What’s the difference between original works and fan works, and which has the edge at conventions? Fan works are derived from existing IP and come with that IP’s fan base built in. If you happen to love the characters or pairing, you can have fun writing and make money, but the hot topics change every season. Original works are harder to sell to strangers unless you’re the creator of a well-known IP. Utsudo suggests building recognition within your community through fan works while developing your originals. Either way, making money from creative work depends on steady effort.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Thoughts after running a booth at CWT

After experiencing a booth at CWT, I had some thoughts I wanted to record.

At these events, original works and fan works are placed in separate areas. Accessories and similar items have their own area too, but I’ll set aside everything other than books here.

The original area is basically for your own original creations—novels, comics, cards, hanging scrolls and so on. Fan works are all kinds of creations based on an existing IP, commonly novels, comics, badges and so on.

But I noticed the zones are sometimes blurry. In what should be the original area, there were sometimes booths nearby selling both original and fan works, so it’s not always clear-cut (?

The advantages of fan works

Back to the point. First, the advantages of fan works. As the name suggests, they’re derived from existing IP. IP covers a wide range—anime, manga, films, novels and more. Any work you can think of can spawn fan creations.

Creators running booths fall into two main types: those who treat it as a business and are more commercially minded, and those who create purely out of love, regardless of revenue.

If you’ve been at it a long time or are very famous, you can make money with either original or fan works. But I believe most creators, after booth fees, food, lodging, transportation and other costs, at best make a small profit—or even lose money.

Back to the point: if you create fan works based on an existing IP, whatever your work is like, you at least have that IP’s fans as a base. And if you happen to be writing about popular characters or pairings, your work may well make money.

If you really love those characters or pairings, you can truly achieve writing for fun while making money. But the hot fandoms change every year and every season, so you may need to change your fictional husbands or wives often. Whether that’s a blessing or a curse depends on how you see it—personally, I can’t really adapt.

The benefits of self-printing and selling

The advantage of printing and selling your own books is that you control the costs. If you print extra, you can keep them as event prizes or sell them slowly—unlike publishers who take most of the profit and tell you what to do. If sales are good, some creators even make over a million NT dollars a year from these events, though that’s the territory of top creators.

The challenges of original works and “using fan works to build originals”

With original works, unless you’re the creator of a very popular IP—in which case your derivative creations are official spin-offs—if you’re just a small writer without much popularity behind you, selling is more likely to lose money. Even so, running booths anyway in hopes of making friends and finding readers is its own kind of fun.

But you can also start with fan works to quickly gain recognition within your community while building your original works—“using fan works to build originals.” Over time, you might really become a top creator at doujinshi events whose fan works and originals both sell well.

Of course, it’s easy to say but definitely not easy to do.

Making money from creating depends on steady effort

All I can say is that whichever path you take, if you want to make money from creating, you can’t escape the work of building it. To stand out takes a great deal of effort—and a bit of luck.

So, are you ready to run a booth and make big money (?

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #175: The Café with Rules
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.