Writers' Ethics

Did you ever wonder what a "book packager" does? In the latest plagiarism brouhaha over Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta etc., now pulled from shelves, the NY Times provides some interesting insights in First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author.

But on the copyright page--and the contracts--there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment. ... In many cases, editors at Alloy--known as a "book packager"--craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers). ... Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them.

And did I hear correctly, that the advance was half a mil? According to the author in a Today Show interview earlier this week, she received this offer when she was 19 for a book she'd started writing when she was 17, which must have been right after her last of several readings of the two books from which she is accused of lifting copy. Sounds like K-12 education needs to add ethics training to the curriculum.

If you'd like to test your judgmentment in a variety of situations, take the quiz in next month's Writer's Digest's Are You an Ethical Writer? Come up lacking or questioning? Poynter Online has an entire division of its website devoted to ethics and two free online courses in its News University. [writing]

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