Plagiarism – An author’s nightmare. I thought I’d just write a short note about it since it seems to be a topic which comes up a lot in various conversations and publications I follow.
Many authors are always worried about the vulnerability of the public exposure of their work to the trolling pirates out in cyber world. Of course this is a concern for many, although there are others who feel it is a form of flattery and that if someone pirates your material it furthers exposure unto you; a free advertising, so to speak.
Authors are thus, put in a ‘Catch 22’ where we want our work publicized and on the same token, we worry about the thievery of our creations. I think that there doesn’t seem to be much of a choice on the matter. If we wish to share our creations with the world, we have to look at it as just another one of the many risky features of doing business. Although it does concern me, okay, a lot, I am not going to let it stop me from sharing my creations with the world.
We can only do our best to keep our eyes and ears open and a helpful tool for us is to put our own author names in Google Alerts and plug in our book titles and then at least we can rely on Google to do a little bit of babysitting for us to enable us to get a heads up on such situations. I hope this gives us all a little peace of mind.
DGKaye©2013
DGKayewriter.com 
Plagiarism isn’t something I can understand. Why? Laziness? I have heard about numerous authors (as have we all) who have had to fight tooth and nail to prove they are the author of such and such work. No, I do NOT think Plagiarism is any kind of compliment. More a headache.
Thank you, Debby for great advice re Google Alerts. I had no idea. 😀
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I’m with you! I can do without that type of flattery. I just wanted to share it so I could share the info I came across in one of the publications I follow because it seems to be a prevalent topic of conversation with authors. At least we have a chance to be forewarned by using the Google, many don’t find out their work is pirated for quite awhile. We need all the ammo we can get! 🙂
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Hi Debbie! Thanx for dropping by & for sharing your thoughts and your opinion on the “writing thieves!” 😀 To me, the verb “to plagiarize” = to steal! I have been plagiarized several times by Romanian bloggers who translated (poorly or wrongly!) my texts and have never mentioned that I was their author…
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My very best, good luck & friendly greetings from Toulouse, France… cheers, Mélanie
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Thanks Melanie. Wow that is awful. Wondering how you found out about the thieves?
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