The Strange Case of LJ Smith

publishing contracts can be killer

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I had always been meaning to write a post about the bizarre publishing fiasco that happened to LJ Smith and had just never gotten around to it. She passed away though recently, so I wanted to pour one out for her, an author my teenage self has quite a bit of affection fore. This is a cautionary tale of publishing rights and intellectual property.

Even if you have no idea who LJ Smith is, you might have peripherally heard of her. She wrote the original trilogy (quadrilogy?) that The Vampire Diaries TV show as based on. The show ran for eight season and continues to be popular, occupying a comfortable supernatural + hot people + drama niche. I read the original young adult novels when I was in high school in the 90s and was absolutely obsessed with them—I read them multiple times. After the trilogy completed I was sad, but can you imagine my surprise when at Walden Books one day, out of no where, there was a new Vampire Diaries book—the fourth and final book, all the characters were back, and an even bigger foe reared its head. (that just couldn’t happen today, with the internet. You would just never get a surprise like that.)

When Twilight got big and I read it, I kept thinking, Why is everyone making a big deal out of these books? Vampire Diaries was way better. I think VD is genuinely well written. The characters are well defined, there’s romance, there’s drama. The books concern a teenage girl—Elena— who becomes entangled with two brothers who are vampires, the “good” one (Stefan) and the “bad” one (Damon).

But I did not know what was doing on under the surface.

LJ Smith was a teacher who wrote a middle grade novel that sold modestly, but attracted the attention of a book packager, Alloy Entertainment. If you’re not familiar with book packaging, this is when a company comes to you (the writer) with an idea and hires you to write it. The Baby Sitters Club was book packaging, as was Sweet Valley High. In some cases, the book would be published in your name, or you might be hired to be a ghost writer. In either case, you would not own the copyright or the intellectual property. I’m not 100% true if this was true back in the 90s, but at least now, Alloy Entertainment is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which will become important later.

The Vampire Diaries did very well and she went on to write other books like The Secret Circle and the Nightworld series. TVD sold millions of copies but LJ only saw a few thousand dollars (her advance)—because she did not own the copyright, something she didn’t fully understand. Her agent at the time, who was apparently her typist*, I guess did not closely read the contract. (*You do not need some kind of credential to call yourself a literary agent. You just need to call yourself a literary agent.)

This is tragic, but becomes more tragic when there is a resurgence of interest in TVD almost twenty years later, post Twilight. Though the original books were published starting in 1991, TVD TV show didn’t first air until 2006. Pretty obvious to see what happened here: people in the entertainment business saw the enormous success of Twilight in 2005 and wanted to capitalize on it. I read LJ’s blog on and off for years—she seemed a bit kooky, in an endearing way—and I remember her being really excited about the TV show being imminent.

I’m not 100% sure of the details, but because of the book packaging issues, I don’t believe she made much, if anything, from the TV show. But because the show was successful, this opened up the possibility to write more books. LJ published the first book in a new VD trilogy in 2009, and I excitedly bought it, despite my being twenty nine years old. The new trilogy came out in 2009-2011, a book a year and these books were… not good. I hate to say it, but they were really bad. Twenty years had passed and LJ Smith had changed as a writer. The pacing was off, the dialogue was bad, my favorite characters didn’t pop off the page the way they used to so effortlessly. Though the world she had created with the original four books showed a small town in Virginia as having various assorted supernatural beasts associated with it, how those supernatural things were contained seemed to work. But now she was introducing kitsunes and other things that just didn’t match with TVD world as we knew it. I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again.

But because LJ didn’t own this intellectual property, even though she was the person who brought it to life and made the property successful, her publisher kicked her off her own book series. Two more VD trilogies were written, the first ghostwritten by someone else under LJ Smith’s name, the second openly written by another author. I actually did not read these so I cannot speak to their quality.

Bizarrely, the story doesn’t end there. In 2013, Amazon launched Kindle Worlds, which was a way for writers to monetize fan fiction. If you are not familiar with the problems associated with fan fiction, I could say in short: people are going to write fan fiction about other people’s intellectual property. Some authors—Anne Rice, famously—were really bothered by this, saying that fan fic authors should instead build their own worlds. It seems harmless to me, to a point, but there do appear to be some problems when fan fic crosses from “free thing I read on the internet” to “thing someone is making money from.” This can take the form of EL James turning her Twilight fanfic into an enormously popular series. Or some trying to copyright tropes that commonly occur in werewolf erotica after she monetized her fan fiction in the form of a traditionally published novel. (I love the idea of a judge having to review stuff about knotting…) Or it can take the form of people on Etsy taking beloved fan fics and turning them into bound books (in which case, neither the author of the fan fic, nor the author of the inspired-from IP gets a cut).

At the time, I recall that Kindle Worlds was supposed to be a scenario where fan fic authors could publish on certain IPs and make money from it. I can’t find this confirmed, but I read in one place that the fanfic author would get a share, the original IP author would get an equal share, and then amazon would take the rest. In researching this article, I went back to see the list of what IP was approved for Kindle Worlds and saw that it was surprisingly short— including titles like TVD, Pretty Little Liars, Wayward Pines, and Veronica Mars. Lo and behold, these are all IPs associated with Warner Brothers. And Alloy is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers.

Do you see where this is headed? LJ Smith then started publishing Vampire Diaries fiction via Kindle Worlds—she was writing fan fiction about her own books. She was devastated about being kicked off her own series, and did not like the way the non-LJ Smith VD books were headed. (She believes she was kicked off the series because of creative differences surrounding the series—which brother Elena should end up with [the correct answer is Damon or both]—but TBH, I wonder if it wasn’t just due to the quality of the books. I think if she had hit the magic of the first books even 50% that would have sufficed, and I don’t think that happened.)

In 2018, Amazon shut down its Kindle Worlds program, without really providing an explanation of why. I really don’t know why because it seems a good deal for Amazon: they got to monetize something fan fic authors were giving away for free, and they go the associated rights of those stories that were published through Kindle Worlds.

I suppose this is a cautionary tale of “read your contract very carefully.” (And don’t hire your typist to be your agent.) I can’t honestly say I read the dozens and dozens of documents I signed when I bought a house. But when I got a contract when NSMC was optioned the first time, I went over it with a fine-tooth combed and sent questions back to my film agents multiple times. I was very concerned about who would own the intellectual property of my characters if I signed on the dotted line. I am also weirdly particular about wanting to retain rights to live theater rights (basically if I ever wanted to do a musical, which I’ve never even thought of, but in 2020 when I was in the process of being contracted for NSMC I was also working on a musical based on someone else’s IP and we were never able to buy the rights, not because the estate would not sell them, but because they were tied up in film rights and had never been exploited). There are parts of the contract that are about “what if there is a spin off? What if there is a sequel? What if there is a prequel?” Both times NSMC was optioned, I insisted on an Executive Producer credit. Authors don’t always get those and they might not always be offered. I did have some power the first time as there were multiple producers trying to get the rights, so I insisted. Even the second time I insisted even though they said no twice. (I was willing to walk if they didn’t cave—it’s my IP, if anyone is earning passive income as an EP on it, I should be too).

I put a lot of thought into creating characters, so I would never want them to be sold away. But I’ve also told my agent that there are very specific instances where I might be willing to work on someone else’s IP. There is good IP work out there, if you can find it, but be very certain you understand what you’re walking into.

Photo Credit: the original 1990s cover for The Awakening the first VD book.