I am in webcomics and fanart-selling too (Three cons this month! I hate myself!) but also being in the fanfic end of things (and, to some extent, in pro-original fic - there's a *reason* I never actually get anything done) I've had to learn to just kind of separate things out in my head, because the way selling and publishing works is *so different* for webcomics and fanart, for no real reason except history.

I mean, there are people who sell their original fic and legal fanfic (and, occasionally, outright fanfic) through the same methods we use for printed webcomics and fanart prints, but the real goal for most people thinking pro is to sell to a proper publisher or get a proper agent, and it's customary even when just shopping it around to an agent to take it off the web (Or take down the originial fic, if it's a serial-numbers job. Heck, it's not that uncommon to take down *all* your fanfic just because you've sold an unrelated novel.) And I've known some people to take it down even when they're just doing self-publishing and don't have an agent or editor telling them to. (And things like P&P slash and SH self-inserts do get pro-published through editors, pretty commonly now, so that was my first thought.)

Anyway! Yeah, Cory Doctorow gets away with it because he was already doing quite well with self-publishing and had the power in that relationship and he was willing to insist, but pretty much everyone in publishing is going to tell you "don't plan to be Cory Doctorow, it's not going to happen." He's still a special case, though I can maybe see a future not too far down the line where he isn't, depending on how the freedom of information laws over the next few years go. (It's becoming more common for pro-authors to web-publish stuff they're fairly sure they can't sell, too, and then ask for tips along Doctorow's original model. So we'll see how things go.)