I had a dream last night — a suspense thriller — about a psychotic book packager. lol
Time to lay off the topic for a bit, don’t you think?
Tag Archives: Kaavya Viswanathan
Why you shouldn’t pay $500 for a copy
People are putting copies of “Opal” on ebay, hoping to cash in on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal. Today on Amazon, copies are still being offered for $80-120. But on ebay, bidding has cooled off. Prices were up in the $50 range yesterday. Not today.
This may be why: according to The Book Standard, about 12,000 copies were sold before Little, Brown pulled the book.
That’s a lot of copies. I’m no expert, but I can’t see the value going much higher than $50. Not for the foreseeable future. So if you own a copy and want to double your money, go for it. But if you’re thinking you’ll buy a copy at that price and flip it . . . maybe not such a good idea.
(For background see posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here and here.)
Inside Alloy
The New York Observer has a piece up about Alloy Entertainment, the book packager that was called in to help Kaavya Viswanathan “write” How Opal. . . :
The convoluted authorial structure of Alloy books is anything but transparent.
“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”
Literary accountability, maybe not. We’ll see about legal accountability. As Booksquare writes in their post about Little, Brown’s decision not to revise Opal:
While we’re not cynical, we fully expect a lawsuit or two to be coming down the pike. ‘Cause this is America and suing is our national right.
(See other posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here.)
“I burst into tears”
That was Kaavya Viswanathan’s reaction when she first saw her book in print, according to this article in The Guardian. Here’s the full quote.
In an interview with The Associated Press before the controversy, Viswanathan talked about the pressures of her new fame and described the first time she saw her novel in print. One Saturday in March in the Harvard bookstore, she happened upon a prominent display of her books, each slapped with a head shot that took up most of the back cover.
“I started to hyperventilate, and I burst into tears,” Viswanathan said at the time.
In retrospect, looks like that was a tell.
The scandal that keeps on scandaling
I guess if you’re going to plagiarize, you might as well plagiarize from more than one book.
The Harvard Crimson is now reporting it’s found passages from Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” that were lifted from Meg Cabot’s “The Princess Diaries” and Salman Rushdi’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories“(!!!).
And The New York Times (registration required) has published a piece reporting similarities between passages in Viswanathan’s book and passages in “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella.
This wasn’t a novel. It was a fricking medley.
(I previously blogged about this here.)
Look what I found down the rabbit hole
Hi! I’m popping up to grab a bit of fresh air and blink in the light.
I’ve been following links from links on this Kaavya Viswanathan story.
I started with The Analytical Knife blog, and followed a link there to Lizzie Skurnick, fisking a Harvard Independent article based on an interview they did with her.
Skurnick also put up a link to this Slate ariticle by John Barlow, about his short stint as a book packager writer-for-hire.
I made a couple of side-trips on the way, but you’ll have to find them for yourself.
I think I need a rest now. Good stuff tho, all of it.
Package ‘er up
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…
