For some years now, I’ve been working on a forthcoming series about different kinds of plagiarism, including something that I call “Soft Plagiarism.” Come September, I’ll have an entire essay describing what that is in more detail, but for now I refer to Jeff Jarvis’s description of my use of the term, as “not a direct quote lifted but instead the coopting of ideas, background, context, perspective, and most of all an academic’s [or journalist’s or writer’s] research and expertise.” We’re all familiar with a certain kind of plagiarism—anyone who has taught at an educational institution understands how pervasive it is, but educators are only trained to detect the kind of plagiarism that involves, for instance, a writer lifting entire pieces of text and passing them off as original work (all of this is greatly complicated by the presence of AI, but that’s a whole other topic). Less obvious but perhaps far more insidious, especially as publications disappear and writers are desperate for eyeball-reaping work, is the filching of analyses and ideas that are unique to others. Jarvis points to the New York Times’s story on Haiti and reparations as an example, and it helps to illustrate some of what I will address: anyone who has followed the scholarship on Haiti knows too well that its impoverishment is the result of centuries of the country having to pay reparations to its own enslavers. This is not shocking or new information.
Yet, in May 2022, the Times reported on this fact as if it had made this unique discovery all on its own, and while it did cite some scholars, it left out critical texts which, if acknowledged, would have undermined the Times’s claim of absolute originality on this point.
I’ve had this happen to my own work so often that it is by now almost a monthly occurrence. Several writers at some of the top publications have taken my concepts and analysis around topics like trauma and Pete Buttigieg and re-presented them as their own, sometimes even using my exact words—thus combining both “hard” and “soft” plagiarism, quite the feat. My initial reaction to all this was to write about what had happened to me in every case, and to detail the ways in which my work had been stolen.
As it turned out, I was — and am — not alone. Plagiarism in publishing, at all levels, is at epidemic levels, across the board, and in multiple forms. A quick and cursory glance at Twitter/X, for instance, on any given day, reveals that countless people—podcasters, journalists, grad students, junior scholars, established academics, new writers, mid-career writers, and even established writers—have had their work stolen outright or quietly filched. The New York Times (a recurring character in all this), for instance, is notorious for floating around in the waters of local media and newspapers, pouncing on interesting stories and then “sending” its own writers to “report” on the same issues or events with a grand flourish: Ta-Da! Look what we found! Most recently, it published a story about two men switched at birth in a Manitoba hospital, but without crediting the Canadian reporter Lindsay Jones—who had spent months researching the matter and published the story in the Globe and Mail in February. Instead, it allowed its own reporter, Norimitsu Onishi, to take credit for the work, giving him a byline in the process. The case of these two men is particularly interesting because the one who is of Indigenous origin was raised as a white child while the other, actually of white parentage, was raised as a member of the Métis community. Where Jones’s story took an indepth look at the failure of the Manitoba government to account for what was one of many such switches at birth and the long, painful, and brutal history of the separation of Indigenous children from their families, Onishi softened it into something more akin to a feel-good story about two men cautiously bonding with their families of birth and each other and of they might now “discover their roots.” The story only came to light because of Jone’s painstaking research—but the Times has not, to date and despite many protests online, bothered to even reference her work.
In this, the Times is like a great grey whale, swooshing around and catching smaller fish in the form of local reportage. Whales at least have an excellent reason for what they do: they’re simply feeding themselves. The Times, with its massive resources, has no excuse: it has a long history of such plagiarism and of allowing its writers and reporters to swoop in and take credit for other people’s work. It’s only recently that more reporters are willing to at least call them out (for reasons I’ll explore more in the coming months).
