Horror stories

Okay, I think I fixed that zokuto thing (turns out, Jaye, that the other one was *based* on Zokuto and plus, didn’t have the word count I needed. Sucks, huh?) Anyway, there appearered to be an extra table command going on that I’ve taken care of. hee hee hee. I feel so html-savvy now!

42,613 / 70,000
(60.0%)

But I digress. Today, I’d like to talk about horrible things that happen to writers. One writer I know is suffering through an experience with plagiarism right now. I found out about this on the same day that I discovered that my credit card has been stolen. It was a week for thievery. The situation mentioned above was a blatant case of plagiarism, in which the author’s whole book was compromised, stern to aft. But many cases of plagiarism are much more subtle, insidious, and difficult to prove. Take the famous situation that rocked the romance writing world in 1997, when one of its pioneers was found to have lifted passages in over thirteen of another star’s works. It was eventually discovered and the perpetrator forced to pay damages, but that was after seven years of blithe plagiarism. The victim was quoted as calling it “mind rape.” I came to romance after all of that settled down, but I never could bring myself to buy books by the plagarist. I remember reading at the time that people were shocked that the individual thought she she could get away from stealing things from such a famous writer. But here we’ve got an out-of-print category book plagiarized in a small-press, electronically published book. And it was caught. Let that be a lesson, plagiarists. You will be caught. Take it from an obscure source or a bestseller. Take a passage, a whole scene, or a novel. You will be caught. And we won’t read your books anymore.

In other news, I was reading in my university alumni magazine that a professor emeritus of history had published a Yale-set murder mystery. I was very interested in hearing more about this, since the more Yale-set books out there, the better, as far as I’m concerned. So I’m reading the interview with the author, and completely commiserating witht eh poor guy and his dozen rejections. And then, I run across this line:

But after many yeas, one morning my agent called me up and said a new publishing house was soliciting manuscripts. We had to find an old copy and have it retyped.

What a great success story! I think to myself. How lovely that the agent stood by him and tracked down a new house (because it’s a gret way to get in) and then my eyes travel down to the bottom of the page, where it says that the man’s novel is available through Publish America.

Okay, I think. Nice old man, wants his novel published, even through a vanity press. Very sweet, very sweet. But… what about the agent? Did his agent actually send his book to publish America? Even sweeter. Knowing his client wanted to have his book in print, sent it there knowing that it wouldn’t garner him one red cent. Nice agent.

Maybe. Or maybe this “agent” is actually a scam artist who has been charging fees to this poor professor-turned-author so that it doesn’t matter whether or not the book sells to a royalty-paying house or that the author has to lay down thousands of dollars of his own cash to see his book in print.

Man, why do I suspect it’s the latter?

Because of

http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/pebp.htm
http://www.speculations.com/rumormill/?z=102187
and, let’s not forget
http://www.publishamericasucks.com/

Sigh.