And let’s begin with – sigh – yet another accusation of plagiarism, which the Harvard Independent’s Jonathan Liu digs up. This time, the paper uncovers “striking similarities” between OPAL MEHTA and Tanuja Desai Hidier’s 2002 novel BORN CONFUSED — another book about an Indian-American girl growing up in New Jersey. (Wait, Ron asks, wasn’t Miss Teen Wordpower telling us just last week she’d “never read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist“?)
Then the New York Observer’s Sheelah Kolhatkar adds more fuel to the Alloy fire, getting a better sense of how books are packaged, who gets pissed off in the process, and the accounting process. “When authors are brought in to write their own books, as in the Viswanathan case, Alloy is known to take 30 to 50 percent of all revenues and shares the copyright with the author. When someone is hired to ghostwrite a series title, it’s a flat fee.”
But is that a conflict of interest for agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh? She says not. “To my mind…the relationship between the book packager and the author are very similar to the collaboration between two authors, or between an expert and an author, in that their interests are completely aligned in the project.”
And it looks like Viswanathan won’t just be checked for her fictional exploits, as the Bergen County Record – where the teen was an intern in 2003 and 2004 – has promised to vet the dozen or so “light features” she wrote for them through LEXIS-NEXIS. A preliminary review by editors, conducted by reading and using Google searches, has not revealed any problems with her writing.