Kristine Kathryn Rush posted this in regards to the latest publishing scandal:

https://kriswrites.com/2019/02/20/business-musings-ghostwriting-plagiarism-and-the-latest-scandal/

Sad stuff.

I wonder if this individual started out with the typical artist’s dream of doing her work and finding an audience, and got sucked into the “beating the system” mentality when things didn’t take off like she had hoped.

Or did she just start out seeing an opportunity to make a quick buck, and wanted to strike while the iron was hot?  I guess the way people get sucked into Ponzi schemes.

Obviously, the first one is more depressing to me.  I’ve noticed this trend of engaging others to write your series books among indies…to push the building of the back list and staying constantly in the churn of Amazon algorithms.  The ghostwriting thing isn’t indie-exclusive, of course… but, ah, what do I know…

I guess I know my perspective. Writing is fun. It’s why I do this… publishing is intermittently fun and not fun…but never as fun as telling stories.  For that reason, I could never see me hiring ghostwriters to churn out work with my name on it to chase a dollar. (I could actually see me ghostwriting much easier than hiring the ghostwriter…though, that doesn’t really appeal to me, either.)  This is one of those cases where I just find it hard to put myself in another’s shoes.

And I haven’t really even touched on the plagiarism.  It’s interesting that this person appears to feel she is not at fault, because it was hired out to ghostwriters and it wasn’t her who actually did the cutting and pasting.  I assume her name is on the copyright, which means she probably has a rude awakening coming.  Yet, she doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there is something a little skeezy in what she was doing to begin with.

Again, I know traditional publishing has implemented ghost writers for ages.  Somehow this seems different…or maybe not.  Because what do I know?

Other than what I will do and won’t do.

— TD