George RR Martin on His Problems With Fan Fiction

what do you think about the ones that are not officially licensed again like the fan appropriations and fan art fan stories fan rewriting I've long been an opponent of fan fiction I then let me define fan fiction very precisely here because sometimes I get criticized by people say you wrote fan fiction when you were young and now you criticize it how dare you I wrote what we called fan fiction in the 60s in comic fandom but that was simply fiction written by fans right and and published without any money and I certainly did a lot of that but I never borrowed anybody else's character or world I I invented I didn't you know I was a comic fan I didn't write about spider-man or Superman or Batman I've created my own heroes you know and wrote about then the white radar and manta ray and garras and the mechanical warrior and all that stuff I was writing when I was 14 and 15 but they were my own characters and my own stories what fan fiction has come to mean is writing Star Wars stories or writing Star Trek stories or or writing you know slash fiction which is you know taking taking characters in putting them together in unlikely sexual situations and you know I don't you know what I don't know it doesn't hurt me so if people want to do that fine but don't don't send it to me and expect me to prove it or something well no fan art that's that's fine that's a whole nother thing fan art is great and people do send me links to that all the time some of this you just have to what you want to do for your own amusement is great but you can't start selling it on eBay or merchandising it via then it you'll get sued if not like me you'll get sued by one of my multiple makers of bobblehead dolls or figure you'll be moving into one of the areas that they're paying me good money to to be into so and time did you have a quick follow-up to that about what it means for the publishing industry now that again texts circulate beyond the actual books that you're selling well I basically agree with George that his ideas are his ideas somebody you know his characters are his characters for us it doesn't have much effect because none of it is very powerful some of it creates good publicity and some of it is annoying but frankly we don't pay a whole heck of a lot of attention to it so George for you I'm curious about what do you what does that mean to you as an author creating a fictional world where that world now exists in multiple forms well let's say it's been an interesting experience to say the least I mean when most of my career writing books like the Armageddon rag and fever dream and dying a light before that or all of my short stories did there was no secondary writes there was no subsidiary rights occasionally I would get a movie option you know most of which just paid me some money and they held the rights for a year or two and then you'd never see a movie or something I did occasionally get something filmed i novella night fliers was made into a film at one point I had a story called remembering melody that wouldn't became an episode of the hitch-hiker so occasionally something came through but there were no other rights beside that but then with with when Game of Thrones started becoming popular Song of Ice and Fire suddenly I started getting these offers that I had never had before from various people who wanted to do replica sores or miniature figurines or you know various types of games of role-playing games paper and pen role-playing games and video games and yes the wildering number of things and I remember having through a period where I said well I don't know if I want to take any of these things some of them seem kind of tawdry yeah you know I am a serious writer we you know would f scott fitzgerald have ever had bobblehead dolls and then I thought about it a little bit you know from what I know that scott Fitzgerald he would have sold bobblehead dolls in a minute if they thought after them any money for that so he and Zelda could have continued to party so I signed these various contracts and yeah I think they both they've been good and bad things about it you know I I didn't want to be just a guy who signs that signs of contract cashiers to check I wanted to make sure that if I was go to these products that they were good products that they were true to the material so initially I wrote in a lot of approvals to all of these things that they could they could do the game or they could do the whatever it is but I would have to approve everything and that sounds good in theory but of course what had led to me spending a lot of time approving stuff and and not only probably giving notes on stuff and I was probably a little obsessive about it at first and it wound up taking a lot of my time so I I still don't want to let crappy products get out there but I have pulled back a little on the approvals now that I know some of my licensees and who I can trust and who I can trust but the good part is that I discover that there's an enormous synchronicity here because I I've my readership started to build from people coming in from other avenues saying I'd never heard of your series but I played the the role-playing game and I loved the role-playing game I thought I'd better look up the books or you know I collected miniature figures and paint them and I saw your figures that Dark Lord was doing and I decided I'd better look up the books so I was getting new readers from from all of these things it did cause a bit of a bump but you know it with the HBO deal which came along a few years later because you know customarily when you sell the rights to a TV or film company they get all the merchandising rights so HBO was saying well we here's the deal and and we get all the merchandising rights I think can't give you all the merchandise I've already sold it to these other people and what do you mean we always get all the merchandising rights and you know it wound up for a time that it was look like the whole deal was gonna fall apart because you know even if I wanted to give them the merchandising rights I couldn't because I had pre-existing contracts but thankfully my lawyers and agents were found able to to iron that out but it was a ludicrous nobodies ludicrous negotiation a point where they're saying yes but we'll give you keychains but we keep bobblehead dolls you're going through all of that with the with the agent and well HBO is going of course the I still have the old contracts that are that are grandfathered in that are still direct to me but everything that's not under contract went to HBO so that is just a flood of merchandising coming out because nobody knows how to merchandise like a television network or or a film studio so there there are new products coming out all the time including some I never would have thought like our own beer I mean it's great we have our own beer it's terrific

Channel: Aegon Targaryen

Views: 1,031,678

Rating: 4.8018785 out of 5

Keywords: george rr martin racism sexism, george rr martin stephen king, stephen colbert, george rr martin new, season 8, history and lore, 2019, winds of winter update, dream of spring, fevre dream, fantasy, books, steven king, jon snow, daenarys targaryan, aegon, theme, music, robb stark, ramsey bolton, joffrey, lannister, cersei, jamie

Id: u5g9-pfIImw

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Darab318]

For someone that dislikes fan fiction so much you’d expect him to finish the books, otherwise the only ending we’re going to have is fanfic from SonicFan69xxx about how Podrick marries Stannis.

[u/Misterobel]

I’m upset he didn’t slam the rewrites specifically

[u/NefariousBanana]

I'm not mad, I'm laughing, actually