Within this context, when I set out to write about the massive problem of plagiarism, I envisioned a giant essay: I often write such, and they sometimes take months to write. This one, for instance, on Current Affairs, “What Really Happened At Current Affairs?” took nearly two years (and is also about several larger crises in the left publishing world). Another one, on trauma and Hannah Gadsby, “Your Trauma Is Your Passport,” (endlessly soft plagiarised in several places) took nearly six months. Even when I write about things that happen to me directly, I spend a lot of time away from the issue so that it isn’t simply about what happened to me, but about larger, systemic issues. I didn’t want my work about plagiarism to be simply about what had happened to me but about the larger problem of institutional changes (such as the disintegration of the university and publishing houses) and pressures and practices that threaten not just individual people’s livelihoods but the very nature and existence of the publishing world. Over the last few years, I’ve been interviewing a range of people in journalism and academia, and the stories are truly horrifying. I finally realised that if I set out to write one large piece, it would take forever and a day. I have since decided to, instead, organise it into discrete topics and write a series of separate essays. What I envision is that, at the end, I’ll also offer a set of suggestions for better working practices and some important steps that people can take to prevent plagiarism.
Which brings me to the topic here.
I have become aware of a problem that seemed to be very specific and rare but which, it turns out, is shockingly common: agents will discuss book proposals with prospective authors, ghost them, and then offer the work to other, presumably more “saleable” writers. I thought this only happened to relative unknowns and was shocked to learn that evenVery Big Names, in academia and publishing, had run into this issue (shock is a sensation that I’ve experienced a lot during my research, so you’ll excuse me if I use variants of the word here and throughout the forthcoming series).
The publishing world has never been more prosperous for a few, very powerful publishing houses (at some point, they’ll merge into one and we’ll all have to trek to the bowels of Manhattan to pay home to The Only One Left). The more complex analysis of its economy is not the subject of this essay, but it’s worth noting that writers at all levels are experiencing a general sense of dread, as publishing options simply disappear. This means that even the slightest interest from a prospective agent might compel a writer to share work in progress or an entire book proposal as soon as possible, in the hope of a contract down the line.
Don’t do that, at least not without making your agent sign a legal agreement to never share your work with anyone else.
A pause: agent-author relationships are as varied as the number of agents and writers out there. There’s no one-size-fits-all model—some of these relationships are lifelong friendships, while some are long-term business arrangements that run smoothly. Many writers and agents may not even enter into formal arrangements of any sort. Others might have some kind of contractual arrangement but a fluid one, and still others might end up (especially at the bigger agencies)with contracts that are dozens of pages long. This is my way of saying, You do you, and I’m not here to argue about what might or might not work for you. This is a recommendation.
Publishing has always been a fairly monstrous place, but it has become more so over the last decade or so. Your prospective agent might be at a large agency, or a mid-size one, or at a small boutique establishment specialising in certain kinds of fiction. They might only represent people who write about, say, whales. Regardless of where they are, they’re in a very tight market. Many agents, like mine, Rebecca Friedman, are excellent, ethical people but many are not and a lot of agents can barely see ahead of themselves in a Fog of Desperation.
A friend recently signed on to an agency that sent her a list of their clients, so that she could talk to other authors about their experiences. This is always an excellent sign. Another excellent sign? If an agent agrees to a formal agreement that they won’t share your work with others. You can frame this any way you want, but my advice is to use an actual lawyer to draft a separate document or add a clause in your contract. Find actual, legal help, not your cousin’s best friend who went to law school. In Illinois, Lawyers for Creative Arts is an incredible resource (for those in the state), and there is probably something like it in your state or city. Try City Hall—you might be surprised at the resources available there.
As for the actual wording, my own preference would be for something elegant and to the point: If you ever share my work with anyone else who then passes it off as their own or uses even a tiny portion of it, even a chapter I’ve long discarded: I will make sure that you and even your great, great grandchildren spend all your lives in desperate penury. (Rebecca and I came together before either of us knew such monstrous people existed). Your actual lawyer may suggest something different, and that’s fine. Just do this.
As in life, there are no guarantees that contractual agreements will be honoured, but you can at least make sure to have a measure of protection. If your prospective agent hesitates to sign an agreement, move on and away. Yes, your know-nothing wanna-be writer friends, the ones who spend all day reading everything on the internet and screaming about how “information just wants to be free” will tell you that there’s no such thing as “original” work anyway, and that you shouldn’t care, and surely you just want to be read?
