There’s a story making the rounds of KBoards right now that just gets weirder the more you read about it.
I started following it when I noticed this thread had been locked: UPDATE: #113 on Kindle and #70 on B&N
OK, I thought. Someone went too far on self-promotion, and a moderator shut him/her down. I scrolled down the thread and discovered that this writer, who had suddenly shot up the charts, was being accused of plagiarism on Dear Author.
Oops. And there was another thread on KBoards: “More author plagiarism? This time of Easy by Tammara Webber”
Scrolling down the Dear Author article and the KBoards thread, it looks like this story, entitled Amazingly Broken, was plagiarizing two different books (and maybe more).
But it gets better! An alert reader on KBoards noticed this entry on Fanfiction.net: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9063496/1/Amazingly-Damaged (Note the similarity of title. And the fact that it’s the author’s only story.)
There’s also the fact that an alert reader of that story had already raised the possibility of plagiarism.
As someone on KBoards put it:
The author of this train wreck stole a Twilight fan fiction that had plagiarized from two popular New Adult titles?
Now, what seems more likely is that the author plagiarized two (or more) popular novels to create the fanfic, which was then turned into an NA (New Adult, for those of you not up on the jargon) Romance. Which then shot up the sales charts on Amazon and B&N.
The book page on Amazon has been taken down, so good on Amazon for taking action so quickly. Just goes to show how quickly the Internet can act!
I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of this story yet, so stay tuned. Can you believe what people think they can get away with?
The more amazing thing to me is that the publisher didn’t do their due diligence and catch this before they published the thing.
And for crying out loud, what was the author, sorry, need scare quotes, “author” thinking? That nobody would find out? That she wouldn’t have to return the advance, or have her career as a writer ended forever?
Sheesh.
Seems to be taken down at all the major online bookstores.
@Chris, there was no “publisher” to vet it. It was self-pubbed, therefore giving the rest of us a bad name. Grr!
And Amazon really needs to develop a plagiarism algorithm, similar to some out there to catch it in school research papers. That would have red-flagged this before it even went on sale.
Ah, another one of these, then.
Some people are stupid. One lady had digital copies of a number of published romance novels by major authors and, for a price, would universally search and replace the characters’ names with the names of soap opera characters or people’s friends. She was really surprised when the lawyers went after her for plagiarism.
The stupidest case of plagiarism I’ve ever read about was bestselling author Janet Dailey plagiarizing bestselling author Nora Roberts in a few of her books. They had many of the same readers so it wasn’t hard to catch. Roberts, being the classy lady she is, gave the damages to charity.
Then there was the story of a teenager who sold a novel for megabucks after only having written a few chapters. Since she was incapable of actually writing a whole novel, she plagiarized other novels to finish it. That whole mess I blame on the adults involved since adult writers who aren’t celebrities with ghost writers NEVER sell a first book that isn’t finished. And they thought a teenager could?