Hair Extensions and Best Sellers! Yay! It's plagiarism!

BENJAMIN LEROY

I remember the days of working in publishing before Twitter was a thing. I can remember them, but I do not long for them like I do so many other things from my past. In addition to all of the cool readers, authors, other publishers, librarians, and assorted others I have a chance to interact with on a daily basis, I also get to see scandals break in real time.

The fascinating drama from this week involves alleged plagiarist “Elizabeth Nelson” who allegedly stole parts of her bio from real people, has eerily similar book descriptions to books already published by other authors, and, in the most awesome kicker, “her” “author” photo is...not even joking...also used in an ad for Revlon hair extensions.

WTF, “Elizabeth?”

I first saw the story on Twitter from Andrew Shaffer (@andrewtshaffer) who also Tweets under the name @evilwylie. The story was picked up by Business Insider where you can see the awesome hair extension/author pic.

Shaffer and others were able to compile a significant list of coincidences between the efforts of “Elizabeth” and those who came before her. So much so that it’s impossible not to believe that shenanigans are afoot.

Oh, and then there were other pseudonyms for “Elizabeth,” other stolen books in other genres and it appears as though there is one giant neon arrow pointing back at one person who hired people to ghostwrite novels for his/her business, and was unaware (or uncaring) that the books were plagiarized.

The way that story is unfolding (my source being the @evilwylie timeline) is fascinating for a couple of reasons.

(1) Who the hell does that?

(2) How the hell does it end up for sale on legitimate vendor websites? Are these stolen books the equivalent of bootleg Coach bags being sold to tourists from the Midwest on the family trip to Manhattan?

(3) Why do variations of this keep happening but the newsworthiness of it diminishes? We must continue to shine light onto the cockroaches of the literary world, lest they continue to muddy the market further. This isn’t about self-pub vs. traditional or any of those buzzwords. This is about people who are generally decent vs. shitty scam artists.  I’m not one for the fainting couch and hyperbole, but seriously, you can’t let people keep doing this. It hurts us all.

I'm grateful to Mr. Shaffer for his breaking of the story and his continued updates, but why is it falling to him to do this? What sort of measures could be put in place by vendors so we never see this? Is it a case where robots are inferior to their human overlords?

It reminds me of a speech I once gave. I don’t have time to go through the whole thing right here, but let me give you the gist of it.

Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers...

“Ben” LeRoy

Ben LeRoy talks about publishing and other stuff on his website.

Comments

[Tom]

nice story :)

[Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt]

I shake my head when I read about blatant plagiarism - and now I can add author headshots to the list of things plagiarized.

I wonder if it's even worth it financially to try to get away with this kind of behavior - as soon as someone notices, the machinery clamps down, royalties are stopped, and a lot of time is wasted by everyone involved.

I guess they hope to be just successful enough to make a little money - but not successful enough to get enough readers so that someone will notice. But then con-men aren't known for good judgment.

I used to worry about accidental plagiarism, so I started being very careful when I copy anything to also copy all the information about where I got it.

Deliberate attempts to hide the original material just sounds like a lot of work. And the better the material copied, the more likely the thief will be caught.

[Shawn Zabel]

What was she thinking when she did that? Perhaps she was thinking that it won't be obvious but duh, people are actually intelligent enough to notice it.