Fanfic Printing

[mrv3000]

Has anyone ever printed fanfic out in a form slightly more polished than feeding pages through your printer?

I've seen a couple of sites that are the "print and sell your novels" kind of deals. Even CafePress has something. But that makes me a bit twitchy since I don't want to sell fanfic (hello, legal nightmare), I just want to be able to kick back with something on print instead of squinting at a monitor. I just want to be able to print one copy and that's it. Something for my own personal use.

Obviously the gov't isn't going to go busting down doors for printing stuff out on your home computer, but one of these printing sites seems more...professional? Is it okay if you only buy a copy for yourself? Or are you going to get smacked down for selling something like this - regardless of the fact that you sold it to yourself and no one else? (And is it even possible to disable outside sales on these sites?)

I really don't have the first clue as to where the lines are on stuff like this.

Comments

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

Well... yourself and a mate or two... XD

I can't believe you're talking me into this.

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

:D Well, given that you'll probably have 400 pages by the time you're done with your series, that deserves to be in book form!

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

Done? There's an end in sight?

You must be thinking of someone else...

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Okay... 800? :D

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

I waited a while to reply to this because I was typing. The universe is now OFFICIALLY more than 200,000 words long.

In eight months (almost to the day).

Not taking into account the DDR-verse fics and the Ten II fics I've written.

Still want to keep the estimate at 800? *Smiles innocently*

[goldy-dollar.livejournal.com]

*blinks*

Okay, now I'm just curious about what fic you want to print out.

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Oh, I attempted to print Opal's The Sum of Things yesterday so I could read while snoozing, but stopped when the copy-and-paste got up to page 70 and I was only on part 6. :D

Then I started thinking about printing fics in book form while whining to Opal that I wasn't going to kill a tree and... You know how those conversations evolve. :D

[goldy-dollar.livejournal.com]

Then I started thinking about printing fics in book form while whining to Opal that I wasn't going to kill a tree and... You know how those conversations evolve. :D

A pigeon down the road exploded, right?


Sometimes I worry about leaving the two of you alone too long. XD

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

:D

And you're of course the sensible voice that moderates our insanity?

HA.

[goldy-dollar.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think... yes, yes I am. :D

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

Which says way too much about me and Michelle...

[nandamai]

I've heard of people using lulu.com this way. I think as long as the author isn't making anything from it, it's fine. And yes, you can buy one copy for yourself, and choose not to sell it to others.

Now if you get an ISBN for it, you'll have a problem. :D

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

That's good to know. I know enough to know selling fanfic is a big no-no, but I wasn't sure about printing and so on.

[nandamai]

Though you know, you could also just put the file on a CD and take it to Kinko's to print and bind. It'd be quicker and they really don't care about copyright.

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Oh HEY. I didn't even think about Kinko's!

[nandamai]

We used to make copies of out-of-print books this way in grad school. Somebody would photocopy all the pages, we'd get Kinko's to copy and bind it, and we'd all split the cost (with a discount for the photocopy person). This was of course before teh intarwebs made finding used books a lot simpler.

/nostalgia

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

Do they do fancy printing and binding? We don't have 'em over here.

You'd have to make one and send it to me, if it turned out to be cheaper than CP! XD

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Warren Ellis actually linked to someone who sort of did something like this, if you're interested in reading more about it.

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Cool! I knew I couldn't have been the only person to want something like this!

[morjana.livejournal.com]

Fanzines have been in business for over 40 years. I think you're safe with this newest version of a fanzine.

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

I'm curious now. I know that fanzines have been around forever - have any PTB or distribution companies ever shut any fanzines down?

[morjana.livejournal.com]

I think the Star Wars fandom ran into a few glitches here and there with their fanzines, but for the most part, fanzines haven't had any problems.

But I published Star Trek fanzines for years (and wrote some stories), and never had any problems.

Have you even attended a zine con, like MediaWest? You'd be amazed at the variety of fandoms involved. And how beautiful, creative, and fantastic some fanzines are.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

The only fic I've ever printed was a birthday present for someone. I bound it myself and did the text for the cover by hand, but left the rest of it blank because she's a better artist than I am.

I have no idea how it works on printing sites. But you can get some pretty amazing binding stuff done at kinkos. :)

[memento1.livejournal.com]

I know, for artwork, a few people have made polished copies and/or books at Kinko's. But not for fic...

