I argue that fictional entities exist and that authors create them simply by making fictive utterances with certain features. I draw on recent research in social ontology to identify their existence conditions and to explain their nature. I argue that fictional entities are abstracta. Nevertheless, the complete metaphysical grounds for facts about their existence are limited to facts about authors’ intentions, the syntactic and semantic features of their utterances, and audiences’ ability to identify certain of those intentions. We ascribe two different kinds of properties to fictional entities: internal properties (those authors ascribe to them by their fictive utterances) and external properties (those ascribed in discourse about fiction). Although fictional entities are not the kinds of things that can have most of the internal properties ascribed to them, I argue that fictive utterances create an intensional context, and so are not to be interpreted as claiming that abstracta possess these internal properties. I argue that the identity and individuation conditions for fictional entities are determined by their external properties. Many anti-realist objections to the possibility of providing adequate identity and individuation conditions for fictional entities result from wrongly taking those conditions to be determined by their internal properties.