Category: Novels

Plagiarism as a cottage industry …

I picked this one up from the Guardian:

Prolific romantic fiction writer exposed as a plagiarist.

The heist was simple: Laura Harner took the work of  Becky McGraw, a successful writher of heterosexual romantic fiction, and rehashed it (almost word for word!) as a piece of homosexual romance.

The scheme hinged on the Harner’s belief that people who read heterosexual fiction  don’t read homosexual romances. Well, she was wrong: they do – and that’s how she got caught.

Having being rumbled, Ms Harner had this to say:

In transforming two M/F romance stories into an M/M genre, it appears that I may have crossed the line and violated my own code of ethics

Really.

Apparently, Ms Harner has churned out seventy-five books in five years. That’s quite an output, so I’m sure a lot of romance writers are wondering exactly how long she has been violating her own code of ethics.

It’s a sad story – sad and inexcusable – but it did make me think:

Seventy-five books in five years. That’s fifteen books a year.

That’s a lot of books.

Why did she have to write (however she did it) so many? I think this the thing that concerns me  most about self-publishing. To sell in quantities you have to

  1. price your books very low
  2. market yourself like mad (and you’d have to do that even if you went with a traditional publisher)
  3. churn out novels at a hell of a pace

Ms Harner seems to have found herself a shortcut to number 3.  Now, I’m not saying that the industry is the reason for her violating her own code of ethics, but I do wonder if we are selling ourselves short by becoming ‘anything for a £1’ shops. I’ve heard many arguments (and they’re all valid) that this is simply the way of things: there are so many self-publishers out there that pricing yourself above 99c is just pricing yourself out of the market. That may be true, but if that’s the case then we should get used to industrial plagiarism  becoming something of a norm.

Slash and Burn … Part II

You hit a point during novel reduction when you honestly believe that your work is parred to the bone; there is not a single word you can take out that won’t crack the foundations of your masterpiece and leave a pile of literary rubble on the bedroom floor.

So it’s time to take a break, and while you’re having a break, you have time to read someone else’s book. Doesn’t have to be a fresh one; in fact, it’s better if it’s one that you’ve read before. This time though, you’re going to read it with an editor’s eye: look for bits you can reduce or trim away completely. This is not to say that the author would agree with you; this is entirely your opinion.

So what are you looking for? Well, exactly the same excesses you’re looking for in your own work:

  • The odd walk or journey that doesn’t lead anywhere or tell you anything new about the characters.
  • Repeating information: something that is said, and then said again, in a slightly different way, a few lines later.
  • Long, flowery chapter intros that set a nice poetic scene, but will probably get skipped over by the reader. (You’ll know them when you see them, because you jump the last ten lines or so.)
  • Long flowery chapter endings that you feel resentful for having read. (You’ll know them because you’ll think, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ as soon as you’ve finished it.
  • Sentences that seem to run on for years and years.
  • Whole chapters that you think you could do without.
  • Characters that bring a little colour to the story, but not much else.

Be brutal; in fact, be over-brutal. You’re not really criticising your favourite author; you’re getting yourself in the right frame of mind to criticise your own work … again.

Then, after another few days, go for it again. You’ll find that you weren’t quite as ‘finished’ as you first thought.