Hey, did any of you know about this one?
Step 1: Author (or maybe plagiarist, I don’t know) produces a book and self-publishes it.
Step 2: The book enjoys a certain number of sales, which tale off.
Step 3: As the sales decline, the author sells the rights to another person.
Step 4: This person changes the character names, puts on a different cover, puts her name on the book, and re-publishes it as though it’s a different book that she wrote herself.
Thanks to yet another post by Nora Roberts, I now know about this.
Wow.
Such creativity! Maybe these people should try applying that creativity toward writing their own books. Granted, that would take longer and be more difficult.
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Man, I am fast becoming a fan of Nora Roberts as a person even if I’ve never read a word she’s written. Er, a fictional word I mean.
There is an honest way to do this. Write a short story epilogue (or prologue), make a new cover, and republish it on Amazon as a second edition. There are a number of professionally published books where this was done.
Pete, and put your name on it and pretend you wrote it? Because that does not sound honest.
The only honest way to do that would be to keep the title, show the real author’s name, and add on the cover, “With a new forward by x.” I’ve certainly seen that and it seems completely, totally different to me.
Not quite what I said. I said republish it as a second edition, same title but different cover. The goal isn’t to get people who already own it to buy it, but to get it back on the shelves with a bit of face lift. You had a similar idea with publishing it electronically. Second editions do the same thing in traditional publishing.
Yes, but the thing Nora Roberts was referring to was EXACTLY what I said: one person buying rights to a book and bringing it out as though they wrote it themselves, just changing character names, with a deliberate intention to fool readers into thinking it’s a different book entirely.
These things are just one hundred percent different from a new edition of the same book.