...and a bunch of other well known books too.
What makes me laugh about news stories like this is not that agents agents didn't bite on Jane Austen, but that some newspaper editor thinks it doesn't happen every day.
It happens all the time here.
I see knock off plots, and re-written books and movies ALL the time. Sometimes I think the author might be blissfully unaware their entire book was a movie 20 years ago. That probably means I'm naive.
If I had a dime for every knock off DaVinci Code or Harry Potter I've seen this year, I'd have enough money to buy the editors of the Daily Mail a copy of the Complete Idiot's Guide to being a Newspaper Editor.
5 comments:
Jane Austen, I was just reading her.
**rips up manuscript**
Plagiarism lives! All's right with the world.
This really is an old sort of story. The NYT had something similar, not too long ago, too. Except that was about living authors. The article is really short, so here it is:
Rejected by the Publishers
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: January 4, 2006
Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."
Whatever the story is - I'll sleep better tonight.
My hat rack dances everytime I deal with rejection.
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