Are squillion-dollar tradpub deals for popular AO3 stories going to ruin fandom?

Hi! I’m Allegra, a fandom expert with a book out next year about the history of fan culture, from Lord Byron to Beatlemania and beyond. Follow me on X, TikTok, and LinkedIn for more commentary on fan trends, cult media, and pop-culture phenomena.

You may have seen the rumors flying last week that a fanfiction by the name of All The Young Dudes, by MsKingBean89, sold for a spectacular seven figures (GBP) at the 2026 London Book Fair. The story, which currently sits at an insane 19 million hits on AO3, is a lengthy, angsty Harry Potter tale centering on a young romance between Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, with Snape, Peter Pettigrew, and James and Lily Potter as side characters.

The pseudonymous Ms. Bean is a passing acquaintance of mine from a (non-HP) fandom we both shared a few years ago. When Ryan Broderick and I interviewed her in 2021, around the time TikTok was speculating she was secretly Taylor Swift, she was looking back on the ATYD phenomenon as something that had finally started winding down after a frenzied few years during COVID. She attributed the success of her lengthy tale to its angst: “that’s really appealing to 15 year old girls, 16 year old girls, to be emotionally destroyed. That’s something that we crave deep inside.”

She confessed to feeling a lot of pressure to be a “replacement” for JK Rowling, and said that even after the success of the story that she craved privacy, and felt that “it’s important that I have something in my life that I’m not trying to sell, and that I’m not able to make money off of in that way.”

So, what changed? Well, obviously, the money. MsKingBean told me in 2021 re: the prospect of going pro that “I can make money other ways [than writing]. I have a job. And I don’t think I would make much more from writing a novel, you know? You hear that they make like $40,000 on average for a book. Okay, well, I could make more than that doing various other things.” Of course, I doubt that the (alleged) offer of £2.5 million for rights to All The Young Dudes at the London Book Fair was what she had in mind when she said that.

Because this was before the huge adapted-fic deals we’re seeing today were on the table: Ali Hazlewood’s originally-Reylo The Love Hypothesis had just been published a few months before, and the AO3 femsub fantasy doorstopper Alchemised was still a popular Harry Potter Draco/Hermione fic called Manacled.

Yes, genre agents were actively scouting new talent on AO3, and it was public knowledge that genre writers like Tamsyn Muir and Casey McQuiston had come up through fanfiction. But when many readers speculated that their original published works began as fanfiction, they were incorrect.

With a few exceptions, the path from fic writer to pro in 2021 was the same as it had been since the 1970s: a writer would hone their skills in fic communities, in order to get good enough to either query or organically catch the attention of an agent who would then shop their new, original work to publishers.

That pipeline is specifically what is changing as publishers belatedly realize that the original Fifty Shades serial-numbers-filed-off method has much more juice to it: especially when it comes to fics that are already popular (unlike Fifty Shades, which had a tiny number of real readers as a fic compared to the AO3 pull-to-publish juggernauts of the 2020s).

The ATYD frenzy didn’t die down as Ms. Bean was observing (and probably hoping): after our interview it actually picked up again, becoming the wellspring of a massive spinoff Marauders fandom, far more popular than ye olde Marauders fandom of the early 2000s that, while popular (see: The Shoebox Project), still played second fiddle to the main trunk of Harry and his cohort.

In 2023 I wrote about how segments of the Harry Potter fandom, in an effort to separate itself from Rowling’s hardcore transphobia, have flocked to transformative works, particularly about the Marauders, as “replacements” for the tainted canon: “The Marauders are just far enough from Harry Potter proper for fans to feel some ownership of the elements of the world that they played a part in creating.”

This is the perfect emotional recipe for a very very popular fanfiction, one that captivates fans and creates bonds between them equal to or even surpassing the bonds generated by the canon itself.1 Having not read ATYD myself I can’t say whether it is worthy of that position or not, but it certainly emerged at a time when that niche also was present to be filled—with JK Rowling’s views on trans people first coming to the fore in 2018, around the time ATYD was published. I don’t think this is a coincidence!

And now ATYD has managed to remain popular for long enough to take advantage of the late 2020s’ major fan phenomenon: the delayed but long-awaited takeoff of slash fanfic into the commercial arena, following a gold-bricked path laid down by het romantasy over the last half-decade.

It really has been only a matter of time. Think about it from the publishers’ perspective. They are hurting for cash cows, with romance and fantasy and especially their grotesquely lovable mutant child romantasy being seemingly the only things readers are willing to pay for en masse—and here is a proven-popular, wildly successful story that has, since the pandemic, spawned its own enormous subfandom of devotees who consider themselves not fans of that witch JKR’s sprawling universe, but instead obsessives of MsKingBean89’s uniquely and compellingly adapted (but far from original) cast of magical misfits.

