Etsy sellers are turning free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, and listing them for sale on online marketplaces for more than $100 per book. It’s a problem that’s rattling the authors of those fanfics, as well as their fans and readers.
Several sellers, easily found on Etsy and very popular, each with hundreds of five-star reviews, are selling copies of fanfiction taken from sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3) and reselling them as bound books. The average price of these bound copies is around $149. Some sellers claim that they’re simply covering the cost of materials, while others just sell the books, usually with the fanfiction writers’ Ao3 username on the cover.
Etsy USED to be a seller space for individual makers. Then about ten years ago they started allowing mass-produced items, and it’s been downhill ever since.
There are still individual makers there, but they’re drowned out by all the counterfeits and Chinese dropshippers of ultra cheap tat, and the corporates making coin off the current “we sell anything that sells” policy.
You can’t even report counterfeits on Etsy anymore. That’s what a shithole it’s turned into.
I reported an item as counterfeit a week ago, it’s still an option. Not that I have much trust in those items actually being removed though
They must have put it back (under pressure!) then, because it wasn’t there last year. I actually went looking for it specifically after I read the WaPo article about Etsy scammers just to see if they’d put the option back.
Also, I just now looked, and you’re right: in the browser view, there’s now a tiny little “Report this item to Etsy” link at the very bottom of the product listing, to the lower right. It’s literally the last thing on the page.
Archive link to WaPo article: https://archive.ph/be2bk
How to report an item to Etsy: https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000344568-How-to-Report-an-Item-or-Shop
EDITED TO ADD correction and links
Do you know of good alternatives?
As much as I hate to say it, Instagram is pretty decent for artisan/niche stuff. There you can actually see them making. Assuming they don’t use tricky camera angles or other bs.
But it’s sad that the answer for one cancer is another cancer
Artisans co-op
No, I sure don’t. I wish I did.
BUT – I will say this. Depending on the product it’s pretty self-evident who the individual makers are on Etsy. If you do your research, like doing image searches, it’s also usually pretty self-evident what is mass-produced and/or counterfeit.
So I still use Etsy, but only in a very limited way, and only if I can assure myself with some level of certainty that the item I want is actually what some individual maker produced themselves.
Nothing wrong with mass-produced items if they’re not counterfeit, I just prefer not to get them through Etsy.
Is there an alternative? Something like old school Etsy?
There are a few but the best one imo is artisans co-op
Not that I know of, at least not on the large scale. I just left a longer reply on this same thread about it, but the only alternative I can think of for individual sellers is eBay. But eBay is not for makers, they take a pretty big cut, the whole Paypal thing is problematic as well, and the only thing I use eBay for anymore is the odd discontinued appliance part. Sorry. I wish there were another maker’s seller space like Etsy used to be, that’d be fantastic.
I don’t know enough about the fediverse, but maybe a Magazine for legit online artist shops would be a good idea.
Maybe I’ll try making one once I’ve spent enough time to understand what I’m doing on here.
what do you mean by that?
Magazines are Kbin’s name for communities