handcrafted the first few books just for my friends, and when we tweeted about it, it quickly picked up traction and random people would come up to me and ask if I’d take commissions,” Lesure told The Verge.
When Lesure finally finished her first book, it wasn’t long until her business took off. Graphic design students learn the skill in school, but without a teacher guiding a newcomer to the art form, like Lesure, it can be a daunting and exhausting task. She relied on DIY videos she found scrounging through YouTube, and nearly came close to quitting the first few times because of the difficulty. Sam loathes the literal printer process watching the pages come out, making sure that everything looks right and the printer doesn’t run out of ink. It’s as much a business and a science as it is an art.ĭifferent creators hate different parts of the process.
They’ll work with customers to figure out what colors and designs they would like to see in the finished product, and which designs they don’t want at all.
#Harry goes back in time fanfiction how to
To make every book, creators have to decide on an assortment of physical details, like the margin size and how to start a new chapter. Her process includes typesetting, redoing the typesetting, doing that again and again until it’s right, printing, folding, sewing, making the cover, and finally putting it all together.įanfiction toes the line of copyright law, and bookbinding poses further issues There are “literally hundreds of moments where I could do something wrong and everything falls to shambles,” Lesure, a student who started bookbinding during a gap year in 2019, told The Verge. That’s because the books Lesure crafts contain works of fanfiction, and she’s found an entire community of avid readers looking to turn their unauthorized digital favorites into physical treats. Lesure spends hours making sure each book looks unique and regal, but she has to be careful not to use any specific imagery that could land her in trouble. Each page is meticulously crafted to feel luxurious, like an expensive tome tucked on a back shelf in a little book shop. The only thing more beautiful than the red cloth stretched across the cover of Sarah Lesure’s handcrafted book is the swirling font filling up the pages inside.
0 kommentar(er)
