Let’s support authors in face of plagiarism
A screenshot of the Facebook post made by Ashley John, which quickly went viral with more than 200 shares.
Lately, it seems like there’s been a plague of plagiarism in the m/m genre. And this week, I opened a can of worms on the latest plagiarist when I realized that “Under the Influence” by Addison Scott looked suspiciously similar to Ashley John’s “Saving Michael.”
A Facebook message later, my suspicions had been confirfmed, and Ashley John made a FB post about the plagiarism that quickly went viral (at least in m/m circles).
As it turns out, Addison Scott plagiarized all the books that were found under his/her name (reportedly about 11) in e-bookstores such as iBooks, Kobo and Oyster. Scott stayed away from Amazon, possibly to fly under the radar for as long as possible.
This kind of wholesale plagiarism is extremely frustrating to authors who have been victimized. They’ve put many hours of writing — not to mention untold amounts of time brainstorming and agonizing — into a novel. I know, because I’m a writer. I don’t have the success of Ashley John, and so far I’ve only published novellas, but let me tell you: It’s tough. It takes a lot of time and energy. It takes courage to lay yourself out there and let people into the inner workings of your mind. And it’s an insult to all authors — those plagiarized and those of us pouring work into our own projects — when we see someone steal books and make money off someone else’s efforts.
But there’s a silver lining, I like to think. We can support the authors who have been plagiarized. We can help their sales surge. This won’t take away the wrong that’s been done, but perhaps we can help make up for some of the sales lost to the plagiarist, by creating an uptick in the original authors’ own sales and helping them gain a larger, faithful following.
I encourage you to buy books from these authors if you haven’t yet, to support them as they go through this experience — and to restore their faith in the goodness of people.
Here are some of the books that were plagiarized by Addison Scott:
“Saving Michael,” by Ashley John. Get it here
“Tied,” by E. Davies. Get it here
“Once a Marine,” by Cat Grant. Get it here
“Windfall,” by Amanda Young. Get it here
“Taking in Strays,” by Kracken. Get it here
“Winter’s Fire,” by Donya Lynne. Get it here
Please add on in the comments, if you know of other books so we can encourage readers to support the actual authors of these works.
DJ Jamison is the author of The Ashe Sentinel series, now available exclusively on Amazon. Click here to see her works.
TheReadEye 
Wow. I don’t write in the m/m genre, but this is no less alarming for me. I guess it’s a growing pain that comes with the self-publishing explosion of the last few years. I would think that sites would have some sort of systems in place for checking. It’s not a complicated process to check for plagiarism, after all.
Wow. Great, but sad post.
“Unconditionally” by Amber Nation was also one that was plagiarized by Addison Scott
Thank you for adding! Click here to buy “Unconditionally” from Amazon
“Unconditonally” by Amber Nation was also plagiarized by Addison Scott.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention in the first place!
I blogged about this too and found Scott had stolen Andrea Dalling’s Seducing Jordan.
Thanks. You can get “Seducing Jordan” here at Amazon
Thanks, everyone. It’s been heartwarming how the community has come out to support the affected authors.
I contacted KOBO and made the complaint here is their reply: Hi Rodd,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
We’ve taken a look at this account, and while the books “by” Addison Scott are not coming in through KWL, we’ve reached out to our Content team to remove all titles associated with this “author” ASAP. We will also reach out to the publisher to ensure no further titles by Addison Scott are uploaded to our store in the future.
Thanks for your patience.
Best,
Taylor
Thank you for emailing Kobo Writing Life!
Thanks for sharing!
Readers and other authors have really come together to track down the books, report the plagiarism to various platforms and more. I’ve already noticed some of these plagiarized works being pulled. What I’d really like to see is some of these platforms implementing some kind of software that could pick up on plagiarism. It exists for bloggers, I think it’s called Copyscape or something like that. So, I’m not sure why this hasn’t been done yet.
I have contacted B&N as well and hope that the name Addison Scott becomes a moniker of bad untrustworthy people. Jail is too good for them
Hi, a great written post, but its really sad to read this 😦
I would prefer such a check, too. But even Amazon isn’t doing this. I’m a german M/M writer, in Germany our genre is yet pretty small. But sometimes we have a really big problem with plagiarism. Last summer, Amazon was overstocked with stolen stories. It looks like in Germany this is no indivual person doing this, but a criminal gang. First some well-known books were stolen, and in the beginning it was a fight lasting up to a week, till Amazon got those plagiats out of their store. Those plagiats were still sold for days.
Amazon explained the fact, that they don’t check for plagiats with another fact: That every author has to confirm, that the book is under his/her copyright. Yes, of course we have to confirm this – but the criminals don`t mind.
Meanwhile they don’t steal well known stories anymore, instead they steal stories from platforms like FF or BookRix (even unfinished), and sell them on Amazon. Very cheap, so the books are sold very often in the first days.
Some german writers and thoughtful readers founded a group to fight plagiarism. Sometimes we are successful, often not. But because we reported dozens and dozens cases to Amazon, at least they are now reacting faster.
OMG Rodd–thank you for sharing! THIS is an appropriate response to a report of confirmed plagiarism! THIS is how you combat plagiarism and assure your legitimate content providers you CARE about them. Pay attention other ebook retailers who shall remain unnamed, but you know who they are because they ARE NOT Kobo!
I am attempting to contact IBOOKS and oyster, though I hear they are closing that down
Yes, I believe Oyster is shutting down in January sometime. Sad to see it go.
Thanks for your support, everyone. I’ve contacted Draft2Digital (apparently “Addison Scott” uploaded her 12-odd stolen “works” through them) and they’re looking into the matter.
Just FYI, it looks like they’re all still up at B&N, but on Kobo, all I can find is ONE GOOD MAN. So, progress is being made.
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