The Harvard Independent is doing their best to dig into the underside of 17th Street Productions, the book packager that shares the copyright on OPAL MEHTA with Kaavya Visnawathan. And to that end, the paper interviewed Lizzie Skurnick (a friend to both Galleycats) about her experience writing Sweet Valley High books for the packager some years back, before the company was purchased by Alloy Entertainment.
“A packager basically serves as both the writer and editor of a book,” Skurnick said in a phone interview. “The advantage for a publishing house is they don’t have to do anything – they don’t have to design the book, they don’t have to think about a concept… They can just say, ‘Here’s $80,000 for twelve of these books.’ They don’t have to do any of the work.”
Most of 17th Street’s work involves long-running series that are written by a slew of writers working on a work-for-hire basis. And many such writers, without protection of copyright, hope that someday they can leverage their packaging experience for honest-to-goodness publishing work. Skurnick explained, “They write books that already exist in series, they pitch series themselves, they pitch standalones, they sort of exist in this netherworld in which they have a relationship with the packager and then, maybe eventually, they’ll have a relationship with the publisher…”
So how does this relate to Viswanathan’s saga? For one thing, many of the copied phrases may have been part of the company’s “house voice.” But more importantly, as the paper concludes, “if Viswanathan’s contract with the packager was anything like standard ones in the past, 17th Street would have received ‘a healthy chunk’ of the author’s reported $500,000 advance. How much? Up to half, plus a cut of royalties. Packaging may not be well known, but it’s a big business.”
And as for that aforementioned blast from the past, yesterday I spoke about Nora Roberts being plagiarized by Janet Dailey. But another scandal rocked the romance world 6 years ago when Gina Wilkins discovered that her 1991 romance was used as source material for WHEN LOVE CALLS, a book published by BET in 1999. Wilkins spoke to All About Romance in 2000 about the matter (which led to an out-of-court settlement) and didn’t mince words. “How did it make me feel? Violated. Nora Roberts calls this ‘mind rape.’ That’s a fairly accurate description,” said Wilkins. “Plagiarism is the most serious breach of professional etiquette a writer can commit – and it must never be excused or condoned. This is what we do. This is who we are. Our words are all we have to offer to our readers. To steal them from us is no different than breaking into our homes and taking our most treasured belongings. It is simply theft.”