IT starts with a familiar name, but then takes a turn.

Jay Gatsby actually faked his death, and is now reunited with Daisy. Scandal’s Olivia Pope is somehow working on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. And a member of the boy band One Direction is falling in love on a college campus — making roughly 250 million online readers swoon.

These are plot twists found in the universe of fan fiction, where authors borrow from another writer’s world, taking characters, places and even real people and putting them in stories all their own. Despite fan fiction’s reputation among old-school publishers for being nothing more than Harry Potter erotica, the online communities have grown to attract all kinds of stories.

And now, that online popularity is shaking up the divide between fan fiction and traditional book publishing. What used to be a disregarded copyright nightmare is a new youth-friendly approach for publishers.

“Fan fiction has absolutely become part of the fibre of what we publish,” said Jennifer Bergstrom, publisher of Gallery Books. “This is changing at a time when traditional publishing needs it most.”

Copyright issues can be circumnavigated by changing names and details, polishing up the prose and voila! a book is in publishers’ hands that already has a built-in audience. What was once Twilight fan fiction is reshaped into the Gabriel Trilogy (850,000 copies sold, per the publisher) and the infamous Fifty Shades Of Grey (100 million and counting). And that’s just the start.

Simon & Schuster recently took that boy band fan fiction story and published it in ink-on-paper form. The story, called After is actually a special kind of fan fiction: “real person fiction”. The main characters of After are inspired by the five members of One Direction.

Written by 25-year-old Anna Todd, After was first published on Wattpad.com, an online writing community where more than 75 million stories live. Copyright concerns are limited because, on that platform, Todd isn’t profiting from her work.

That’s how fan fiction has lived for years: separate from any exchange of cash or contract.

Sites like Wattpad, Fanfiction.net and ArchiveOfOurOwn.org are overflowing with entries for numerous books, movies, TV shows and plays from Edgar Allan Poe to Peter Rabbit.

The authors of the original works, of course, have mixed reactions. Most notably: J.K. Rowling doesn’t mind if you are creative with her characters, but George R.R. Martin abhors it.

Traditionally, publishers hadn’t been so hot for it either. “Fan fiction wasn’t really a word we thought of,” said Shaye Areheart, who formerly oversaw a division at Random House and now runs a publishing course at Columbia University. “It’s very difficult to say how you would get to turn another person’s intellectual property into your own.”

The exception was for authors who had been dead for long enough (70 years, for most) that their work becomes part of the “public domain”. William Shakespeare and Jane Austen are two of the most common examples.

“The books we love the most are the ones where you close the book and you’re still thinking about those characters,” said Carrie Bebris, author of the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries, in which the main characters of Austen’s beloved Pride and Prejudice solve mysteries together. “We want to be drawn into their lives again, because we didn’t get enough the first time.”

That’s what has made fan fiction popular, even among established authors. English crime writer P.D. James’s Austen-inspired book Death Comes to Pemberley became a BBC TV movie.

These books don’t typically market themselves as fan fiction. Instead, they’re “inspired by” or “a retelling”.

“The line is not clear between inspiration and fan fiction,” said Ashleigh Gardner, head of content and publishing at Wattpad, where After was written. “It’s very much about how the author self-identifies their work.”

After author Todd was insistent that Simon & Schuster stay loyal to her fan fiction base. At first, she tried to keep the names of the One Direction band members as her characters’ names. But before long, Harry became Hardin. Zayn was Zed, Louis was Logan, Niall was Nate and Liam was Landon, and they were just college friends, not bandmates.

The best-known fan fiction success story is Fifty Shades of Grey, which began life as a Twilight fan fiction series called Master of the Universe.

“If you take away the wrappings of fandom, you have to make sure the story can stand by itself,” said Cindy Hwang, executive editor at Berkley Books.

Hwang is working with three writers who came from fan fiction. One started in the Twilight fandom, one in Harry Potter and another in Batman. While the Twilight author was able to transform his story into a three-part best-seller, the others were writing fan fiction in worlds that Hwang said were “too integral” to the story. In other words, you can change the name of Hogwarts, but everyone will still know it is Hogwarts. Hwang had those authors write original books instead.

The only way for fan fiction writers to publish work that keeps the inspiration in plain view is to gain appropriate permissions. The estate of Agatha Christie, for example, recently gave approval to writer Sophie Hannah to create a mystery novel starring Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot.

Supporters are hoping that the After success story clears the way for more than just fan fiction romance writers. “We’ve been talking about what comes next incessantly” said Bergstrom at Simon & Schuster. “I feel like horror will be it, maybe urban legends. Really any genre could be what comes next.”

And if those fan fiction spin-offs sell like Fifty Shades of Grey did? “Then,” Bergstrom said, “long may they live.”

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2014