We are excited to welcome Jennie Bennet as today’s guest!

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Thank you for having me on Thinking Through Our Fingers, I’m really excited to be here!

It seems like every time I go to the movies there’s a new superhero flick. I don’t get to the movies much, seeing as I have four kids and limited time with my husband, but I am on the internet enough to know that there are at least four superhero movies a year, and all of them make good money.

Why bring this up? Well, superhero movies are the fanfiction of Hollywood.

When I tell people I write Fanfic, most people don’t know what it is. Fanfiction is anything based on a character that doesn’t belong to you. Be it Harry Potter, Twilight, or in my case K-Pop (Korean pop music.)

Since these characters (or real people who are celebrities) do not belong to the writer, most of the time the stories can’t be sold. But there is a loophole. If the characters are changed enough—mostly their name—they can be published.

The next question I usually get is about 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, that started as a fanfic, and yes, it was hugely popular.

But most of all, people ask me why I write it. The answer is simple, I love the fandom. A fandom is a group of people who are all crazy about the same thing—Harry Potter, Twilight, or K-Pop— and the K-Pop fandom is amazingly strong.

Asianfanfics is now the number one fanfiction site. This can include K-Pop, K-Drama, or Anime inspired stories or anything that came from Asia. I will say this, though, whenever I login to said site, all the most popular stories are usually about K-Pop.

I never intended to fall down the fanfiction hole, it happened because I made fandom friends who heard I was writer and asked for a fanfic. I did it for fun, and it became my happy writing place. As I made more fanfics, however, I started to pressure myself to get more views, spread the word to more people, find more comments, and generally sell something that was free.

This got me thinking. If I wasn’t afraid to publish my fanfiction on Wattpad (a popular site for free books) then why would I be afraid to put that same fanfiction up for sale? So I did.

I had to change the names of the original people and groups I wrote about, and there was some heavy editing involved, but on Dec 1^st I published Snowflake Kisses on Amazon and got to #1 in YA Holiday.

K-Pop is still a fairly new thing in western culture, but it’s gaining popularity at an incredible speed. Like the superhero movies that are put out, the appetite for more books related to favorite fandoms is voracious. It’s an emerging genre that might be the next big thing, or it might only stay fun. Either way, I’m going to continue to write Fanfic because I enjoy it, and if I sell a few books along the way, it won’t hurt.

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Jennie Bennett is a mother to four beautiful and crazy children, and a wife to an incredibly hot and kind husband. She found a passion in Korean pop culture in January of 2013 and she’s never looked back since. She currently resides in Houston, Texas with her husband, kids, and a cute puppy named Charlie. You can find her website here.