At some point one might blink in un-surprise to yet another discovery of rampant holy shit plagiarism, but today is not that day (and frankly, I hope it doesn’t arrive).
Per Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, and many, many other people doing the terrible work of unearthing and checking books page by page, it seems writer Cristiane Serruya has lifted…sheesh, at this point, half the internet into her books?
As always, a fan found it and let Courtney Milan know:
If you know me, you know I do not make accusations lightly–especially accusations about plagiarism and copyright infringement. Earlier today, a fan sent me an email claiming that portions of my book that had been copied by another author. After investigation, I have concluded that Christiane Serruya has copied, word-for-word, multiple passages from my book The Duchess War.
There are more passages copied than what I list below, and history suggests that if you delve deeper into this book, and other books, there will be even more plagiarism.
Oh, indeed. Sad Plagiarism Bingo square: it’s never just one book.
Once folks began looking, there were plenty of additional examples. Which of course means buying copies of a book one suspects contains other people’s work – a particularly galling enterprise, return policies notwithstanding.
As Tessa Dare searched, Natalie The Reading Debutante identified The Duchess Deal as one of the sources.
Well, this is embarrassing. I am 95% sure this was lifted from my books, but I don’t know where or in which one. Geez, #CopyPasteCris knows my books better than I do.
Sidenote, how come none of the bits from my book show up when I search? I had to go get the other off the shelf. pic.twitter.com/aDqEUhelj2
— Tessa the RedNosed Rein-Dare (@TessaDare) February 19, 2019
It’s The Duchess Deal! I’d know that book anywhere. Jesus Christ I’m livid! pic.twitter.com/tKnLOTtizz
— Natalie Jane Smith (@thereadingdebut) February 19, 2019
It seems the lifting is rampant and thorough, too:
I am literally 9% into ONE book “by” @CrisSerruya (ROYAL LOVE), and have found text plagiarized from at least 5 authors. #copypastecris
— Tessa the RedNosed Rein-Dare (@TessaDare) February 19, 2019
And while passages from Bella Andre, Trish Morey, Lynne Graham, Abby Green, Karen Marie Moning, Lisa Kleypas, Kresley Cole (is your jaw on the floor with mine?) and many others have been identified, reader Kawy also spotted lifted recipes from The Knot, and from The Field Magazine:
https://twitter.com/kawy/status/1097716453258772480
We haven’t gotten to “and the ‘author’ once managed Blues Traveler” territory yet, but that is definitely a new subterranean notch on the WTF scale.
The scope of the plagiarism is still being revealed, with new updates at the #CopyPasteCris hashtag on Twitter.
I’m still caffeinating but I’m about 87% bafflement face at the moment, with an equal amount of exhausted empathy for the individuals doing the investigating. The hours it takes to identify, search, and match passages from other books are not small in number. (Been there.) And it is work that the potentially wronged individuals have to do, because otherwise the plagiarism continues.
And then there’s the ridiculousness of lifting so much from so many places to assemble into one book. Imagine the work that goes into creating a new document, then taking portions of others, fitting them into the skeleton of some kind of narrative, and finding others to add in as well. Forget the mathematical calculations of how many tabs that would be in a browser. Why would someone do that? It seems like an astonishing amount of really, really dumb work and, as always, you’ll get caught.
Looks like I’m going to have Rihanna stuck in my head all day:
If the plagiarism call-and-response pattern holds, at some point there may be a flounce (which is always a boomerang because flounces are never one way) or maybe a vague, passive-voiced non-apology.
UPDATE: I was wrong! I was not expecting this response:
https://twitter.com/CrisSerruya/status/1097847797351673856
She’s also reached out to Courtney Milan:
Oh, boy.
My theory, and purely a theory: ghost writers. Lots of ’em, grabbing passages left and right then selling the “manuscript.” ETA: I’m definitely not alone in that theory.
