News Reporter: Act Four: When self-publishing isn't the same thing as a real writing career

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Act Four: When self-publishing isn't the same thing as a real writing career

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Every week, I answer a question from my Monday Washington Post Live chat in the Wednesday edition of the Act Four newsletter. You can read the transcript of this week’s chat here, and submit questions for next week’s chat here. This week, a reader wrote in with a question about the Stanford sexual assault case that I initially said I’d answer here, but that I find I’m just not ready to comment on yet. So another reader points us to an article from the Atlantic about the rising phenomenon of self-published authors ripping off other writers’ work and passing it off as their own:

As a writer/editor, I’m disturbed by this reported in stealing books. Other than awaiting and hoping for readers to spot similarities between books, then notify the original author, I wish there were more that could be done.

In this piece, author Joy Lanzendorfer points out that the incentives for self-published authors to plagiarize and the solutions to combat them may be connected.

One author who self-published on Amazon, Laura Harner, may have “resorted to plagiarism to keep her rankings up, [best-selling author Opal] Carew said. Before she was caught, Harner was considered unusually prolific, producing 75 novels in five years. Amazon rewards writers who come out with new books quickly by putting them higher in the rankings, which in turn means more sales. This policy also puts pressure on authors to write more to maintain visibility and to offset the dropping price of ebooks,” Lanzendorfer writes. “Plagiarized books are removed from the site. However, it can take a while for the company to respond to complaints, which can be maddening for authors, since every day a fake book is up is a day they're losing sales.”

I agree that it would be great if there were more that could be done. And Amazon, which has huge repositories of published text, would probably be in a relatively strong position were it to try to build an algorithm that scans texts for similarities to each other and could flag suspicious works to be examined by human editors. (The founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, is the owner of The Post.)

I suspect, though, that part of what this reader is writing in about isn’t just the business side of this equation, but the moral one. It’s flabbergasting to our questioner, as it is to me, that someone who wants to make a living as a writer would so blatantly rip other people off. Shouldn’t aspiring writers be the people most sensitive to this sort of fraud?

That said, there’s a huge gap between wanting to make a living as a writer of fiction, or political commentary, or anything else, and actually being able to write strong content consistently. Platforms like Amazon or blogging software mean that anyone can publish, which is not the same thing as meaning that everyone can write.

Sometimes, people who avail themselves of these platforms will work their way up to big publishing deals or full-time writing jobs. E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades” franchise started out as fan fiction. I started blogging about pop culture while I was still working at a trade magazine covering federal pay and personnel policy. But not everyone will. Most of being a writer is just getting up and writing every day, even when you don’t feel like it and even when you don’t have great ideas or a great grasp on the words. Software and diligent readers may be able to catch people who can’t actually do that. But there’s no algorithm that can keep them from faking it in the first place, with all the dishonestly and lack of pride that entails.