Plagiarism in Romance
From Sugar and Spice Press:
An Open Letter From Sugar and Spice Press
Today we received a letter accusing one of our authors of plagiarism. We take matters like these very seriously and have begun an emergency investigation of this matter. The author was contacted by a reviewer on Amazon and denied the plagiarism, but the reviewer saw so much coincidence that she felt the need to contact the original author who in turn contacted her own publisher. It was not brought to our attention by the author of our company. Our only indication came via legal letter today. Sugar and Spice Press abhors plagiarism, and we do not condone this in any way, shape, or form. Our authors sign a contract at the time of submission acceptance, and they affirm by signing that the submission is their original work.
Link to the rest at Sugar and Spice Press and thanks to Laura for the tip. This link is to the publisher’s home page and the content may change
From Erotic Romance Publishers:
Sugar and Spice have posted a front page announcement of a plagiarism issue with one of their titles. The author in question seems to have plagiarized A Harlequin title from the 1990s. Perhaps not anticipating that it would be reissued.
Based on the excerpt provided, the book in question is Too Close for Comfort by Stephanie Morris. To my memory, this is not the first time that romance has been plagiarized and the heroine race-swapped.
Link to the rest at Erotic Romance Publishers
In the days of small presses that sold regionally, plagiarism was easier to get away with. Put an ebook up on Amazon and it’s at least available everywhere in the US and probably elsewhere as well. All it takes is one review pointing out that a book is plagiarized to bring the whole house down. One of the posts reports that another romance press has pulled all of this author’s books.
UPDATE: One of the comments from an author who was asked, effectively, “Prove to us that you wrote this first” reminded PG of a technique he has used for years for a variety of legal matters.
In a world of email and electronic documents, it can be difficult to prove that a document existed or an email was sent on a particular date. There are digital notary services that, for a fee, will place a tamper-proof date stamp on a document to show that, for example, a document signed by both parties existed on the date the document was received by the service and hasn’t been changed.
Because he is always looking for free alternatives to simple paid services, PG opened up a Gmail account for the sole purpose of accepting incoming email from PG, sometimes with a document attached, and giving it a Google date stamp. When he sends an important document to opposing counsel and wants no questions about the content and date, he blind-copies this Gmail account. If there is a future question about what was sent and when, a time-stamped copy resides on Google’s servers.
While Gmail doesn’t have the bells and whistles that digital notaries have, PG is unaware of any method by which a phony document could be placed in a Gmail account on a back-dated basis. It’s easy to make an electronic copy of an email and change the date or to print and scan a copy of an email and use Photoshop to change a date, but so long as an electronic copy is sitting on Google’s servers, it ought to be pretty safe from tampering. If someone hacks the account, emails could be deleted but not changed and resaved with the original date. (PG thinks).
An author who is nervous about accusations of plagiarism could set up a Gmail (or Hotmail, etc.) account, forward a copy of his/her manuscript on a periodic basis and have date-stamped records of when various drafts were written and what was in them. It’s even a free offsite backup system for the manuscript.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
Whenever I see these accusations, though, I have to admit my first thought is: is anybody checking to find out if both authors are just incredibly unoriginal?
I ask this only because I’ve noticed, over the years in teaching and in workshops, that authors of the most stunningly cliched works are the most paranoid about others stealing their ideas. And yeah, they are prone to sending “cease and desist” letters.
At the same time, I know exactly the depths to which people go to recycle material. Not just plagiarism, but tools which help plagiarists: like there’s a “unique article generator” out there, where you write the same article three times, rephrasing each sentence, and it will mix-and-match to create hundreds of versions of the article so you can sell them as “unique” content.
Humans will always work ten times as hard on a short cut than they would have to one the real thing. I don’t know why, but they do.
Just read the examples at the link. It’s pretty damning.
Check the Too Close for Comfort by Stephanie Morris and Logan’s Way by Lisa Ann Verge using the look inside function and you can see for yourself.
That article thing is called “spinning”, FYI. And it can be used legitimately by content writers, too, to produce multiple versions of their own articles, which isn’t plagiarism—unless you can plagiarize yourself?
Anyway, there are a few other questions: Are you certain the one predates the other (and one didn’t languish unpublished for decades)? And are you certain the two authors aren’t the same person? Or that one of them wasn’t a ghostwriter?
I recently saw someone claim G.R.R. Martin pulled a line from an old TV show—only to be corrected that G.R.R. Martin was one of the writers for that episode.
*shrug* It is completely possible that the new title’s author plagiarized the other title—particularly because a lot of folks don’t seem to understand what plagiarism is, these days—but I also think it possible that the plagiarism is non-existent.
