A Different Kind of Ghost Story

Last week, among other topics, I talked about those ads on Craigslist where writers advertise for other writers to write their books for them in a work-for-hire arrangement. It got me to wondering why someone would do that. If you consider yourself a writer, shouldn’t you be writing your own books?

I indirectly got an answer to that question while following a different story. In short, it’s good, old-fashioned ghost writing, and it’s been around for decades. You didn’t really think all those celebrity “authors” like Vanna White or William Shatner wrote their own books, did you?

Ebook publishing has opened up a whole new market for this, especially in the romance genre. That explains why so many of these ads are looking for romance writers. That also explains how some romance writers appear to be so prolific.

If you want to make a living in ebook publishing, it helps if you write fast. Some writers have a new release every freakin’ month. I kid you not. Granted, the definition of “book” among romance e-publishers includes word counts as low at 15,000, which makes it a lot easier. I once did the math and determined it really is possible to write a book a month. If you write a minimum of 1000 words a day—doable even if you’ve got a day job—by the end of a month you’ve got 30,000 words. That’s enough for a romance ebook. Or two, if you’re writing short stories.

A romance writer working full-time can easily hit this target, and in theory have a minimum of twelve releases a year. Those of us who aren’t that fast and can only manage half that output (or less, for us true slowpokes) can still build up an impressive backlist and its attendant sales. All it takes is an ad on Craigslist, and a willing ghost.

I never thought about that before, but it does make sense. Romance epublishing favors speed. It keeps your name in front of fickle readers. Can’t keep up with reader demand for your work? Hire somebody online. For $500-$1000 or so you can get a subcontractor to write your novel for you. That way a book with your byline on it will appear on the market every month. If you’ve got a big enough following, you’ll make your outlay back in the first week. There’s certainly no shortage of hungry writers out there. Like I mentioned last week, $500 is more than I made with my last release. It’s just that I know I’d be pissed if a book I wrote made a ton of money for somebody else. That’s the only reason I haven’t skewed off in this direction.

I’m not saying everybody with a huge body of work is doing this, but it does make me wonder. I’ve heard rumors James Patterson works this way, so it isn’t only romance or epublishing.

There’s another way a writer can hit the book-a-month deadline, which is how I heard about this in the first place. Since we’re coming up on Halloween, here’s a horror story for you.

I’ve been following a breaking story over on the Absolute Write site regarding a “prolific” writer of M/M romances. She’s had something like 75 books come out in the last five years, or roughly 15 books a year. How can somebody write that many in so short a time? Well, maybe she has a husband with a good-paying job and kids who do all the housework.

Or she was plagiarizing other writers. Which turned out to be the case. It’s easy to write quickly if somebody else has already written most if not all of the book for you.

Even worse, she was taking M/F books and changing pronouns as well as character names to turn them into M/M stories. Since M/F readers don’t normally wander into M/M territory and vice versa, she probably figured she wouldn’t be found out.

Except one omnivorous reader did figure it out and contacted the plagiarized M/F author. Now the M/M writer’s entire backlist is under scrutiny, and more examples of blatant theft are appearing almost daily.

What does this have to do with my discussion of ghosting up there? Well, someone in the comments tried to defend the plagiarist by suggesting maybe she’d hired a ghost to write some of her novels for her. That it was the ghost, not the author herself, who rewrote somebody else’s book and sold it to the author, who in turn sold it to a publisher, or self-published, which I think was the case. Either way, the books got sold to unsuspecting readers at the original author’s expense. Man, this sure gets complicated, doesn’t it?

If you’re one of those genuinely-fast full-time writers who actually produces all that wordage every month, I salute you. If you’re not quite that fast and are bolstering your backlist with ghost-written works, hey, okay. Everybody has to make a living. If you’re stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own, shame on you. It will come back to bite you. I recommend you find another line of work, like politics or something.

Me, I’m gonna keep slogging along, writing my own works at my own glacial pace. It doesn’t count as ghosting or plagiarism if I put a pen name on something I wrote myself. The inspirations for some of my stories—well, that gets a little spotty. It’s all original by the time I’m done with it, I swear. And that’s all I’ll admit to. Happy Halloween!

License to Steal

Last week during our discussion of AU fan fiction, we briefly touched on the subject of plagiarism. I insisted what I was doing—writing stories while picturing certain actors/characters as the leads, with nothing else in common with the original TV show/inspiration—wasn't stealing. I don't see how it could be, given those parameters, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't think like one. Both DC and Marvel Comics say you can't call your costumed characters "superheroes" any more, and don't get me started on Disney. I'm not taking any chances of getting slapped with a cease-and-desist.

