Publishing Scandals

A woman pretends to be a Penguin Publicist so she could con reviewers into taking her self-pubbed novel, apparently.

http://bookishantics.com/2016/01/04/beware-catfished-fake-penguin-employee/

RiverThames wrote:A woman pretends to be a Penguin Publicist so she could con reviewers into taking her self-pubbed novel, apparently.

http://bookishantics.com/2016/01/04/beware-catfished-fake-penguin-employee/

What a way to get a whole community as a whole against you, and possibly legal troubles as well. Yikes.

Well, this has to be a scandal: DAW Books bought four more books from me.

http://mrmaresca.com/wp/the-alchemy-of-chaos-and-beyond/

Yay, RiverThames!

Awesome, congratulations!!

Kindle Pro - library no longer limited by weight. Kindle Con - can't get books autographed by the author.

Damn you, Amazon One Click.

Cassie Clare sued for plagiarism

http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/02/08/copyright-clash-over-demon-fighting-stories.htm

I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest, seeing that Cassandra Clare has form for plagiarism. However, given that she seems to have stopped literally cutting an pasting text, it may be hard to prove that she stole the idea. Unless, the plaintiff can show more points of similarity than just similar names and a similar idea, it looks a little like a nuisance suit. Books about demon-hunters are pretty common nowadays. Though Ms. Clare is the most popular at present, a quick search of Goodreads returned pages of results on the topic.

I haven't kept up with the Clare insanity and had no idea ABCFam (or whatever they are now) are doing a show based on her drek. How sad. I don't understand why any respectable publisher, network, or studio will touch this woman with a 10 foot pole. The movie version of These Mortal Instruments was a flop, was it not? I remember back when the Draco Dormiens/TMI thing was going on, someone mentioned that she was selling Tolkien fanfic using Tolkien characters at CafePress and that she had three or four laptops "stolen" while writing the Draco trilogy and set up gofundme type pages to have her fans replace her tech so she could keep writing. If even a fraction of this is true, her career should have never made it past the original plagiarism scandal. I don't get how some authors can survive this sort of thing with barely a scratch on them (Clare) and others are just done writing forever (Cassie Edwards). Why doesn't Clare's shit stink?

Lots of other writers (and her publisher) don't seem to care what happened before she went pro. I'm not sure why. Do they think it was just youthful hi-jinx? Cassie Edwards had been a pro for a long time, and in addition her scandal was HILARIOUS, which got it a lot of press.

particle_person wrote:Lots of other writers (and her publisher) don't seem to care what happened before she went pro. I'm not sure why. Do they think it was just youthful hi-jinx? Cassie Edwards had been a pro for a long time, and in addition her scandal was HILARIOUS, which got it a lot of press.

It's sort of like how fucking around isn't cheating until you're married. Does that make any sense? I've asked around a bit, and yeah, no one really cares that much. We all have literary skeletons in our closets, no one wants to make airing them out a thing.

I suppose it's because plagiarism is the one unforgivable sin of writing, like stealing jokes is for comedians. Considering the amount of sweat and tears it takes to produce one decent story, let alone make it published, finding out that someone stole your stuff is pretty heartbreaking. When a writer has a history of plagiarism, it calls their current integrity into question.

However, given that there are a limited number of ideas floating around - and a large number of writers - there are a lot of shockingly similar concepts within the genre. I find Cassandra Clare readable enough, though her stories are rife with tired tropes, like many former fanfic writers (and I would know). As I said, she's probably a lot more careful with her cribbing than she once was.