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Authors Behaving Badly: Jordin Williams

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Plagiarism is the literary equivalent of identity theft. Taking another author’s story and trying to pass it off as your own is unfortunately all too common problem. The publishing industry is no stranger to plagiarism, but over the last few years the changing technological landscape has removed a lot of the safeguards that once at least mitigated the practice. In an age where anyone can upload a file to Amazon without a single person (even Amazon themselves) confirming the identity of the user or checking the file, plagiarism has become even more widespread.

 

Which brings us to the bizarre case of Jordin Williams, which broke today over at Dear Author.  Williams is the author-of-record of a New Adult book called Amazingly Broken. Don’t bother looking for it online, however. Amazon has already taken it down. As have most retailers. Apparently, Amazingly Damaged is not a novel at all, but rather a collection of plagiarized works. At this point, two books have been identified as victims so far: Tammara Webber’s Easy and Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster. I say so far, because as the details emerge it seems possible more than two books were victimized.

 

The facts are flying pretty fast (and the comments section over on the Dear Author page is a good place to try and keep up.) But apparently Jordin Williams, who claimed in interviews and on her website that she was a successful ghostwriter, paid a ghostwriter to write Amazingly Brokenfor her because she can’t write. No, you read that correctly. But the ghostwriter (or Jordin, or both) apparently stole the story from the site Fanfiction.net, and the original fan fiction was allegedly Twilight fan fiction.

 

An eagle-eyed fan who had read the Easy actually alerted the appropriate folks to the original problem, and thankfully in this particular case it looks like Amazon moved fast enough to stop the faux author from profiting. But there are a lot of questions from this entire debacle that need to be addressed. It isn’t just indie authors who are worried about their reputations here (and there are already people using this as an excuse to discredit all indies in general). All retailers that offer DIY publishing to generate product to sell should be worried.

 

1. Why is Amazon (and all DIY publishing services for that matter) NOT using basic anti-plagiarism software? The software is not that expensive. Colleges have been using various programs for years now to deal with academic plagiarism. This is not the first time Amazon has had this happen. There have been many high-profile cases over the last couple of years regarding outrageously obvious plagiarism. Amazon could design their own in-house software to do all the work for them, since they have all of the digital files in their system already.

 

2. What does her sudden success say about the promotional machinery being used, and how easy is it to manipulate sales ranking on Amazon? This book from an unknown author short to the top of the charts in a matter of days, and according to Williams she simply got on popular book blogs. Some have alluded to whether or not Williams paid for reviews, or paid the bloggers to push her book. (To clarify, I haven’t seen anyone complain about paying for a service to organize a blog tour. This is a common practice. The question is whether or not she paid the bloggers to praise her and if those posts were essentially undisclosed advertorials.

 

3. What can the indie community to help mitigate these sorts of incidents? Is there anything we can do, and is it even our place to be involved in policing it? These very public debacles hurt indies the most, because the naysayers use it as “evidence” against indie publishing. But is here anything indies can do to insulate themselves from people like Williams?

 

Lots of questions, but few clear answers.


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