[anotokino.livejournal.com]

Please be very careful about this, and read through the legalese of any site you want to use. Things like these always have the potential to end very badly, even if you have the best of intentions(which I of course believe you do :P). If you're unsure you could always run it by someone with more experience of these kinds of things... There's fandom_lawyers for example, but I don't know if they would be able to give you the advise you need...

So tl;dr, my advice is just to be very cautious.

[sarae03.livejournal.com]

I have formatted some of mine into "book" format using word and printed it out that way. It's kind of fun...creating the headers, footers, borders, gutters, mirroring, table of contents, etc. They turned out very well...then I edited them and now I need to do it again. ;)
But then I found that printing them (because some of them are rather lengthy) was not the most economical idea and I've pretty much stuck to reading on screen. Have you seen this? Kindle It could be just a fad, but I'm thinking it could be a fan fic readers dream. Format your own fiction, take it with you anywhere, read it any time...less eye strain and no printing.
*sigh*

[acciochocolate.livejournal.com]

As morjana said above, fanzines have been around since the early days of Trek in the 60s. People submitted their works to an editor of a zine, who was calling for submissions, and the approved work (with corrected typos, etc) was usually typed up by the editor again so that they could do a physical layout. Often times the editor would get fan artists to do commissioned art for a particular story, or the art and story might be sent in together. The organized layout was then taken to a nearby place, Kinko's or other, where the zine was printed. Some fanzine editors bought their own nice printers. Depending upon the financial resources of the editor, she might opt to have the zine collated and bound (perfect or spiral) at the printers, or she might have a collating party, and purchase her own binder.

Usually no more than a few hundred if that were printed. Those with stories in the zines got a trib (short for contributor's copy), the rest were sold at cost. No zine editors that I ever heard of set out to make any money. That was not ever the objective. The cost of the zine, say $5-$20, paid for the printing, and professional collating and binding, the printing of the front colour cover (if it had such), and the shipping and mailing costs. Many editors didn't even break even.

Disclaimers were always printed in the front of the zines. That would keep the legal beagles off of fandom's backs, then and now. So, no legal nightmare.

The problems (except for the silly SW PTB, and Fox shutting down some Buffy sites) were rare, and only happened if a non-license holder was trying to make money off a film or TV show. And this was usually about things other than fanzines, like toys or models or photos, that sort of thing. No zine editors that I ever heard of set out to make any money. That was not ever the objective. The cost of the zine, say $5-$20, paid for the printing, and professional collating and binding, the printing of the front colour cover (if it had such), and the shipping and mailing costs.

If you want to print out some fics for your own reading, there should be no problem.

If you print out someone else's work, again for your own reading, there should be no problem.

I wouldn't try to print someone else's work in a zine without checking with them first if it could be your intention to sell it. And that's a plural you.

There was this girl who wrote a SW novel a while back, and had it printed through Amazon. It had an ISBN #. The SW franchise people found out about this rather quickly, and made Amazon pull it, as the writer did not have a contract with whoever is publishing SW media tie-in books, and therefore it violated their policies.

Your best bet would be to put any fic in question into some formatting program like M$ Word, and print it out at home. You could then take it to a printer to have it bound. This would solve any problems that I can see, other than the cost of the paper and the ink.

[maypanic.livejournal.com]

I know people have used viovio.com for similar projects, they're generally for photo books but since you can use pdf files it works for print books too. They absolutely don't offer your work to anyone else. Their prices are reasonable, especially on the softback larger format books. But at that many pages you'd probably do better at kinkos... even in the 14x11 size book your page count could get really pricey.

[okelay.livejournal.com]

I worked in a photocopy place for a few months. I printed several books and then binded them with rings.

if you don't want to get into trouble, I say go down to some place that does that sort of thing and ask them about it. get a budget and all that.


you take the digital file, the .doc or .pdf or whatever,
set the page to book-mode, horizontal, and printed on both sides. then it's printed, cut in half, and binded. you can put a photo on the cover and all that. I did that and printed a few books.

or you could do the copy-paste and read it in a pda or ipod if you've got it. I have several of my favourite fics in .doc format to read and reread. a xouple I printed even.