Outsourcing Your Stupidity

It has been a while since I’ve done a rant about plagiarism. It’s one of the more corrosive bits of self-destruction writers engage in. It might be envy, or laziness or something deep-seated and broken in the writer’s psyche, but in most cases I’ve heard of, the plagiarist is compulsive to the point that they’ll inevitably be found out. After all, by its very nature, this is a sin that’s intended to be flaunted in front of as many people as possible.

But someone’s found a new wrinkle on this rotten old fruit.

The victim in this case is romance author Courtney Milan. In her own words:

If you know me, you know I do not make accusations lightly–especially accusations about plagiarism and copyright infringement. Earlier today, a fan sent me an email claiming that portions of my book that had been copied by another author. After investigation, I have concluded that Christiane Serruya has copied, word-for-word, multiple passages from my book The Duchess War.

Somehow the plagiarist never takes that one fan into account. As if nobody out there is going to recognize the material they stole from a N.Y. Times bestselling author. Not like there are thousands of fans out there reading books in the same genre, right?

We’ll skip the damning list of evidence Courtney supplies. Suffice to say, evidence in these cases is always damning. When you have copied passages word-for-word from prior work, what’s your defense? “Oops, my bad?”

Well, Christiane Serruya has a novel defense for her plagiarism. Something original that I admittedly never heard before:

This falls into serious WTF territory. That ghostwriter was a piece of work:

And while passages from Bella Andre, Trish Morey, Lynne Graham, Abby Green, Karen Marie Moning, Lisa Kleypas, Kresley Cole (is your jaw on the floor with mine?) and many others have been identified, reader Kawy also spotted lifted recipes from The Knot, and from The Field Magazine…

Like I said, compulsive. It was probably just as much work constructing this Frankenstein book as it would have been to write an actual novel.

So let this be a lesson, don’t buy cheap romance manuscripts from Chinese Bots on the Internet.