Books Romance Authors Gone Bad
posted by on April 21 at 10:41 AM
I remember back when I was in high school and my friends and I were trying to figure out what we wanted to do—all of us wanted to be writers, of course—one of the things we considered doing was to write romance novels under a pen name. After all, we reasoned, how goddamned hard can it be to write romance novels?
Apparently, it’s a lot harder than it seems. Last week, I linked to a story about a romance author who couldn’t handle a three-star review in Amazon and so started intimidating and stalking her fan. This week, publisher Signet announced that they’re firing romance author Cassie Edwards, author of Savage Moon, Running Fox, and Savage Longings. This is probably because she appeared to have lifted huge passages from very old novels and historical texts and plunked them into the middle of her books. Maybe soon, Danielle Steel will threaten Nora Roberts with a broken bottle, and we can have congressional hearings about the sad state of romance fiction in America today.
Romance is fucking boring. I'd rather read a character novel about a stupid bitch named Cassie Edwards.
Actually, Nora Roberts already had a smackdown with another romance author, Janet Dailey. Roberts called Dailey's plagiarism "mind rape." Dailey had to pay Roberts and undisclosed sum of money.
By the way, Nora Roberts writes futuristic mysteries under the pen name J.D. Robb and I swear the future she writes about is looking more and more likely.
Danielle Steele indignantly insists she is not a romance writer, so she is more likely to come after YOU with a broken bottle.
I think her punishment was a little harsh. Were people buying her books for their originality??
There's a more cohesive roundup of the Cassie Edwards debacle at www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com (link is on the right side). The big issue is that she's got 75 million+ books in print and her best excuse for not citing any of her sources (and outright plagarizing a Pulitzer-prize winning book) was that "she didn't know you were supposed to." Plus, when pursued on the plagarism thing, she promptly decided that the reason people were persecuting her was because of her (claimed) Native American blood, even though nothing of the sort was ever mentioned.
And while they get a lot of shit, romance novels make TONS AND TONS OF MONEY for the publishing industry.
NEEDS MOAR WE-SHA-SHA
those novels sound pretty g-d racist.
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