Literary Plagiarism Revisited

[alfreda89]

http://my.ev1.net/english/news/newsarticle.asp?articleID=50258751&subject=entertainment

One of the things that irritates me the most about this is, why in heavens' name didn't this young woman write her own book, using the tropes of a transition family from India? I can see the owner of my favorite Indian restaurant coming up with a plan to Get His Granddaughter A Life -- it's pure culture.

Instead, she not only mimicked books from her teen years, she apparently borrowed entire passages wholesale.

And some editor paid her six figures to do this? Do you realize how many books a novel in this price range has to sell for the publisher to make any money at all?

I certainly hope that that editor is around when *I* release my next manuscript to the NYC Wars.

Comments

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard about the book packager -- so that's three who are culpable, the writer, the editor and the book packager. The last two should know the sub-genre. The agent might be slightly less familiar with the sub-genre, if s/he sells in different fiction markets.

It's still a mess, even at six figures for two books. I wonder if they'll put out another edition -- and will it sell? Can she recover from this and have a career? Will the editor get busted back to the mail room?

Those of us trapped in mid-list h@#l would like to know.