A Ghost Writer’s Take On #CopyPasteCris

If you’ve been anywhere near the writing community on Twitter, you’ve probably seen at least a few posts about #CopyPasteCris. This is about Cristiane Serruya, who plagiarized from more than 36 books and up to 28 different authors.

The list of authors includes Courtney Milan, who is probably the worst author to plagiarize from, considering she’s a lawyer who knows her shit about intellectual property.

There is a lot to be said about this topic, including the problems with Amazon’s algorithm for letting this happen.

But what really pisses me off is Serruya putting the blame on a Fiverr ghostwriter who has since deleted their account.

There’s already a lot of hate on romance authors who use ghostwriters, and ghostwriters in general. Even before Serruya offered the excuse, people were crying ghostwriter. Sarah from Smart Bitches wrote:

My theory, and purely a theory: ghost writers. Lots of ’em, grabbing passages left and right then selling the “manuscript.” ETA: I’m definitely not alone in that theory.

I have huge respect for Sarah and the rest of the Smart Bitches gang, but I can’t help but be annoyed that she immediately thinks ghostwriter when plagiarism is involved. (To be fair, she later updated the article with a mention of a ghostwriter who had been ripped off by Serruya.)

Here’s the thing: blaming it all on a ghostwriter is a crap excuse.

In high school, I ghostwrote romance novels to make some extra money. I worked with both new and established authors, most of whom just wanted someone to make a first draft, which they would edit and publish later. More often than not, they gave me a basic plot to work with and I wrote the first draft. From there, one of four things would happen:

• they would have me do some editing and revisions
• they would revise it themselves
• hire a professional editor
• publish it as-is

But they all used a plagiarism checker on my work.

Hell, I often used a plagiarism checker before sending the first draft to them, just in case a line I thought I made up came from a romance novel I just read.

So not only is her excuse complete bullshit, but it’s harmful to both ghostwriters and authors who utilize ghostwriters.

There’s already a lot of hate about authors who use ghostwriters, and unfortunately, there is a good reason for it. A lot of scammers use ghostwriters to create massive quantities of content to get a larger piece of the Kindle Unlimited pie. (If you want to learn more about the KU scam epidemic, David Gaughran explains it better than I ever could).

But not all authors who use ghostwriters are scammers or unethical or fake authors.

I repeat: just because someone uses a ghostwriter doesn’t mean they’re a fake author trying to cheat the system.

There were a lot of reasons authors hired me as a ghostwriter:

• they had writer’s block and needed a first draft to kickstart the writing process
• they wanted to collaborate with another writer without sharing the royalties (nothing wrong with this, by the way. This is what ghostwriters sign up for.)
• they simply preferred revisions to first drafts
• a personal emergency came up but they still wanted to meet their deadline

When I started ghostwriting, friends and family members told me I was letting myself be exploited because I didn’t own the stories. But it comes down to this: as a ghostwriter, I was guaranteed payment. The author takes all the risk. They have to do all the marketing, editing and handle all the business part of writing.

I’ve tracked down some of the stories I ghostwrote and barely recognized my own work because the author rewrote the story and made it his own, probably spending hours and hours into making a first draft from me into a masterpiece, all so she can hopefully earn royalties to get a return on her time and financial investment.

Of course the author should have the rights to the story.

I learned a lot from ghostwriting, including time management, the writing process, and how to work through writer’s block of my own. Most of the authors I worked with were really nice, welcomed my input, and even gave me tips on how to improve my own writing.

For me, ghostwriting was an intense writing bootcamp, and without it, I probably never would have finished and published my own novel, Swapping Secrets.

In my opinion, Serruya amplifying the animosity towards ghostwriters and authors who hire ghostwriters is almost as bad as the plagiarism itself.

Ghostwriting can be an awesome way to practice writing and make some extra money. It can also be a valuable tool for writers who are dealing with writer’s block or just want to collaborate with another writer and I would hate for flimflammers like Serruya to scare all legitimate authors out of the ghostwriting market, leaving only scammers willing to work with ghostwriters who most likely only want to pay their rent on time.

Sources

• https://davidgaughran.com/2018/10/09/kindle-unlimited-scamming-cheater-magnet/
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/20/romantic-novelist-cristiane-serruya-accused-of-plagiarism-courtney-milan?bcmt=1
• https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-cristiane-serruya-courtney-milan-plagiarism-20190219-story.html
• http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblings/2019/02/18/cristiane-serruya-is-a-copyright-infringer-a-plagiarist-and-an-idiot/comment-page-1/#comment-343766
• https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2019/02/cristiane-serruya-alleged-plagiarist/
• https://courtneyreadsromancesite.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/copypastecris-and-the-amazon-algorithm/
• https://bookriot.com/2019/02/19/round-up-of-copypastecris/