OMG. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to a blog…it all gets worse. It appears now that historical romance novelist Cassie Edwards has not only taken passages from many a research book verbatim into her own novels, but has also taken passages as well from the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge. (see Smart Bitches Trashy Books website for full listing paragraph by paragraph.)

If there remained any doubt in this author’s mind that Edwards was confused by the proper citation of sources for historical research, this just blew it out of the water.

La Farge’s book is fiction. You’ve now just stepped over the line of believable and are blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s fiction for profit. (Not that you should have done it with the non-fiction, either.)

Wow.

All I can think of is where is her publicist????

Seriously, if this were one of my clients, I have had a heart attack by now.

Note to authors, there are three basic things you should do when the media calls or you have been ratted out for something you didn’t want anyone to know about:

1. No comment is as good as admitting you did it. Seriously. This is what everyone thinks. Better to make a comment that says you aren’t certain what’s been said and you’ll have a better comment later than to make no comment at all.

2. If you already know what’s been said, and you are in any way guilty. Admit it. Then follow it up with what you are planning to do to resolve it. Denial will only make the people who broke the story go looking for additional dirt to prove their point.

3. Hiding out and taking down your website only makes things worse. If you have a problem be the first to comment on it. With things the way they are now, you aren’t going to escape the comments and it isn’t going to just die down. Get your own message out there, be consistent in your message and make sure you take responsibility for what you did.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Writing, Publishing, Writer's Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.