Except for what I'm about to discuss.

I've noticed a form of plagiarism that appears to be okay. You're still taking somebody else's words and using them as yours, but people shrug and look the other way. I've seen it done on TV, in movies, and in print. I've done it myself. Nobody's come banging on my door in the middle of the night. Yet.

Here's my personal tale of filching: My first published novel (as opposed to short story or novella) was the romance A London Werewolf in America. My werewolf hero came to Philadelphia and fell in love with a (human) witch. It was established right from the get-go that the werewolves referred to humans as monkeys, apes, simians, primates, and words of that nature. Shapeshifter speciesism. You get the picture.

Then I got to the part where an alpha wolf's brother gets shot. The brother's dying. The alpha's going berserk. The witch tries to help. She's human, and the shooter was human. The alpha's on the brink of attacking her.

And all of a sudden that famous line from Planet of the Apes lodges in my brain and won't go away. I couldn't help it. I had to put it in. The witch is up to her wrists in werewolf blood and the alpha screams at her, "Take your stinking paws off him, you damn dirty ape!"

What the hell. It fit in context. I figured if there was a problem, the editor would let me know about it.

The editor did mention it, but it was more of a "I see what you did here" than a "take that the hell out, you bloody thief." We had a laugh over it. I left it in. So did the editor. The book came out, got good reviews, and nobody brought it up, least of all the lawyers for 20th Century Fox.

Later in that same book the witch and her werewolf boyfriend capture and question one of the bad guys. "Bite me, chickie," he tells her. "And your little dog, too." The editor didn't even comment on that one. Neither did anyone else.

But it's still stealing, right? Those aren't my words. They are obviously not my words. I think that's one of the reasons I was able to get away with it.

The other reason is, the book under discussion was intended as a comedy. That seems to be the magic Get Out of Jail Free card in these circumstances. If you're writing a comedy, a spoof, or a satire, you can get away with almost anything. There were enough original gags, one-liners, setups and humorous situations in London Werewolf (even the title is a play on John Landis's movie title, An American Werewolf in London) that the Apes line came across as just another punchline. Because it and the Wizard of Oz line are so well-known, there's no question I lifted them. Everybody already knows from where. I'm not trying to put anything over on anybody. My thievery is right out there in the open for all to see, and I'm using it to get laughs. Make people laugh and they'll forgive you for a little literary snatch-and-grab.

I think the winner of the Pilferage Sweepstakes has to be the classic "Do you feel lucky?" speech from Dirty Harry. One time I saw variations on it on two different TV shows in the same week. One was a cartoon. (Specifically, the old '90s X-Men cartoon show. Specifically, Wolverine. Wolverine was born to sneer, "Do you feel lucky?" at people. Batman was born to growl, "Go ahead. Make my day." Which he did, in an issue of Batman and the Outsiders.) I even saw a version of it used, with dragons, in a Discworld novel by the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett. Pratchett was a satiric genius. Are you going to try to convince me he was a plagiarist?

Of course he wasn't. Neither am I or any of the other writers whose works I noted above. Neither was the guy who used the Wizard of Oz line before I did, in a Dungeons and Dragons novel, of all places. Yes, it was a humorous one. Yes, we all knew what he was referring to. That's what makes the joke funny.

It's when you take other writers' words—sometimes by the paragraph—and deliberately try to pass them off as your own that the law has to step in. 50 Shades of Grey was not plagiarism, in spite of its origins. E. L. James lifted Stephenie Meyer's storytelling techniques, not her words. She changed the characters before she changed their names. That guy who wrote a spy novel by cobbling together scenes and sometimes whole chapters from other, published spy novels, including some James Bond books, was a plagiarist. The people who lift entire books off Amazon or fanfic sites, change the character names and then slap their own bylines on them and try to sell them are not only plagiarists, they should be burned at the stake. And their little dogs, too.

Meanwhile, I've been toying with the idea of whether or not it's possible to write an entire novel using only movie quotes. It would have to be a humor book, of course. One of those novelty books where you see how many of the quotes you can guess the origin of. Which means every single line in the book would need to be identified in the back, so you can check your answers. Which pretty much defeats the purpose of plagiarism.

