Monetization of fan-made crafts and texts remains a contentious issue in fandom. The existing literature documents fans’ rejections of explicitly for-profit, authorized spaces for fanfiction ...publication, such as Kindle Worlds and FanLib, but tenuous acceptance of crafts and practitioners who demonstrate adherence to gift culture principles. Fanbinding—the practice of binding fanworks into codex form—brings to the fore concerns of author permission, intellectual copyright, and compensation for artistic labor prevalent in arguments regarding fanfiction monetization. Our research draws from survey data collected from thirty-one fanbinders and examines how they justify their decision-making on taking commissions through perceptions of acceptable fannish behavior and definitions of gift culture. We found that binders who do take commissions overall reject an explicitly for-profit enterprise and instead reinvest funds back into their craft, strengthening binders and commissioners’ ability alike to contribute to the fandom gift economy. Here, binders offer a concentrated model for how to navigate competing concerns about fannish self-preservation, gift economy, and sustaining a costly craft, offering insights into how practitioners of other fancrafts might similarly navigate a third-space hybrid economy to justify compensation.
Binding fan fiction into books is an increasingly popular phenomenon that follows in the footsteps of twentieth-century fanzines and challenges the current perception of fic as an exclusively digital ...form. Fan binders complicate book historical notions of bookmaking as a commercially driven enterprise by infusing it with affective connotations that rearrange the book production model of Robert Darnton's communication circuit. The notion of a fan fiction communication circuit extends Darnton's model to account for the noncommercial, reciprocal practices of fan fiction production. Members of Renegade Bindery, a community of fan binders on Discord, provide testimony regarding their philosophy, technique, and motivation that paints a complex picture of contemporary private bookbinding practices that construes value for printed works through affective labor rather than commercial return.
Fanbinding is the practice of printing and binding fanfiction and other fanworks in codex form either by hand or using online print services. In June 2020, fanbinder ArmoredSuperHeavy created ...Renegade Bindery, a Discord server for fanbinders of any experience to gather, discuss, and exchange resources, advice, and files to support one another’s artistic object-making. The foundation of Renegade Bindery generated an increase in community-oriented practices in online spaces that support fanbound work creation. In the last two years, the bindery has grown to over 900 members and offers an increasing number of channels dedicated to databases, exchanges, and community events, nurturing the circulation of fanbound works and encouraging fan creators to produce works (in number and scope) beyond what they might achieve on their own. This paper examines these communal elements of the discord server and how it sustains an information environment of fanbound work creation, circulation, and dissemination and how that circuit crosses digital and material boundaries.