I know there’s a market for ghostwritten romance manuscripts (since romance is a perennial cash production machine according to some wisdom). I wonder if someone has developed software that takes pieces of books like a deck of cards and shuffles them into a new order.
Presto. A “book.” I wouldn’t be surprised if such a program exists, but again, a lot of work for something that will be discovered. Readers remember shit like this, and we recognize patterns, especially in books we love. Always.
This story will likely to continue to evolve and I’ll update as new information arrives. In the meantime, I wish everyone some sleep and a LOT of coffee. Really, really good coffee.
ETA: I’m setting a timer for 5 minutes and using the free preview to see what I can find. Ready, set, go.
Shaded Love, free preview.
Chapter One, All That’s Unspoken, Constance Phillips, screenshot via Scribd:
Jeez. Ridiculous.
ETA: Well, gee golly gee whiz, it was indeed perhaps a ghostwriter:
ETA: Via Claire O’Dell: the Goodreads page for Royal Love has been edited to read “Plagiarised from Courtney Milan.”
ETA, 20 February:
Well, that’s been a lot.
Cristiane Serruya deleted her Twitter account (not surprising).
A person named Bee commented on Courtney Milan’s original post saying they had worked as a ghost writer for Cristiane Serruya (and who wasn’t paid, either):
Her work, when given to me, was a number of mishmashed scenes that needed “expanding”, as she said. I took for granted that these were her own words, and embellished as she requested, as this is how I work–I often help authors who are “too close” to their own book to get it in shape for publication. Now I can see that it’s very possible those were plagiarized scenes that she was hoping a ghostwriter would change enough to make unrecognizable.
Oy.
Courtney also revealed on Twitter that two additional ghostwriters have independently contacted her revealing the same details of Serruya’s approach.
And the list of plagiarized titles has lengthened to nearly 30 (I’m sure it’ll pass that number today).
CaffeinatedFae on Twitter (holy smokes I love that name!) has been keeping a running tally and posting them in a Twitter thread. And @JeannaLStars has also kept a Twitter list with US and UK buy links.
Added: CaffeinatedFae also has a lengthly list on her website (nice job!).
Titles link to the book in question.
- The Importance of Being Wicked, Victoria Alexander
- The Wedding Gift, Bella Andre
- Grey’s Lady, Natasha Blackthorne*
- A Season of Hope, Christi Caldwell
- Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase
- A Hunger Like No Other, Kresley Cole
- If You Deceive, Kresley Cole
- Lothaire, Kresley Cole
- The Duchess Deal, Tessa Dare
- She Belongs to Me, Carmen DeSousa
- Slade, Laurann Dohner
- Fool for Love, Marie Force*
- The Accidental Wedding, Anne Gracie
- The Spanish Billionaire’s Pregnant Wife, Lynne Graham
- The Spaniard’s Marriage Bargain, Abby Green
- Badlands, Callie Hart
- Marrying Winterborne, Lisa Kleypas
- The Rogue Not Taken, Sarah MacLean
- The Duchess War, Courtney Milan
- The Heiress Effect, Courtney Milan*
- Proof by Seduction, Courtney Milan*
- What Happened at Midnight, Courtney Milan*
- Beyond the Highland Mist, Karen Marie Moning
- Forced Wife, Royal Love-Child ,Trish Morey
- The Christmas Company, Alys Murray
- All That’s Unspoken, Constance Phillips
- Warrior Prince, Michelle M. Pillow
- Love Potions, Michelle M. Pillow
- The Liar, Nora Roberts*
- Private Scandals, Nora Roberts
- The Liar, Nora Roberts
- Lost in Temptation, Lauren Royal
- The Darkest Night, Gena Showalter
- How to Tame a Beast in Seven Days, Kerrelyn Sparks
- Ruthless, Michelle St. James
- Rafael’s Suitable Bride, Cathy Williams
*Indicates newly added titles.
