Wanting the name without the game?
Thinking about the recent plagiarism scandal -
Okay, I don't know what a law professor in Brazil earns - and of course, one does not know how much of the surrounding story was true, either - and maybe she was hiring cheapo ghostwriters because her salary would not run to dearer ones (although dearer ones might, we suspect, have cavilled at being expected to knit together plagiarised passages from an array of successful romance writers, unless they were convinced that 'this is experimental fiction!' was a plausible defence that could be invoked, which does not seem to be the case.) So maybe making the loads of moolah that might be in the mix for a 'best-selling romance writer' was a motivation. (Given that, I understand, gaming Amazon stats is an industry in itself, that itself might be in question.)
But I'm wondering if, as the author of that article suggests, 'Serruya valued the idea of being a romance author more than the process of writing romance books'.
I have (I think) noted before the phenomenon whereby individuals who have some kind of fame or renown or at least a very comfortable living on Some Other Field nevertheless want to Write A Book, or at least have a book published under their name -
I believe there is, or was, something of an industry for ghostwriters being given A Story by celebs and actually writing the thing, which was then published as By The Celeb -
- Cue gibbering by generations of writers who had people come up to them with A Story and offer it to them on a profit-share basis, as if the writing was not the hard part.
And I recall, somewhere in one of Ursula Le Guin's collections of essays, her utter bogglement when some wealthy lady offered her a substantial sum to write a book for her daughter, to be published under daughter's name, because wealthy lady thought that was how it was done, her daughter had always wanted her name on a book.
Obviously this is A Thing.
It's still A Thing that I find it hard to get my own head around. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2889754.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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