That’s always the logic of people who don’t have to write for a living (and we are a rare, even dying breed). But as to originality: there are two ways in which your work can be original (here, we are talking about fiction and non-fiction, not the sciences—where something can in fact be proven as original research much more easily). The point is not the subject matter, but the perspective one brings to bear upon it—and, sure, it might well be a perspective that builds upon other people’s work, but how you add to it does in fact make the work original, or unique.
You might, for instance, choose to write about a murder in a small town, let’s say, Aberdeen, Illinois. You might have heard a whiff of the story and then spent hours in archives researching the incident, even spoken to many of those involved. Let’s say the murder involved both a poison and a sword, and that there were orgies before and after (why not?) making it a particularly gory and interesting tale in which a publisher might be interested. If an agent slips your proposal to another author, that person can use your sources to present this explosive story as their own. If that author is a “big star,” the kind to whom your sources are more likely to speak because, star, your entire project is sunk.
It doesn’t even have to be a project exploring facts—a conceptual approach itself might be original and new. Now, let’s take the exact same story and think about the book as a tale about the murder, yes, but also as a narrative that radiates outwards so that it’s also one about “small town America,” and that all involved were somehow reacting to the grind of living in Aberdeen. You might show that the murder wasn’t just about small town tyranny, and then argue that such oppressive conditions are in some ways actually necessary: that without having experienced the oppression of small town existence, no one can truly be “American.” In this way, you use this story to illustrate a complication in the construction of American identity itself. So, what you have is, first, a laying out of a simple proposition, and then a massive complication of that idea. That particular analysis—a take, if you like—is particular to your work. (This is just an example, and please don’t rage at me if you happen to live in one of the many Aberdeens in Illinois). That approach is uniquely yours, and perhaps unmatched in available literature. Another author, unburdened by the need to do research (since you’ve already done so much of the groundwork), can take and use it. They may not be able to do as good a job, sure, but their stardom can sell the book to a publisher who sees in the project all the elements of a best-seller: murder, small town America, sex, a unique “lesson” to be learned, a Netflix series down the line, perhaps, who knows, an actual movie?
Originality is not a myth. Sure, two people can think about the same topic, but the approach one takes towards it can mean the difference between a saleable book and a good idea for a book.
The explosion of the internet has meant several shifts, especially in writing and publishing and the fact that, theoretically, everyone can now “write” and have their work seen by, theoretically, millions has been both a boon and a curse. Most people aren’t aware, for instance, that even web articles in proper publications have to be contained and have a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they imagine that such work can be produced like a MySpace journal entry and simply meander around without a point (there’s a reason why editors salivate over the few writers who can actually write). Writing is labour—the construction of an arc so that it makes sense to a reader, knowing what to use after months of research and/or thought and experimentation, making the heartbreaking decisions about what to leave out, and so much more. Plagiarists know this—that’s why they’re plagiarists: they know how much work it takes to create a project, and they either can’t or don’t want to do that work (some of the biggest “star” writers out there are actually past their prime, and coast along on dried up laurels). Agents also know this, and this is why the most unscrupulous among them might look at their supposed “star” writer and think, Crap, this person’s not going to produce anything worthwhile but a publisher might happily sign a contract with them—and me—so let me just pass along this far more interesting work, by someone else. This happens very often, but few writers will talk about it because the publishing world, like academia, is pitifully tiny: You’ll never write in this town again, is the unspoken threat.
So, don’t share your book proposal with an agent, especially if they’re cagey about their other clients and don’t even list them on their website. Keep an eye on their clients’ work to make sure that your work (including work you may have drafted and decided not to use) isn’t now being repurposed by someone else. Please don’t share your book proposal, period. Too many writers imagine The Life of the Writaahhh as something out of a Merchant Ivory film or a Vanessa Bell painting, with everyone lolling around in pinafores and those long bathing suits at the seaside and then retiring to sunny writing nooks in actual, proper studies, taking in the scent of lilies from the garden outside while sharing Very Grand Ideas that emerge months later as Famous Books inscribed with cryptic epigraphs: To E., Who Knows Why.
