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Arilou 06-05-2016 10:31 PM

Plagiarism in Self-Publishing
 
I just read this interesting article about plagiarism in the self-publishing word. Apparently, it's becoming common practice for people to rip-off an author's work, either wholesale or with some superficial tweaks and throw it up on Amazon or elsewhere. One person used this method to amass 75 published novels in 5 years. Oddly, the article mentions that this person was considered prolific before being caught. How that didn't raise a massive red flag much sooner I don't know.

I also forward the description of how author's feel at learning that they are being ripped off particularly heart-wrenching:

Quote:

When Webber found out her work was plagiarized, she cried. To describe how she felt at the time, Webber used a word that comes up repeatedly when authors talk about plagiarism: violated. “I think it has to do with a sudden, blinding awareness of vulnerability,” she said. “You had something you believed belonged to you and someone took it.”
For anyone puts not just time and effort, but a lot of themselves into their work, that feeling should be instantly recognizable. It's worse to when someone distorts one's vision of their work as in this particularly unfortunate case:

Quote:

A former soldier who served in Iraq, Weston survived an IED attack with a broken back and brain injury. He wrote about his experiences at a treatment center for combat veterans with PTSD, which was published online as Terror in a Cloud of Dust. Rushton seems to have used Weston’s words in her romance novel Hasty Resolution, and Weston was upset to see his personal experiences used in someone else’s erotic fiction. In an open letter to Rushton, Weston’s wife Lilah said it bothered him so much he had trouble sleeping. “That writing of his was something he was actually proud of, and now he feels that [it] is something cheap and ruined,” she wrote. “Ruined by a complete stranger with no consideration for the soldiers who were there that day.”


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