When I saw “Nora Roberts” my first thought was, “Everybody, get underground NOW.”
Plus, there are the pheasant recipe from Field Magazine and a scone recipe from Jamie Oliver, as well as two articles:
- From The Knot, “A World Tour of Wedding Cake Traditions,” written by Sarah Doyle
- From The Guardian, “I help women and children in refuges heal together after domestic abuse,” written by Jessica Scott* (From the article: “Due to the confidentiality of Hestia’s work, Jessica’s name has been changed.”)
And, this Tweet from @SalvagedBooks and KJ Charles made me snort coffee:
ETA:
Courtney Milan has also provided a detailed post of what to do next, including filing ethics complaints with RWA and reporting the books at Amazon, BN, and Apple. She’s also created a Yahoo Group for those affected. Details are at her site, of course. This community can be truly a gift.
ETA, 22 February:
The editor who worked on Royal Love asked Courtney Milan to post a statement on her behalf :
I would like to personally apologize for my role in this situation. I edited Royal Love, Book 1. If I had any knowledge this book was plagiarized in any way, shape, or form, I would have sent her packing.
And per the incredible work done by CaffeinatedFae (wow I hope that caffeination is 200% real at this point) and others, the list is up to 36 books and 28 different authors. The list above has been updated.
Nora Roberts has written about this, and the Janet Dailey plagiarism from 1997, Plagiarism, Then and Now, wherein she writes about plagiarism, and how it’s always a reader who discovers it:
You don’t get over it, you get through it.
Since then, I’ve had a couple more less public and ugly cases which we dealt with firmly and quickly. Because I’ll never play nice with a plagiarist again.
That leads to now.
…it’s always a reader, and bless you every one.
@Ren Benton, Comment #15:
To give Cristiane Serruya the benefit of the doubt, I know of at least one exception to that: If you self-publish on Smashwords, your book can end up on Kobo, Amazon, iBooks, B&N and a bunch of others if you qualify for the Premium Catalogue. Amazon’s KU exclusivity clause presumably doesn’t apply to merchant accounts held by a publishing company. Futher details can be found at their FAQ page here: https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#Distributing
Sadly, I don’t believe that qualifying for the Smashwords Premium Catalogue involves going through some sort of TurnItIn-for-ebooks process.
@Jen (Comment #2) You are so right about plagiarism in science. I’m also an academic, and at least three times I have peer-reviewed manuscripts for a journal and found MY OWN sentences/paragraphs in them. (And then of course I’ve gone on to google every other well-written sentence in the otherwise poorly-written manuscript, so I can give the editor a complete list of the plagiarism—I got my plagiarism google-fu training right here on SBTB ages ago during the Cassie Edwards debacle.)
The brazenness of it astonished me each time—I’m an expert in my field, you’ve even cited my papers (though not cited them for the plagiarized passages, oddly enough); what are the odds that I’m NOT going to be asked to review your paper?!
Stupid question, but are her first books, the trust trilogy, any idea if they are plagiarized? I reviewed them long ago on my blog, and either want to take down the reviews or else credit the right people with it…
I attempted to read “Royal Love” a few months ago. I couldn’t get through the first chapter. The dialogue was disjointed and the plot was all over the place. I deleted the book and forgot about it.
And to the surprise of no one, CS just deleted her Twitter.
Addendum: she also deleted her webpage and is scrubbing Kindle copies of her books of the noted plagiarism so when owners of the books refresh their kindles offending passages will be gone.
[…] This falls into serious WTF territory. That ghostwriter was a piece of work: […]
I’m struggling with everyone that lets her off the hook and blames the ghost writer. (I am not a ghost writer) She accepted checks, would have accepted accolades (She admitted submitting one of her identified works for a RITA consideration–RWA has since removed the entry from the running). She put her name on this chop shopped piece of intellectual theft. She has to take responsibility.