Forget it. That's way too much trouble. Somebody else can do it. I'm going to go write something original. And don't even think about stealing it, you damn dirty ape.

In the Air

The other week we had a minor scare over at our other blog, Shapeshifter Seductions. On that blog we five writers have been chronicling the adventures of a cast of shapeshifters in Talbot’s Peak, a remote town in Montana. Imagine our consternation when we discovered an ebook publisher was putting out a multiple-author series about love and lots and lots of sex set in a remote town in Montana. Turned out it was cowboys and not shapeshifters getting it on out there in the boonies, so this time we’re okay.

Not so much with the other book, about the sexy werewolf in the town of Talbot. I’m assuming that writer got the name the same place we did: Universal Pictures’ The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. as reluctant werewolf Larry Talbot. As homages go, it’s pretty obvious.

We’re not the first writers to come up with “secret enclave of strange beings” stories, or even the first to do a romance series involving shapeshifters. There’s a huge market for romance right now, and tons of writers with tons of ideas all looking for receptive publishers. There’s bound to be serious overlap.

Because that’s the nature of ideas. They’re raw materials, clay we dig out of the imagination mine and shape into a story. Sometimes it seems like a bunch of us latch onto the same vein of clay at the same time. All of a sudden you’ll see a flurry of stories about hidden towns populated by shapeshifters or vampires or aliens or demons or really, really sexy pagan priests who believe making love is the best form of worship. Everybody pairs up or triples up or whatever, and a good time is had by all.

Is this plagiarism? No, it’s coincidence. Ideas are free for the taking. It’s the execution, the specific way you shape the idea clay, that makes the result unique and copyrightable. You can give a dozen writers the same idea, and you’ll get a dozen totally different stories. There may be a bit of duplication, but it’ll probably be spotty. Not a cause for alarm.

Does plagiarism happen? Well, yeah. Ask Nora Roberts how she’s feeling about Janet Daily these days. Or the people who’ve posted fanfic or free stories at various venues, only to find their work lifted, word for word, by a self-published “writer” on Amazon. In this case the idea was, “let somebody else do all the hard work and then steal it.” That’s not what’s writing’s about.

Here’s a true-life coincidence. My first published romance was Coyote Moon. A female auto mechanic who doesn’t know she’s half werewolf is courted by a werecoyote. At the time I wrote and sold the story, I was completely unaware of the existence of Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, about a shapeshifting female auto mechanic. Since then I’ve learned enough about the series to know we each went in totally different directions with the same essential premise, and I had no intention of turning mine into a series anyway, so legally I’m off the hook. To this day I’ve never read any of the books. However, I’ll bet there are people out there who’ve read both and believe I’m a stinking thief. Not so, but how do I prove it? I had an idea and I wrote it my way. How was I to know somebody else had the same basic idea before I did? I was new to paranormal romance and urban fantasy back then, and hadn’t read extensively enough to know what was already out there. Briggs’s lawyers never came after me, so either she isn’t aware of my book or she is aware of how general ideas float around, waiting for writers to make them specific.

Then there were the SF stories I wrote about the telepathic pterosaurs that bore more than a passing resemblance to Anne McCaffrey’s

Pernese dragons, but we won’t go into that. Again, lawyers never became involved. My series, had I continued it, was already heading in a totally different direction. Remember, it’s all in the execution.

Sure, there’s a lot of iffy stuff out there, especially in Hollywood. Back in the ‘70s producer Glen Larson (or “Glen Larceny” as he was known by a lot of working writers) had a penchant for putting shows on the air that bore more than a passing resemblance to other people’s work. Check out Larson’s cop show McCloud and the Clint Eastwood flick Coogan’s Bluff, for example. Or Battlestar Galactica (1970s version), that hit the airwaves in the wake of the phenomenal success of Star Wars. Larson swore the show was in development before George’s movie took off. Maybe it was. Maybe the same general idea hit them both.

Just like ABC and NBC both decided to create shows about fairy tale characters living in the modern world, not long after DC/Vertigo tried shopping Fables to them. Fables is a comic book series about fairy tale characters living in the modern world. Neither TV show bears much resemblance to the comic book, or to each other, for that matter. Wherever ABC and NBC got the idea, they did different things with it. Though I’m sure Fables creator Bill Willingham would love to know the source of their inspiration.

