Yes, and most of it is awful, whereas Joanne Rowling is talented.
It’s very unlikely that she would (or even could) have devoted herself to writing fiction in her free time as a passion project without hope of monetary reward and without any way to live from her writing for the ten years it took to finish the Potter series.
And even if she had somehow managed, you’d never hear about it, because without publishers to act as gatekeepers it’d have been lost in the mountains of fanfic and whatever other slop amateur writers upload to the internet.
i could give examples of both paid and unpaid and have them shot down as "this is crap writing". instead i will simply point out that there is very popular unpaid fiction on the internet, and its popularity is indicative of its quality, even if it doesn't match the standards of a literature PhD for "good writing". so basically go look for the most popular unpaid fiction online and there's your answer. i mean all of this conversationally and kindly, if my tone feels patronizing at all.
I specified "literary fiction" intentionally, because I suspected it would be the hardest kind for you to find, and that good genre fiction (sci-fi, mystery, romance, etc.) would be somewhat more likely (though still unlikely) to be available for free. But you seem to have ignored that stipulation and steered us back to just talking about fiction in general, and also using popularity as a benchmark for quality...
> its popularity is indicative of its quality, even if it doesn't match the standards of a literature PhD for "good writing"
This is a false dichotomy. Literature PhDs are not the only people out there who enjoy high-quality literature more than light entertainment, and anyway, you seem to be admitting that there's a type of fiction that doesn't exist unpaid, so isn't this just proving my point correct?
All that said, even if I accept for the sake of argument that the existence of popular free genre fiction would be enough to prove your point (because, in fairness to you, we were originally talking about Harry Potter, which is as genre as it gets)... I went looking, and there are at most a few sporadic examples. A few minutes of research suggest that some books by Cory Doctorow are among the most popular ones. Also, The Martian by Andy Weir used to be freely available, but isn't anymore as far as I can find.
Sorry, but Cory Doctorow and (formerly) Andy Weir represent a pretty small body of work compared to the entire canon of paid novels, so I'm going to have to call BS on your claim unless you provide some examples of your own.
i didnt respond to the literary part because it's moving the goalposts. i don't care about the literary value of things i read for fun, and most people don't as long as the style and structure of writing doesn't stop them from enjoying it. i never made assertions about "literary" fiction writing, just fiction writing in general
It’s very unlikely that she would (or even could) have devoted herself to writing fiction in her free time as a passion project without hope of monetary reward and without any way to live from her writing for the ten years it took to finish the Potter series.
And even if she had somehow managed, you’d never hear about it, because without publishers to act as gatekeepers it’d have been lost in the mountains of fanfic and whatever other slop amateur writers upload to the internet.