Oh dear. Writer Liz Fielding reports that someone has stolen her story which is not good news for those of us who are new to fiction writing and trying to find our feet.
It's hard enough to know where to pitch work and a it's a real slog in making contacts without having the fear that better known writers could actually rip off your work and present it as their own before you've even managed to get a foot in any publishing door either online or in print.
It seems it happens quite frequently but the Womagwriter's blog gives some hints and links on copyright HERE which might help if you suspect that a story of yours has been stolen.
Maybe I'll hold off from publishing more of my short stories up here until my fiction work begins to make more of an impact out there which seems a shame because while it's posted up here, I know at least that someone will get to read it.
Meanwhile, I'm busy rewriting my 90 minute script which isn't up here. I'm hoping to send that out to agents by the end of next week and then get back on with the 2000 words or more a day needed to push my crime novel along which has slowly begun to take shape even though the lion's share of the work still needs to be done.
At the risk of stolen ideas, I'll keep to myself for now what it's about.
mmm... word burglars... :(
ReplyDeleteThere was once a professor who reached that level in science by taking obscure papers from little-known journals, changing the author name to himself and sending them to other little-known journals. He was caught out in the end but he'd been on a professor salary for quite some time by then!
ReplyDeleteIn those days he would have had to re-type the whole paper and re-draw the diagrams. Nowadays all he'd have to do is press 'copy'.
There's probably a lot of this going on now. The thieves know that self-published authors don't have the legal departments of a full-blown publisher and also can't patrol the whole internet looking for copied stuff.
I doubt it can be stopped but every new one they copy increases their chances of being caught.
Oh - on ideas. Ideas can't be effectively stolen because what I write on that idea won't be anything like what you write.
ReplyDeleteAlso, ideas can be thought of by two people at the same time. I'm reviewing a book called 'Rain' about creatures made of rain. It's very good, and so close in idea to my own short story 'The Life of Water' that I'm glad I'd already published that!
The idea of creatures made of rain is common to both but the other author's take on it is very different to mine. His is much nastier.
Don't worry about ideas. Guard what you make of them.