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When E. L. James's triple-decker erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011-12) hit the New York Times best-seller list in early 2012, mainstream responses were both scandalized and titillated. Multiple media outlets and would-be cultural guardians declared themselves shocked-shocked!-that women would want to read such explicit sexual material, never mind write it. When word leaked that Fifty Shades started life as fanfiction of the young adult vampire-romance series Twilight (2005-08), that same mainstream media found itself even more baffled by the fact that James's work did not exist in a vacuum. Even a cursory investigation of online fanfiction, for Twilight and other texts, revealed a staggering number of stories-most romantic, many erotic-written by fans for fans. And most of those fan writers were women, writing for an appreciative audience of other women.
Among those fan writers, a common response to the success of Fifty Shades was "That story? Seriously?" As writers and readers of fanfiction will tell you, if you know where to look, you can find an enormous number of stories, at any level of sexiness you desire-all for free. Aja Romano, a well-known fanfiction writer/critic as well as a reporter for The Daily Dot, wrote an article for that webzine entitled "How to Find the Good (Fanfiction) Porn," in which she pointed curious readers new to the world of fandom toward sources of quality fanfiction. And many fan readers and writers, myself included, will grumble that there are far, far better stories out there, and why couldn't one of those get published? Given Fifty Shades' success, it is entirely possible that a fan author I enjoy will be able to turn her work into a best seller. However, many of the fan stories I love the most-those I find most successful and satisfying on an aes- thetic level-would be near-impossible to publish. Many of the best fan stories (as well as many of the mediocre and the worst) are completely unpublishable for reasons that have nothing to do with nebulous assessments of literary quality, and everything to do with the fact that fanfiction is often so deeply embedded within a specific community that it is practically incomprehensible to those who don't share exactly the same set of references.
In recent years, there has...