Most contracts include a clause where you swear on your Mama and your dog that this is your original work and you have the right to sell it. Doesn’t Amazon’s? If it does, this person is more than embarrassed — she’s staring at a breach of contract lawsuit. Also, what the actual hell? She claims to have employed a ghostwriter through Fiverr (“Will use plagiarism to create a novel for you for $5!), put her name on it, published it, and didn’t read it? If she’s really such a fan of the authors cribbed from, she’d have noticed the familiarity of what she was reading. This is so stupid, in so many ways, it’s dizzying.
I can’t remember the article or the “fake” author, but a programmer was found out for creating a program that would write romance books and putting them up on Amazon / he was making so much money, he opened an account for his girlfriend as well producing the same books with a different cover. But it’s scary to note that he created this on a simple programming software we all have on our computer and just made this amount of money from it. On another note, as a writer, I would be horrible to be accused of plagiarism and then not know if it were true or not because I didn’t take the time to read the product I was selling. If she were a so call lawyer, she must not be a very good one. People like this should be banned completely from selling anything on Amazon.
This is so blatant. And obvious. I write stories for fun mostly–my published output is still small–but I agonize over word choice and plot and syntax and so do other authors and writers I know.
And then she just cuts and pastes (at last count) 24 books?!
Poking around the internet I’m still not totally convinced she’s a real person and not a bot, but there is a small amount of self-promotion (with multiple photos) that says she’s a Brazilian lawyer. She’s clearly not a native speaker, so the most generous scenario is she is an actual romance fan who wanted to write but out of her depth and hired ghostwriters to fix unnatural grammar and pad out the book. The worst case scenario is it was entirely intentional and either the entire book was put together by someone else (or she doesn’t exist and one or two people did this on purpose.) Truth might be somewhere in between, but either way someone made some really bad choices.
She alleged that she paid the ghost writer $150. That’s just under 21 hours of work at minimum wage. And she was shocked that the words weren’t original? I’m not buying it!
@Emily C and others: Yes, happy to clarify. The books I’ve worked on in the past two years have been super-normal ghostwriting jobs: sports dude who started a totally new career and wanted a book to go along with his really successful new career; woman who started a non-profit in a third world country; woman who transformed herself from obesity to semi-pro triathlete and is encouraging others to likewise transform their lives, etc. So some of them are memoirs and some of them are more like self-help books. The process generally is either super heavy editing of/direction of a barebones manuscript that the author wrote but they know it needs tons of work OR lots of phone calls, interviews, etc. after an outline is written.
Most universities give their professors access to engines where they can check if a paper has been plagarised. Given the big dollars involved, I don’t understand why publishing houses don’t use a similar tool.
@Theresa She’s self published, so Amazon, etc would have to be screening her, though your question still is valid for Amazon.
Apparently, the RITAs have been impacted, too.
According to a Courtney Milan tweet, several GWs have come forward to say that she basically gave them a pile of scenes and asked them to string them together into a novella, so the ghostwriters assumed they were just polishing her words. According to one of the GWs, she didn’t even pay her for her work, so she cut ties after 2 books.
Also, the current count is 28 books, 26 authors, 2 recipes, and 3 articles that she copied material from last I saw. See #CopyPasteCrisList on Twitter for the latest.
@Mags – Yep, I posted partial info about that above; thank you for the author total!
@denise – yep, she put her book up for Rita contention. They’ve removed it!
@Lisa F – YW! Saw on RWA’s twitter feed that they removed her as a RITA judge, too.
It’s Cassiegate all over again, but with Jamie Oliver’s scone recipe instead of black-footed ferrets.
But she claims to be a NYT best seller and a USA Today best seller? Is she really or does she just say she is? And she STILL has Royal Love on Amazon even in AUDIO and she has taken off the “plagerised from Courtney Milan already as if that even made any sense to do.
So she even stiffed the ghost writers?
