A Harry Potter fanfic has just become one of the most successful publishing releases of the year. ‘Alchemised’, SenLinYu’s debut novel, sold 300,000 copies during its first week in bookstores and reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. But the real impact came days before its publication, when Legendary Entertainment paid more than $3 million for the film rights, setting a record for a debut novel.
How it was done. The story behind the book is as notable as its figures: ‘Alchemised’ was originally titled ‘Manacled’, and was a fanfiction which mixed the universe of Harry Potter with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, focusing on the relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. Over 18 months, SenLinYu transformed his viral story (which racked up millions of reads on the fanfictions Archive of Our Own) into a completely original work, removing all traces of JK Rowling and Atwood’s intellectual property from the text, but attempting to preserve the core of the narrative. The result: Favorite Debut Novel of 2025 at the Goodreads Choice Awards.
What is it about? Alchemised follows Helena Marino, an alchemist and healer who awakens after 14 months as a prisoner of war of the necromancers, the victorious side in a devastating civil war. Helena discovers that her mind has been magically altered, erasing crucial memories from a part of her life she doesn’t even remember owning. The book has a violent and dark approach, and that is why SenLinYu rejects the label of “romance” despite the love component: “I did not write this book with the idea that it would be seen as something aspirational,” he says.
The author’s past. The appeal of the book lies precisely in that uncompromising darkness. SenLinYu, of Japanese descent, injects into her fantasy elements based on the real horrors of war (her maternal grandmother was in American concentration camps during World War II) and has sought to recover ignored historical perspectives, particularly the experiences of Soviet women on the Eastern Front. That combination of epic fantasy and anti-war criticism has connected with readers who seek more mature and disturbing narratives than those usual in the genre.
The paradigmatic case. The path of fanfiction The publishing phenomenon has an inescapable antecedent: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. In 2009, EL James began posting chapters of ‘Master of the Universe’ on Fanfiction.net, reimagining the relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan from ‘Twilight’, without vampires but with a domineering billionaire. Reader reaction was so positive that James self-published the story in 2011 after removing explicit references to Stephenie Meyer’s saga and renaming the protagonists Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele.
The break came in March 2012, when Random House acquired the rights to the novel in a seven-figure deal. The result was more than 150 million copies sold globally and a film trilogy that grossed $1.3 billion at the global box office. Already then Jennifer Bergstrom, an executive at Simon & Schuster, declared that “the fanfiction It has definitely become part of what we publish. This is changing the industry at a time when traditional publishing needs it most.” For the first time, major publishers were publicly acknowledging that online communities of amateur writers were a legitimate talent pool.
Other successes. The success of ‘Fifty Shades’ was not an isolated case. Anna Todd wrote a story about One Direction’s Harry Styles on Wattpad in 2013, publishing it in serial format under the title ‘After’. The story accumulated more than 1 billion readings on the platform before Simon & Schuster offered it a contract that sold more than 10 million copies and spawned five films. More recently, Ali Hazelwood transformed her fanfiction of Star Wars centered on Rey and Kylo Ren in ‘The Love Hypothesis’, which will soon be adapted to film.
The journey here. This transformation of fanfiction into a bestseller would not have been possible without the digital ecosystem that supports it. Archive of Our Own houses more than 13 million works and has become the largest archive of transformative writing. SenLinYu’s ‘Manacled’ was the second most read story in the entire history of the web when it was removed in January 2025, having accumulated more than 10 million views and 84,000 kudos (the equivalent of “likes”).
This phenomenon has forced the traditional publishing industry to rethink its methods of attracting talent. Literary agents and editors now systematically scour Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, and Fanfiction.net, identifying high-impact stories before offering contracts. Removing references to other people’s intellectual property is now a normalized process, and thanks to this, streams like the ‘Manacled’ videos accumulated millions of views years before ‘Alchemised’ hit bookstores. A whole tide of public before the official publication of the book.
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