Parry Hotter and the Six-Figure Book Deal
"Pull to publish" adult fantasy based on Dramione fanfic is funneling money to one of the world's most notorious transphobes.
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People just cannot let Harry Potter go. Despite the fact that J.K. Rowling, the series' author, is a rabid transphobe who actively invests in attacks on trans people and ghoulishly celebrates her legal victories, Harry Potter's profile seems to be only increasing for a new generation of fans. A multi-season HBO series is launching later this year. A myriad of people who should know better are collaborating on official Harry Potter projects, such as the full-cast audiobook readings that instantly dominated the children's audiobook section of the New York Times bestseller lists as soon as they were released.
And over the last year and a half, there's been a flood of major "pull-to-publish" deals for books based on Harry Potter fanfic as agents and editors actively scour sites such as Tumblr, TikTok, and Archive of Our Own (AO3) for material. AO3, a massive clearinghouse of fanworks, currently hosts more than 17 million works spanning 77,000 fandoms—nearly 238,000 of those have a "Harry Potter" tag. Not everyone in fannish communities is thrilled by the pull-to-publish trend. Some are concerned about seeing a personal pleasure and shared love of playing in imagined worlds turning into a commercial enterprise, which could have dangerous implications for arguments over whether fanworks violate copyright.
Debates over whether fanworks are transformative and thus considered fair use, or derivative, which falls afoul of copyright law, have always been contentious, with legal opinion generally affirming that as long as creators don't profit from fanworks, their work is fair use, as it is noncommercial and intended as commentary. Arguably, not going after fannish creators for copyright violations serves the owners of the intellectual property by keeping that property relevant: Fanworks usually celebrate media and often introduce new readers, listeners, and viewers, so they're a complement, rather than competition. In the case of pull-to-publish, publishers and authors alike are walking a tightrope: If you're not allowed to profit from fanworks, are you able to sell a massaged version of your fanfic? Clearly the copyright lawyers at publishing houses think it's worth the risk.
It's difficult to make a case for separating art from artist, a common defense of consuming Harry Potter-adjacent content, when the artist is actively earning millions of dollars from the continued relevance of her work and using it for evil.