Etsy sellers are turning free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, and listing them for sale on online marketplaces for more than $100 per book. It’s a problem that’s rattling the authors of those fanfics, as well as their fans and readers.
Several sellers, easily found on Etsy and very popular, each with hundreds of five-star reviews, are selling copies of fanfiction taken from sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) and reselling them as bound books. The average price of these bound copies is around $149. Some sellers claim that they’re simply covering the cost of materials, while others just sell the books, usually with the fanfiction writers’ Ao3 username on the cover.
This is hitting the “Dramione” fandom—which pairs Hermoine and Draco from the Harry Potter series—particularly hard, because this type of fanfic is extremely popular on Etsy. “All the Young Dudes,” a massively popular Harry Potter fanfic by MsKingBean89, is being sold by multiple sellers, including one that mostly sells bamboo and rattan handicrafts. “Manacled” by SenLiYu is another wildly popular one that’s been turned into merch and bound books on Etsy.
Some authors are deleting their works from the internet altogether to prevent book binding resellers stealing them.