Self-published authors are facing challenges when it comes to protecting the copyright of their work.
According to a story in The Atlantic, the rise of self-publishing tools on sites like Amazon have made it easier for self-published authors to be ripped off. Some titles are literally stolen as is, others are edited a bit. Here is an excerpt from the piece:
One day two years ago Rachel Ann Nunes, who writes Mormon fiction and romance novels, received an email from a reader asking a strange question: Had she collaborated with someone named Sam Taylor Mullens? Nunes had never heard the name before. But the reader went on to say she had noticed similarities between one of Nunes’s novels, A Bid for Love, and another self-published book by Mullens. When the reader confronted Mullens about the parallels, she was told the two authors were simply collaborators. If that was a lie, the reader said—and it was—then Nunes may have been the unwitting victim of plagiarism.