In short: you can’t copyright a basic idea. You can copyright what you do with it. If you’re “inspired” by others’ works (ask me about my obsession with Supernatural some time. Bring a lunch.) make sure to keep it just that—inspiration—and give it your voice and your personal spin. In other words, be original. If you want to write a series about a town of shapeshifters in Montana, go for it. But don’t name it Talbot’s Peak, don’t include a wolf pack feuding with a criminal organization run by an evil tiger, and don’t make the mayor a squirrel. We’re watching.

Slippery Slope

I'll come right out and say it: I'm a pessimist. After last week's foray into fan fiction, I got wondering about a couple of things. 50 Shades of Grey to the contrary, there's no money to be made in fanfic. They're not your characters. They belong to E. L. James and Stephenie Meyer and J. K. Rowling and Eric Kripke and Joss Whedon or whoever created them in the first place. We write this stuff for the love, not the money, because trying to make money from it is called plagiarism. If you absolutely have to write fanfic and still want to get a check, you can do what I did: write an original story and "cast" the actors from the TV show as the leads. Chances are, if you're writing AU (alternate universe) to start with, the story and characters are going to mutate anyway and by the time you're done you'll have an original work on your hands. Saves a lot of bucks on lawyer fees.

That scene I wrote last week was meant as a joke, just for laughs. But my pessimistic brain got to thinking. Suppose, in the wide open world of the Internet, somebody connected to the show stumbled across my joke scene. Suppose they liked it, enough that they decided to incorporate it onto the show or in one of the tie-in books. Suppose they did this without telling me. So one evening I'm watching the show, or reading a book, and there's my scene, almost word-for-word. Either it's the most amazing coincidence in the history of TV fiction, or I've just been ripped off.

What are my legal options? I'd say zip. It was a piece of fanfic, stuck on the web as a free read for everyone to see and rip off. The characters don't belong to me. If anyone would be accused to stealing it would be me, for using someone else's creations in the first place.

This is all hypothetical, of course, and the odds are astronomically against it actually happenings. Too bad. I'd love to see that scene on TV, even if I didn't get paid for it.

And then, in the world of weird coincidences, I ran across a thread on  the Absolute Write forums (www.absolutewrite.com) that took my paranoid can of worms and slapped a whole new label on it. See what you think about this:

There's this indie writer (can't remember his name, Howey something or other; maybe I'll look it up later) who indie published a story, "Wool," and a number of sequels. It did well and got him noticed. "Howey" has a publisher now, and his "Wool" series has fans and a following.

"Howey" appreciates his fans so much he's encouraging them to write their own stories set in the "Wool" universe. Not just write them, but publish them. On Amazon. For money.

Yeah, you read that right. This guy is encouraging his readers to write, publish and sell their own fanfic based on his original concepts. What a guy.

And what a potential mess.

Hey, it's his decision. If he wants to give away his rights and cut into his own profits, that's up to him. I'm not sure what his publisher or agent thinks about this. Here's what the folks on AW think: is he out of his freakin' mind? Does he expect to get a percentage from any derivative works? What happens if somebody writes something that violates his concept of his universe? What happens if it takes off, a la 50 Shades? Would he go after the writer then? Who now owns the rights to his creation, if he's basically given them away?

Or the question that occurred to me after I wrote last week's scene, but didn't want to mention for fear of giving unscrupulous people ideas: what's to stop somebody from taking all that free literature that's been posted all over the Internet, changing a few names and scenes here and there, and selling it as your own?  What legal recourse do you have if it was fan fiction to start with?

Or, as I explained to Savanna, suppose someone else had turned E. L. James's original fan fiction into 50 Shades of Grey? What could she do? Go cry to Stephenie Meyers?

I think I'll avoid the whole mess by not writing fanfic any more. Or if I do, it'll only be short scenes like last week's. Or I won't post it where it can be pirated by anyone with a computer. I like to make money from what I do. That's why those books I mentioned earlier in the post never had a fanfic version. I've never denied its origins, but it's an original work now, and I own it. So there.

We'll be putting a copyright notice up on the Shapeshifter Seductions blog in the near future. We've had enough problems excising all the risky names from the characters for indie publication (it was fine when we were doing it for free, but once you start raking in the bucks lawyers come sniffing around). Now people are going to listen to this guy and think it's okay to rip off any book or TV show because this one writer said so. Not our stuff, folks. We own it. Hands off.

Fasten your seatbelts, readers. We're in for a bumpy ride. I think that paraphrased line is from All About Eve. I'm citing all references from here on in.