Happy Sunday 3.5 Readers.
BQB here to talk about an article in The Atlantic – Stealing Books in the Age of Self-Publishing by Joy Lanzendorfer.
The article discusses how it is too easy for some unscrupulous people to take the works of others, change them around a little bit and then pass them off as their own, profiling authors who have had this happen to them.
Apparently it happens more often than people realize, and it isn’t always so blatant that is easily discovered. Sometimes plagiarized books are up for awhile and as the article notes, it is usually a plucky reader that spots the similarities and alerts the author.
To make this a BQB Daily Discussion, what are some ways that self-publishers can protect themselves from such chicanery?
Bookshelf Battle 
Not much as far as I know. Put your stuff out there and it’s available for chicanery. But publishing with an ISBN protects you at least legally. And if you’re using an alias you should get a DBA in that alias before publishing so that if some idiot tries to say he’s really the BQB, you have legal proof you are.
Yikes that would terrible. But I’m the Mayor of East Randomtown, chosen because no one else in town was smart enough to create a blog with 3.5 readers.
Surely my constituents would vouch for me.
If you think they will show up in court for you, then go with that. LOL. I went the DBA route myself but I’m not mayor of anything so….
One thing that appalled me is an author on Amazon using the name Stephen King who is not the real ‘Stephen King’. I saw that some of his books were free on Kindle Unlimited and when I downloaded one it became obvious that this was not the famous Stephen King, but some hack that was using the same name to get sales.
I might have heard of that. I wonder what someone would do if their name actually was Stephen King?
I don’t believe that was the case here but in my travels I have met a couple normal people with celebrity names and wondered what they would do if they ever became famous.
Middle initials are often used. Michael J. Fox, for instance, used a fake middle initial because there was already a famous actor named Michael Fox.