'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)
If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

Leave a comment


Type the characters you see in the picture above.

Recent Related Entries

Collaborative Authorship Made Easy
A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog:The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn't discuss it,...

Does anybody remember that Facebook thing?
A group of Seton Hill graduates who bonded through the SHU blogosphere in 2003 and 2004 have continued to use their blogs, and there are some newer students who have made an effort to continue their blogging this summer. Since...

Go Ahead, Steal My Car
The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for...

Above the Law?
Inside Higher Ed:Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent...

Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis:I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color....