Booksquare has a post up about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal that raises the question behind the question:

It also makes one wonder why in the world a business like Little, Brown would spend a reported $500,000 on an unwritten book by a first-time author who was starting her academic career at a famously tough university.

For a possible answer, Booksquare links to this piece at Publisher’s Weekly that suggests How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was purchased not as a novel, but as a product: an attractive author with an interesting backstory, matched up with a “test-marketed, packaged” story.

Makes sense to me.

Update: the story gets worse…