The harry potter

Harry Potter: The Fic That Launched A Thousand Ships

Creating and commercializing fanfiction is hardly a new phenomenon, but in the late ’90s, the community got a boost from new platforms sprouting from the rapidly expanding internet.

The Harry Potter series is typically credited with launching modern fanfiction—with a big assist from sites such as Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, which launched in 1998 and 1999, respectively. Racheline Maltese, now a professional romance author, wrote fanfiction in high school and returned to it after the emergence of J.K. Rowling’s brainchild. "The Harry Potter books were taking too long to come out, so we were going to finish some ourselves,” Maltese says. “A lot of people got into Harry Potter in part because it was a kids' book that had all these adults with tragic backstories floating around that we didn't get to learn because that wasn't really what the book was about.”

Nine years after the last Harry Potter book hit shelves, J.K. Rowling’s magical universe is still one of the most popular fandoms. There are over 759,000 Harry Potter-related fanfics on Fanfiction.net, the most on the site. (Twilight is second with over 219,000 works). Archive of Our Own, established in late 2009, boasts over 117,000 Harry Potter fanworks, the most for any series in any medium, with the exception of TV series Supernatural (154,245).

The most famous fanfiction author to go pro from the Harry Potter fandom is Cassandra Clare. She published her wildly popular Draco Trilogy from 2000 to 2006, several years before James posted Master of the Universe. “It is notable that Cassie Clare did it first but it didn’t spark the same gold rush that happened after E.L. James published,” says Adam Wilson, an editor at Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, who has worked with fanfiction authors. He credits this to the advancement of the self-publishing market and Fifty Shades’ “taboo” factor.

Clare is infamous in the fanfiction community and has been accused of plagiarism and cyberbullying. In 2001, she was banned from Fanfiction.net over allegations of plagiarizing The Hidden Land, a then out-of-print fantasy novel by Pamela Dean. Shortly before publishing her first professional novel, The Mortal Instruments, with Simon & Schuster in 2007, Clare removed all her fanfiction from the internet.

The fact that Clare’s following from her fanfiction days, which thrust her into the professional publishing world, has largely abandoned her apparently hasn't affected her bottom line. Clare spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list, and in 2012, she signed a three-book deal reportedly in the high seven figures. The movie based on her book, City of Bones, was a bust at the box office, grossing only $95.4 million on a production budget of $60 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Her Mortal Instruments novels has also made it to the small screen as the Shadowhunters series on Freeform. Shadowhunters, currently in its second season, averaged a modest 2.2 million viewers in its debut season, but renewal looks likely. That said, Clare is again facing accusations of plagiarism. Dark-Hunter author Sherrilyn Kenyon alleges that Clare’s works are “virtually identical” and filed a copyright and trademark infringement suit in February 2016.