…your novel has things in common with something else you wrote? I know that if you’ve published a short story in a magazine or something along those lines that you should be up front about that, but the internet makes the boarders of what is considered “published” fuzzier…
I have a fairly decent start - about 125 pages - on a novel for young adult readers. Maybe it’ll be good enough to attempt to have it published when it’s done, maybe it won’t. But here lies my quandary: this novel has a fair amount in common with a piece of fan fiction I wrote in 2004.
I have no worries about there being potential for character infringement, given that the main character’s personality in the piece of fan fiction was almost wholly imagined anyway because on the show he was an infant and in the fic he’s eleven. And I’ve also excised the adult characters to the show, who were only secondary in the fic anyway. The main character is now a girl, a couple years older, and has no paranormal powers (beyond dreams that come true), and is a first person narrator, whereas the fic was in third person.
What remains in common is that I was intrigued by the idea of a kid being given back to their real dad, who has younger kids, when their adopted family can’t handle them anymore after a few kidnapping attempts. Eventually the father’s past catches up with everyone while Christmas shopping, putting the main character, both real parents, and a couple younger siblings in danger. Total plot similarities between the two pieces? About 35%.
The only people likely to pick up on the fact that this has a lot in common with the fan fic are people who read both. And therein lies the problem…as fanfics go, this story is moderately well known in the fandom. It actually won an award in the “official” fandom fic awards back in October; an award determined solely by readers. Even if I removed it from my page and asked archives to remove it too, it’s probably on any number of people’s hard drives. Not to mention that people in the fandom are fairly savvy about using wayback to access removed content. Therefore it’s remotely possible that someone could connect the dots and realize that this(turn the pages until you get to load the very much unedited excerpt) and this share things in common.
How do potential publishers see something like this? Ignorance is bliss or tell us up front when submitting the novel? Suppose you didn’t tell them and word leaked that it started as fanfiction, would it give publishers a lot of grief even if there wasn’t a case for character infringement?
I ask now, not because I’m confident that the novel will be publishable, but to know now if it having a lot in common with a fic will hurt its chances of being published even if it is well received by publishers. If so, spending the time to finish it would merely be an exercise, and perhaps thinking of a new plot would be a better use of my time if I intend to meet my lifelong goal of write a publishable novel by the time I’m 30…which is only 15 months from now, yikes.
Publishing types, please advise me.