I could name one trad published author who recently announced on her blog that she’s working on a new series that has an elevator pitch that could be used for a series I’ve had stewing on the backburner for a few years. That doesn’t mean she stole my idea, though it’s entirely possible—albeit unlikely—that she’s seen a short story I wrote in my ‘verse.
So neither of us has plagiarised the other, though I suspect our resultant series will end up comparable and that some readers of both our series (once both are published) will assume one of us ripped off the other. Her epic fantasy series already is the closest thing I’ve found to my own—which I again started writing well before she was published. ^_^
Okay, having looked at the posted excerpts, that is indubitably plagiarism. Possibly unintentional, if the plagiarized title happens to be a favorite of the plagiarist’s, but… with how close those two are? Unlikely. *sighs*
Possibly unintentional? You’re being too kind.
The author’s name is Stephanie Morris. If you Google “Stephanie Morris” Plagiarism, you can find comments on sites going back to 2009 by someone named Stephanie Morris condemning Plagiarism. It’s deliciously hypocritical.
Carradee:
Oh, yes, I know that it’s legal (if you’re spinning your own work), and it’s even ethical if you’re actually writing another article.
But these automated systems of creating hundreds of “unique” articles are, imho, pretty close to a black hat technique.
First of all, if you’re going to use an automatic article generator, then you aren’t writing well. You’re writing to fill in a form. So the stuff that goes into these article generators is crap in the first place.
Second of all, you aren’t actually creating an actual new and unique article out of the same material and concept to suit a new market, you’re doing the equivalent of plagiarizing yourself — you’re making rephrased exact copy for the express purpose of pretending it’s new.
That’s a lot different than a professional non-fiction writer “spinning” an article to suit a new market.
Camille,
The author whose book has been plagiarized in this instance, Lisa Ann Verge, is a longtime experienced pro with a currently thriving career in mainstream fiction. She is also, by way of disclosure, a good friend of mine (and a well-balanced, sensible person–well, unless the margaritas are flowing quite freely!).
One has only to read the excerpts posted on the publisher’s website for your comparison to see that the plagiarist quite clearly that the plagiarist appears to have scanned Verge’s 1990s Harlequin novel and just replaced a few names and adjectives. The text posted is virtually identical.
I wrote an article on synchronicity years ago for the RWR: instances wherein writers have similar ideas and/or execute them similarly. It happens a LOT, particularly in genre fiction, and particularly in any sort of headline-grabbing fiction (ex. one agent interviewed for the article received 3 fiction proposals in the same week about the Shroud of Turin).
Reproducing someone else’s text line by line, with only the names changed, as is evident in the sample text posted on the linked website, has nothing whatsoever to do with sychronicity. It’s plagiarism.
Wow – don’t get to see too many complete examples of line-by-line plagiarism like this one!
Even “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed…” settled for scattered (and sometimes slightly re-worded) liftings. And Q.R. Markham’s “Assassin of Secrets” was stitched-together from so many sources it took only hardcore fans to recognize bits here and there.
I was only commenting on how that’s my first thought. I didn’t mean to imply that I had knowledge of this case or cast aspersions on it.
As I said, people WILL do amazing things avoid the work, even if it’s more work than the original.
This happened to me with a gay male romance ebook. Imagine my horror when my publisher contacted me asking if I was the author of my own book. A reader contacted them saying it had already been published by someone else. It turns out the thief had lifted it from a writer’s site where I had put it up for feedback. The only thing different was the change in names and additions/deletions from editing. I can only imagine what my poor publisher thought, though. Publishers can be damaged if their authors turn out to be plagiarists.
Fortunately, I was able to prove I’d written the book because I had registered the copyright a full year before the plagiarist put up her self-published stolen version. Proof of copyright in hand, my publisher did what needed to be done, including getting the plagiarized book taken down, and inserting an acknowledgement in the blurb and copyright page of my book about the existence of the unauthorized version.
But what a mess. Plagiarism is theft, plain and simple, and I’m sorry Sugar and Spice is being forced to deal with a thief trying to masquerade as an author.
I’ve seen firsthand all the trouble this kind of thing causes. I wish them all the best moving on.
This is a reason to 1) keep records of your drafts and where you’ve posted it and 2) get your copyrights registered asap.
BTW, I hadn’t noticed before that the copyright office lets you register unpublished work too. Also, if you are willing to pay a small fee every ten years or so… the WGA will let you register synopses. (This isn’t the same as copyright, but it does establish when you first started working on a story.)
Actually, Camille, it’s not a bad idea to register your work right before you publish it if you’re not working with a publisher that will be registering your work for you.
What if you have an ISBN and publish date on Smashwords that predates the plagiarized copy?