@Jake: Rowling and Tolkien and Harlequin titles can be in KU while in other stores, but they don’t use KDP. If you use the KDP self-publishing portal, you are small potatoes and are bound by the same contract as everyone else. That contract states if you put something in KU, no more than 10% of that content (which is equal to the sample size) can be available anywhere else in ebook form. There is no exemption for people who put a name in the “publisher” field (which anyone can do). It is the same contract that has to be agreed to every single time someone clicks “publish,” and the exclusivity for KU content in that contract is perfectly plain—no more than 10% of anything in KU can be available elsewhere in any digital form, and 100% of the content in those box sets is available elsewhere. It’s a terms violation. There is no “benefit of the doubt,” and anyone who tells you otherwise either hasn’t read the contract or is selling the KU clickfraud scam.
“Premium catalog” at Smashwords means ONLY that the epub file is functional and you’ve assigned an ISBN to meet the other stores’ acceptability requirements. Nothing at Smashwords or any other distributor has any bearing on AMAZON’S CONTRACT TERMS. Yes, you CAN put your content in other stores, and yes, if ANY of that content is in KU, it’s a terms violation, for which Amazon can yank the offending content, take away KU money, and/or terminate the account, depending on their mood that day, all of which is warned of… in the contract that must be agreed to every single time the “publish” button is clicked.
Even people who aren’t lawyers should really pay attention to what’s in there.
@Lisa: For a hefty fee, one can buy into a box set of 20+ books that will be sold for 99 cents, which enough people will buy to put it on a bestseller list, which makes all umpteen unheard-of authors included “bestsellers.” Last I heard, USA Today was going to exclude box sets in response to the flood of “bestsellers by virtue of cheap,” but there are plenty of other ways to game that system.
Lawd. People who think they can plagiarize in Romancelandia especially are not too bright. *insert Liam Neeson “I will find you” meme here*
@65 Ren Benton: The cost accountant in me looked at this, and wondered how do they make any money? Or is the best-seller title the object? Assuming the aggregator makes their money up-front selling and assembling the bundle, and the 20 authors split the $.99 equally, that’s less than 5 cents per book — $495 for 10,000 sales. If the aggregator also takes a share of the proceeds the take is even less. Even if the set sells 100K copies, that’s still only $5,000, and there’s costs like the buy-in and covers and websites, not to mention living expenses and taxes, to come out of the proceeds. Where is their break-even point?
As a lawyer, wouldn’t she recognize fraud when it bitch slapped her upside the head?
I’ve done some ghostwriting for children’s literature. In those cases, the publishers put out the books with the original author’s name, even if that person has been dead for decades. Or in some cases, the “original author” never was a real person. The Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series were and still are written by multiple people, and Caroline Keene and Franklin Dixon have always been pen names.
As a ghost writer, my job is to meet the publishers word count and reading level, and to mimic the style of the series. Sometimes I come up with the story idea, and at other times I’ve been given a detailed outline. It’s a particular skill that not every writer can manage, because of the need to sound like all the other books in the series.
I think ghost writing is fascinating, especially since, as you mentioned Kris, many series I loved like Nancy Drew, and Sweet Valley High, etc, were written by teams operating under a pen name. The ability to mimic style and voice and write to an outline is a unique skill, too.
Ghostwriters in the comments and lurking: would you be interested in talking with me about how you got started? You can email me at sarah @ smart bitches trashy books DOT com.
@SB Sarah- I was thinking the same thing about ghostwriting and would love to hear a podcast ep about it! It’s a legit skill and I am fascinated by skilled writers being able to take someone else’s story (a famous person/public figure for example) and turn it into a full work keeping the original intent and voice of the named author.
@Meg DesCamps and @Kris Bock- thanks for answering my questions about ghostwriting and your process.
