What to do when author doesn't reply to anyone's mails and I want to continue the story ?

[Erozetta]

On a related note, does anyone actually reply to emails? I’m fairly certain I’ve never replied to a Lit-related email.

That kind of one-to-one contact seems a bit creepy. I prefer my readers keep their distance, thank you. (Maybe I’m just weird).

I do.

 

[TheLobster]

On a related note, does anyone actually reply to emails? I’m fairly certain I’ve never replied to a Lit-related email.

That kind of one-to-one contact seems a bit creepy. I prefer my readers keep their distance, thank you. (Maybe I’m just weird).

I only replied to a few; I agree that most are quite creepy. I generally ignore comments, too, especially if they're not from people whom I know from AH.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't think you can compare the 50 Shades books to the Twilight books and see the roots of Twilight supporting Gray. It may be the germ came from Twilight, but the virus is a totally different strain. You can no more accuse E. L. James of intellectual theft than Dame Agatha Christy of ripping off Sir Author Conan Doyle. However, both Dolye and Christy have rather prickly detectives who are assisted by dim bulbs or dull tools. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but taking the story whole cloth and appropriating it is just theft.

Not sure how you got that from anything I said. My only point is that copyright is trivial to circumvent with a bit of effort, as evidenced by Master of the Universe -> 50 Shades of Grey. Stephanie Meyer is famously un-litigious, so a decent argument could be made that if she were more like James herself in that way, there might have been a decent case to be made against 50 shades. That's just not a fight Meyer ever wanted to fight, clearly. And I think that's for the best, personally.

I've never even published fanfiction period. It's not really something I'm interested in. I just think it's a mistake to conflate the ethics of it with the legality of it, because the legality of it is frankly silly and fully of holes.

At some point being too intensely judgmental of derivative work becomes an exercise in cutting off our noses to spite our faces. There's surely a line somewhere, but it's often something like the Supreme Court's famous opinion on pornography, 'you know it when you see it.'