Whichever publisher it was that dropped an atomic bomb of cash on MsKingBean is making a huge bet: that the fandom built up around All The Young Dudes organically on AO3 and social media over the past 8 years will translate into a fandom just as enduring and obsessive and willing to spend money on multiple volumes of a queer romantasy series that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Harry Potter. This is not a guaranteed thing at all. In fact, I personally find it fairly unlikely for a variety of reasons. But I can see the logic in the bet.

The consequences for the publisher are simple: either they lose money or they make it. For Ms. Bean, it’s a little more complicated: a life-changing amount of money, and probably a great deal of exhausting work stripping the serial numbers off her story, in exchange for the cash (guaranteed) and clout from the publishing world (not guaranteed) and, I will note, the guaranteed, ongoing, and in fact already intense opprobrium from fandom at large for committing what they perceive as an unforgivable betrayal, taking fandom culture deeper into the depths of commercial exploitation.

For the fans of ATYD, of the Marauders, of Harry Potter, and AO3 readers in general, the potential consequences of this fic going wide are a lot more complex than cash and clout. Just as in the recent Heated Rivalry/NY Mag kerfuffle, fans are now navigating a brave new world wherein their private spaces are being turned inside out and their valuable entrails sold back to the world.

While ATYD fans themselves are stressing about the “mainstreaming” of their favorite work, and speculating on how the HP-specific elements of the story’s worldbuilding will be made Rowling-free, one popular sentiment amongst fans outside the community seems to be along the lines of: “harry potter fanfics turned traditionally published novels are genuinely a plague upon society.”

“this ploy by money hungry publishers is going to ruin fanfic & trad publishing #STOP” reads another tweet, summing up the general mood. The nakedly commercial aspect of the acquisition is clear to everyone, making the deal announcement into one more harbinger of some kind of oncoming fandom apocalypse.

Non-ATYD, old-school Marauders fans have a bit more of a nuanced view. On Reddit, an opinion shared by many fic readers is that ATYD has done major damage to the HP fic community: due to its outsized dominance, its characterizations (which are rather distant from the canonical characters) drown out authors who have different interpretations and/or rely more closely on the Rowling texts.

“While I dislike how mainstream fanfiction is becoming, I long for this fandom to be free of ATYD and all the fics that spawn from it with a copy pasted set of personalities and appearances😭” wrote one user. This stuff is important to a lot of people! There are worlds within worlds out there.

As the great Katherine Dee wrote in GQ in response to the Heated Rivalry drama, although fan spaces online are technically public but historically private in practice, this mainstreaming of fandom, which everyone is noticing, is dismantling the digital-social norms which have supported these communities for decades. Yeah, it’s probably not a great thing…

But it’s not something that can be easily halted or reversed. Freaking out, complaining, righteous indignation isn’t going to do anything to stop the revving up of the commercial engine. Because after all:

The culture that fandom built won. It isn’t a dirty little secret; it’s the organizing logic of contemporary media consumption. You can’t be the bedrock of contemporary culture and also the invisible underdogs.

Another genius friend, Tiffany, posted a great video on TikTok which mentions how the moment something underground becomes legible to capital, it becomes mainstream, and therefore uncool. That’s what is happening to fic right now in general, and slash fic in particular. Heads are perking up across boardrooms at the thought of being able to acquire popular IP with an existing loyal readership, fantasy or sci-fi or romance or whatever, no matter the genders of the characters involved. Rumors are flying that the most popular Byler (Mike/Will from Stranger Things) fic on AO3 is about to get a huge publishing deal too.

We seem to be at an inflection point for the reception and publication of self-published stories, including fanfiction. The online discourse bomb over the recent cancellation of the clearly AI-written “femgore” novel Shy Girl included some valuable insights on why on earth a reputable publishing house like Hachette would be publishing a seemingly completely unedited and unvetted manuscript by an unknown writer. “Publishing houses and agents make you jump through 10,000 hoops if you are an untried author,” wrote writer Amy DeBellis on X. “But if you self-published a book that turns out to sell like hotcakes? Publishers will be DESPERATE to get their hands on it. And you get to skip past allll the hoops.”

Of course, it can be argued that fandom’s inborn relationship to commercial pop culture has meant it’s always-already been uncool—and likewise, it can also be argued that no matter how legible it gets to capital, there will always be something inherently cool about fanfiction, especially erotic fanfiction written and read by women and queer people with no active aims towards popularity or mainstream success.

The real question is whether those fans and creators will continue to feel welcomed, comfortable, and encouraged by a community that is increasingly a motherlode for outside extraction.

Many fans see AO3 as a blissfully non-commercial alternative to Wattpad, where writers have long actively angled for popularity in order to secure the IP deals and screen adaptations that the for-profit platform has on offer.

AO3 is very secure in its by-fan-for-fans nonprofit operations, but they can’t really do anything as it stands now to stop outside actors and entities from interfacing with it to surface the most popular and potentially profitable new works. This newfound legibility to capital has the potential to drive some fans off the platform entirely, which I’m sure is not what the OTW wants, but would it be in their best interests to change the way they operate it in order to stop it?