Entrepreneur cashes in with novel take on 'fan fiction'.

On Aug. 23, HarperCollins will begin a bold marketing experiment. For eight weeks, authors and editors from the publisher's stable will work with writers of "fan fiction" to produce an e-book that HarperCollins intends to sell on its Web site.

The objective isn't to produce great literature; it's to connect the nation's 65 million romance readers with the HarperCollins imprint Avon Books.

Fan fiction refers to stories written by amateurs using characters or settings from popular TV, film or book properties. The first critical mass of fan fiction grew up around the original "Star Trek" television series, but in recent years such shows as "The X-Files" and "Buffy the Vampire Slaver" have inspired large literary output. The advent of the Internet provided fans an easy way to write, share, critique and catalog their creations. Entire libraries appeared online, with works ranging from brief dialogue snippets to complete novels.

All of this content depended on intellectual properties owned by film and TV studios, of course. The studios had the legal fight to quash the sites, but that would offend their biggest fans. So they usually turned a blind eye as long as no one made money from the writings; if the content ever became inflammatory, the studios might send a cease-and-desist letter.

Now FanLib Inc., a company headed by former Yahoo executive Chris M. Williams, has found ways to turn fan fiction into a legitimate business. The company launched its first online event in February to promote Showtime Network's "The L Word." The HarperCollins gig represents its second project.

"So much passion and energy goes into these creations, and there's an opportunity to capture that energy and use it on behalf of the media companies to make properties bigger," Williams said. As to the question of letting strangers play with the media corporation's intellectual property, "it has reached the point where the business opportunity outweighs the legal liability," Williams explained.

For "The L Word" project, fans developed a complete episode. Every week a writer for the show delivered a "scene mission." Fans then posted their versions of the finished scene on the site and other fans voted on the competing drafts.

Writers only accounted for 3 percent to 5 percent of the site's audience. The rest of the traffic came from other fans, who read and voted on the posts. By the end of the week, the vote tally produced a winning scene. Then the site would post a new mission for the next scene, and the process repeated itself until a complete script emerged.

Besides promoting "The L Word," the exercise generated Web traffic. The project delivered 175,000 site visits, with the average visitor looking at 18 pages--decent numbers given that the audience was limited to people with Showtime who watched "The L Word." Advertisers for the project included W Hotels, Lending Tree, Saks Fifth Avenue and Fox Searchlight Films. FanLib makes money from a licensing fee paid by the sponsor as well as shared revenues from the ads.

New marketing methods usually have trouble quantifying their effect, and the goal of the L campaign was to increase word-of-mouth, a particularly difficult factor to measure. But the week the event launched, the phrase "The L Word" had a 26 percent rise in the AOL buzz index, a number indicating how often people search for a term. Also, Showtime staffers noticed more chat about the contest online.

"That anecdotal evidence is what we wanted to achieve--to activate this fan community," said Ken Todd, vice-president of New Media Programming Content at Showtime Networks.

"The show was up 51 percent in the ratings," said Williams, citing the only number that matters in TV. "I'm not going to take sole credit for that, but Showtime would admit that we were part of it. And the show was renewed for a third season."

The HarperCollins project will consist of two parts. The romance section will run for eight weeks for Avon, followed by a teen event to promote the launch of the HarperTeen imprint in January.

These events target fans of a genre rather than a specific book, with the goal of promoting HarperCollins authors. "This kind of event has never been done before, so we will be measuring everything," said Carolyn Pittis, senior vice-president of global marketing strategy. The metrics include traffic to the contest and related author Web sites, book sales and eventually the success of the e-book.

To standardize what Williams calls "massively social storytelling," FanLib has sunk more than $1 million into software development. The platform handles visitor registration, submissions, voting, feedback and advertising. Along the way, it compiles a tidy database for later use by advertisers and sponsors.

BY JOEL RUSSELL

Staff Reporter