A new NA Plagarism case

June 28, 2013 Uncategorized

I wasn’t going to post until the new story was ready to come out, but this has been going wild over kindleboards, goodreads and then the web.

Dear Author broke a story about an author called Jordin Williams, who had put up a book called Amazingly Broken that turned out to have plagarised parts of Easy by Tamara Webber. Jordin Williams claimed it was ghost written, but then Kindleboards found a link that made it appear the text was actually borrowed from a fanfiction: Amazingly Damaged.

And then things really started to unravel into cross promotions, suspected fake IDs and more. There’s a full breakdown here, with a diagram that has to be seen to be believed.

• Teresa Mummert’s blog: Plagarism Plot thickens

The problem is that this is hitting authors who weren’t involved: bloggers stating that they will only take authors they know for review, or just closing to indies, and a general view that all indie and small press books are being tarred with the same brush – yet the indie authors are the people who revealed it and are the ones up in arms.

What really disappoints me? It worked. Despite spam complaints, the book hit #68 on Amazon before it was pulled – in six days! If this is in fact one person, and not a network of linked authors, it seems they have found a way to make being an author work that does not involve writing – and it seems the readers honestly didn’t notice. That is a very depressing thought.

Meanwhile I’m back to the cafe, where my 1,500 word short is now on 15,000. I honestly did not think there would be anything else to say about Brooke’s Vale and their story was done apart from a few shorts. Instead it turns out that even when the rebuilding is done, the scars of a disaster remain and there is a lot more to tell than I thought.