All of that is a fantasy. Bloomsbury was a lot of things, sure, fecund even, but it was also a set of rich people being utter shits to each other. There aren’t writing communities to be found, at least not the ones you imagine, even at those expensive “literary fellowships” that you pay for just to have the privilege of handing in your cellphone and sharing a bathroom with seven other people for three months. You can and will find excellent writing companions and readers, writer friends even, and those relationships may well last your lifetime or at least many happy years. Share your work with a trusted few, but don’t share your work willy-nilly or on social media. If you want to be a writer, you have to first divest yourself of the precious idea that writing is a calling or magic (blame Elizabeth Gilbert for that one), inhabited by Very Special Snowflakes Who Just Write. Writing is a profession—and I would not be in any other—located in a complex set of economic structures, and it drips with desperation. Don’t share your work just because someone who seems like a Mentor or is a Very Well Known Writer promises to “share your work with the right people.” There are no ladders of influence that run straight up and down in the publishing world. Think, instead, of those moving staircases in Hogwarts, the ones that keep sliding up and down every which way and make it impossible to know whether you’re coming or going. You’ll find your rhythm and your people, and it will take time, and much caution.
In the coming months, I’ll also expand on how matters are changing to such an extent that publishers and agents and plagiarists in general may finally be seeing some major pushback. The changes in the publishing industry might come sooner than even I had imagined. In early August, Artnet reported that the British Museum has “settled a dispute with Canadian writer Yilin Wang, agreeing to reinstate her translations of Chinese-language poems by early-20th-century feminist revolutionary and poet Qiu Jin to its exhibition “China’s Hidden Century”—this time with permission and full credit.” The museum had wilfully used Wang’s translations: “in a video projection, in the wall text, and in both the digital and audio guides to the exhibition, all without credit. The exhibition catalogue also included the translations, still without permission, albeit with one credit.” Wang, in essence, received neither credit nor compensation for her work, the result of years of labour and expertise—despite the fact that the museum, which “received a a £719,000 ($949,370) grant from the Art and Humanities Research Council in support of the exhibition,” had more than ample funds to do both.
Wang struck back by organising a fundraiser for legal fees and threatening to sue the museum. As Artnet puts it, succinctly, “Faced with legal action, it didn’t take long for the institution to change its tune.”
Legal action is, I believe, the only thing that’s going to have an effect on the far-reaching problem of plagiarism. What the British Museum–an emblem of an Empire whose entire existence has depended on pilfering on a mass scale–did is in fact plagiarism. Like the museum, publishers at places like the Times and corrupt agents aren’t going to change their behaviour based on goodwill and a sense of justice: they’ll only stop their theft when faced with the possibility of lawsuits. At some point, a major news outlet, too cocky to believe it can be stopped, will steal from someone with deep pockets (and these days, most writers are people who don’t need to write for a living and are often independently wealthy) or from someone who says, Fuck it, I have nothing to lose in this hellscape of publishing anyway, and I’ll just sue and retire to grow persimmons in Connecticut. At some point, an agent and their pet author will be stopped short by a writer who takes them to court.
Make that agent sign that agreement. And be prepared to sue their ass. Show no mercy. An agent who passes on one writer’s project to another doesn’t deserve to be in the field, and should be drummed out of the profession. The same is true for the author who knowingly steals that work, and for the acquisitions editor at the press who may well have seen the older proposal and still decided to sign a contract, thus becoming part of the theft.1This last sentence was modified on Feb. 11, 2024, to reflect the role of acquisition editors. Let them move sideways, perhaps as booksellers—too noble a profession for them, really, but they will have to eat, and we can show them mercy. They can spend their days selling actual books instead of the ideas that make them possible.
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Vanessa Bell, Interior with a Table, 1921.