Clearly this situation is a serious lapse in morality and due diligence on the part of so many involved in the publishing of these books by this so-called person Cristiane Serruya (I’m of the camp now that the author is just a bot)
@Emily C: I completely agree. Writing in someone else’s voice/style is HARD to do. I mean, that’s why the lifted parts jumped out from the Serruya books: the shift in language was noticeable. Being able to smooth that out consistently while working in someone else’s voice and language is a skill.
Dear God. I’m so angry, I can hardly think. Now she’s taken down her website and FB page. For a purportedly innocent person, that looks hella shady.
IIRC, I think The Babysitters’ Club books were ghostwritten after a certain point as well–I devoured those as a kid.
It looks like the list is up to 34 books now? My God. Does anybody else get the feeling that this is a plagiarism farm instead of a single “author?”
If you look at any romance best-selling list on Amazon you will find fake authors, lots of them, in the top 100. They often use stock photos as author pictures, and they use Amazon almost exclusively, employing click farms to page through the books. They get their books by synonomising other books, cutting them up, piecing them together and then getting a ghostwriter to paper over the cracks.
The same method is used to offer books for sale to “authors.” It’s made easier because romance uses tropes. We’re less interested in original situations and plots, more in the characters’ responses to the situation they’re flung into. So they can find books with similar themes and tropes and cobble the frankenbook out of that.
The real answer is to get Amazon to care about the issue. If they went after these “authors,” removed any royalties earned and actually put the books through something like TurnItIn to check for similarities, took away the motive for doing this, then the problem would decrease.
Right now it’s rampant. I was once kept off the top of the Regency list by a fake author. I know the names of some who buy their books rather than write them themselves, and so do a lot of other people, but naming and shaming is almost impossible. The authors cultivate strong support networks, and you can find yourself doxxed and targeted. If you want to prove plagiarism, it’s a really tedious, time-consuming and dispiriting process.
Amazon and the other outlets really need to step up on this issue, but I’m not holding my breath. While the books are making money, why should they care?
This hit me so hard yesterday, coming as it did on the same day as yet another rejection for a book I, my beta readers, and my RWA mentors believe in strongly and have been fighting to get published for quite some time. The thought that I can have worked so hard on something that never quite seems to fit anybody’s line, while someone like this can outright fake a bunch of books and instantly become a “Best Selling Author” and Rita nominee (OMG SHE GAMED THE RITAS WHAT BALLS) really galls me. More than that, it makes me wonder why I even bother to try.
Many people have asked me why I won’t self-publish my books. This is why. I want the validation of an actual publishing house. The whole reason this bitch self-published was because any legitimate publisher would have spotted the plagiarism and called foul before she made a cent. It may limit your profits but it legitimizes your work.
@LindaX, I don’t know if it was so much an implicit threat as a rudimentary shield, as in “OMG I is a lawyer and I knows the law so I would not have done this thing it must have been somebody else.”
As a self-published author via KDP (not in KU because OMG that small print) I am actually kind of grateful, at the moment, that my group of readers is so small. And that nobody is stealing my stuff. Although when it comes down to it, how would I know?
Sigh.
@EC Spurlock I get it. I’m trudging through the swamp of Queryland myself right now. Book’s placed in competition, done well with beta readers, but so far, no agent. Why try? Well… why not? Sure, there’s the constant rejection and roller coaster of submit-wait-hope-hear-rejection-dejection-lather, rinse, repeat, but why not fight for what we’ve worked so hard to create? That shitty people can game the system is awful (a Rita nomination? What?), but we can actually by God write and create and do not have to fear exposure. Go git ’em, EC! We will sit together on a panel one day and tell aspiring writers how we made it.
@EC Spurlock, yes, and yes. I’ve been published a long time, but I’ve never known the market as tight and as difficult as this. I’m hybrid, but most of my self-published books are my backlist. Keep going if you can.
This so called author has used passages from 2 of my favorite books by Christie Caldwell and Courtney Milan. I am appalled, as the lines she uses from “The Duchess War” is word for word…. Coincidence ? I think NOT.