Warning: Long, cynical conspiracy rant ahead
I’m not ready to let Alloy off the hook yet. There have been too many contradictions with what they and the publisher have said about this book over the years as to the involvement of the packager to necessarily believe they’re telling the truth now.
1. Publishers don’t care about scapegoating an author who’s name is now mud. But they can’t blame the company who might bring them the next Gossip Girls bonanza. So I’m cynical of both LB and Random House absolving Alloy of any wrongdoing. You don’t eat the goose that lays the golden eggs.
2. The book required a lot more work than other packaged books they’ve done. No, wait, they were only involved in the first four chapters. Yeah, sure, they get to split copyright and a chunk of the advance and royalties for tweaking 4 chapters?
3. The original MS was much darker and went through several versions to lighten it. Original MS? What original manuscript? We asked for an e-mail from the author to get an idea of her voice and then came up with the outline of a novel ourselves that would suit that voice. I think there were other creation myths to this novel as well but the news articles are starting to blur for me. It does make me wonder, did the girl write any of this herself or was she just a unique marketing spin to slap in the author bio?
4. If Alloy did have a heavy hand in the writing of this book, how convenient for them that absolutely none of the plagiarized phrases were written by them.
5. KV got a $500K advance for this and her next book. Woowee! This must be something darn special for us to pay this much to a 17 year old. Please send all your reporters out to cover this story. The editor, publisher, author, author’s parents, agent, guidance counselor and pet cat Fifi will be available for any and all interviews. Um, did we say $500K? No….that’s not quite right. No she didn’t get that much. Yeah, the packager would have received some of that. I swear, that one’s a double whammy. If you’re going to have your Harvard classmates bitter, and from what I understand, nasty at times, you should at least get to enjoy the thing they’re jealous about you having.
6. The same editor is thanked in the acknowledgements of both books. Sure, she now claims she was only involved in the early part of Opal. But considering that a similar plot is one of the things KV has been accused of, you’d think even an early outline read by that editor would have uncovered it.
7. By its very essence, book packaging is based on a lie. The fact that Francine Pascal’s name is on the front of every SVH is a lie. You may consider that a harsh statement. After all, it’s not like they’re trying to cover it up. All you have to do is read the copyright page. But let’s be realistic, who other than writers read the copyright page? And even at that, before this week, how many of us didn’t know how involved packagers were in some of the biggest selling series? But it’s a harmless lie. As long as good writing is there, readers don’t care who wrote it. Yeah, try telling that to Milli Vanilli. Their fans were *really* loyal to them after finding out they were just a couple pretty faces lip synching to the real voices behind the scenes. On the other hand, the real voices (don’t remember their names) tried to make a go of it after being outted. But they weren’t pretty enough so they failed. So in that way, maybe packagers are the most honest people in the publishing world. They acknowledge the disgustingly superficial world we live in and cater to it, matching decent writers with pretty faces for a single package that the general public laps up.
8. And here’s something else. We’ve had discussions on this board about friends/family recognizing themselves in our stories. We care about their feelings and we don’t want them to get hurt. Soooooo, if you were a teenage East Indian on her way to Harvard with parents who are both doctors, would you write about a teenage East Indian on her way to Harvard with PSYCHO parents who are the exact same type of doctors as your parents? Sounds like a cute marketing ploy the packager came up with. And it worked, because the parents’ professions were mentioned in all the pre-plagiarism articles.
9. Early on, some of us thought the plagiarism might have been unintentional, because logically, if you were capable of writing 300 good, funny pages, why would you go to the trouble of finding and inserting a few stolen phrases and potentially risk everything? How about this: the person who inserted those phrases had the specific job of adding sizzle to an otherwise average manuscript?
10. KV is accepting the blame for writing all the phrases in question. Means nothing to me. Alloy and/or LB could have promised her great things to cover up the truth. Because if it turns out that Alloy employs ghostwriters who plagiarize, that taints every money-machine book that they have ever touched. None of the big publishers want that because they all love those money-machine books.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I believe this to be true. I’m just saying it’s very possible. I don’t think we have a smoking gun here where we can say one way or the other what the truth is.
Maybe it was all KV’s doing and the rest of the bunch were clueless. Also very possible. Except for that one editor who worked on both books, I think it’s entirely realistic that no one involved in this book would have caught the similarities. If I read MM’s books three years ago, I can guarantee that Opal would look brand new to me. Personally, I think the people who tipped off the Crimson and MM are MM fanatics who have her books memorized.
Anyway, conspiracy theory now finished.
