pull to publish

pull to publish (third-person singular simple present pulls to publish, present participle pulling to publish, simple past and past participle pulled to publish)

1. To withdraw a work of fan fiction from circulation and commercially publish a reworked version of it as original fiction.
   • 2014 August, Joseph Brennan, David Large, “‘Let's Get a Bit of Context’: Fifty Shades and the Phenomenon of ‘Pulling to Publish’ in Twilight Fan Fiction”, in Media International Australia, volume 152, number 1, page 28:

     Such a definition allows us to consider the implications of ‘pulling to publish’ Twilight fanfics.

   • 2015, Jessica Seymour, Jenny Roth, & Monica Flegel, "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Fan-creator interactions and new online storytelling", Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 4, Numbers 2-3, June 2015, page 108:

     E. L. James’s 50 Shades of Grey (originally a Twilight fan fiction) has enjoyed tremendous success, inspiring other fan fiction authors to ‘pull to publish’, particularly via new fan-launched digital publishing houses […]

   • 2019, R. Lyle Skains, Digital Authorship: Publishing in the Attention Economy, page 68:

     While attention capital drove her success, it was not entirely positive: the fan community perceived James’ “filing off the serial numbers” (deleting identifiable references to its source text) and pulling to publish as a betrayal of the community and an exploitation of community efforts to improve the work through feedback.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:pull to publish.

This term can be applied to the commercial republication of fan fiction based on source works in the public domain, such as The Cthulhu Mythos, Les Misérables, or Sherlock Holmes. The term file off the serial numbers is exclusively used to describe removing proprietary elements from fan fiction based on copyrighted source works (e.g. changing character and planet names in a Star Wars fanfic).

• file off the serial numbers