I’m a friend of Tali’s. I actually met her on the writer’s site she mentioned. We’re both with the same publisher now. And I can tell you, from watching what she went through, I promptly registered all my work I had at the before mentioned writer’s site (and everything else now, as a matter of fact.). As bad, emotionally speaking, as this was… it could have been so much worse.
In academia we urge grad students to mail copies of their work (article drafts, major papers) to themselves, then keep the sealed envelope in their secure files. Courts, university honor courts, and journal publishers will accept that as evidence of priority in cases where a professor or other grad student has tried to steal, er excuse me, use the entirety of the work without attribution.
PG can correct me if I’m wrong (as I am not a lawyer) but:
It’s my understanding that the “the poor man’s copyright registration” is not acceptable in courts of law, because there is no chain of evidence. (For instance, you could mail an envelope to yourself that is poorly sealed or even unsealed and then seal it later.)
The WGA’s service is a custody service. You send them (or upload) something and they keep it in secure custody and can testify in a court of law that they received it on that date and it has not been out of their custody since. The disadvantage of this is that if you don’t pay a fee every ten years, they ditch it, and you no longer have proof of that original date. And electronic submission to the copyright office is nearly as cheap now.
Some academic journals and institutions may accept this, however, so I suppose it might be worth doing. I was told that, short of copyright registration or WGA, the other things that can help your case is to keep your notes, and correspondence with others and early drafts of a work, since this will help establish that you developed this work yourself.
Unfortunately, I think we’re about to head for a crisis in proving you own your work, because there will be too much material for touchy-feely determinations. Places like Amazon will want proof. Further more, much plagiarism will be caught by automated computer systems, and they are not always able to determine the original source.
This was a problem for eHow writers — eHow allowed reprints, so people often uploaded articles they’d published elsewhere. But sometimes they had unpublished it from the original location, and a plagiarist had published it somewhere else, after the first pub, but before it was uploaded to eHow, so it appeared that the eHow author had stolen it from the plagiarist. Those people had an awful time proving themselves.
Camille, the old mail-the-manuscript-to-yourself trick is pretty much inadmissible in court, according to my attorney father.
PG may want to chime in, however.
Too Close For Comfort has been expunged from the author’s site, but interestingly, so have other titles. Compare these two links, the current and Google cached version:
http://stephaniemorris.webs.com/booklistseriesguide.htm
Vs.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xTV_cQ8t-LUJ:stephaniemorris.webs.com/booklistseriesguide.htm
More on this story to come, perhaps?
Jon, I’m guessing the expunged titles are the ones the publisher has pulled from circulation–because if they’re still listed on the author’s site while NOT available, then readers who visit the site might ask the writer where to get them, why they’re not available, etc. Which queries this individual presumably would not enjoy, given the situation.
Or there was more than a single incidence of plagarism.
Jon, I agree that’s an equally likely possibility. It’s rare that the first time a thief is caught is the very first time he has stolen.
The plagiarizing author changed a few verbs here and there throughout the text, all of them for the worse (replacing strong verbs with weaker ones).
Just read PG’s idea for using Google to date stamp things: brilliant!
I have used Yahoo mail for the purpose of back up, but I never thought about it being useful for time stamps.
I would imagine, though, that even Google Docs would do for that. If it hits a server and stays there, that server has a record of when it first got there.
I’ve got a whole mess of Livejournal posts — locked to a specific filter, but while I could play happy games with the posting-times… The ones with comments? The comment-dates are out of my control. I couldn’t back-date a post and have comments that share that date.
At first I thought, oh no, this is one of those ‘same idea at the same time’ issues and I am guilty of that myself… who hasn’t written the ‘hero’s journey’?But then I read the example on the website and realized it was pure plagiarism, through and through.
I wonder if emailing the rough draft to your kindle account as a personal document would work as well for copyright. Just be careful not to delete it, I suppose. That’s how I read mine when I want to pick up on typos and formatting issues. And it makes me feel published.
I don’t know, but if you ever had to prove your ownership to Amazon, that should at least be convenient for them to check. (Unfortunately, Amazon is really difficult to deal with in extraordinary circumstances, so it might not help anyway.)
Your best bet, always, is Copyright, because that’s the prove everyone expects. The problem is if your prose has been exposed to anyone who might steal it before you officially make it public.
I really ought to resume emailing myself in-progress copies of my work. I might double-check and see where I left off tonight. It’s been at least two months since the last time I did it.
I also like the idea of emailing it to myself to have a copy in case a hard drive crashes and burns. There are multiple reasons to do this.
Thanks PG
You can actually plagiarize yourself. If you’re writing an academic paper, and use part of another paper or book you wrote, you have to footnote that.