Picture the scenario:
You’ve written a book, it was received well, sold a few hundred copies in the first couple of months. The reviews were favourable and you slaved over your words.
But now you want to walk away. Delete the author name so that it never existed. The catch? You don’t want write off the book you wrote, just the author name.
In this digital age you can’t run away from what you have done, you can try to delete posts, pages, twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, Google Accounts (with extreme difficulty), Goodreads (Impossible) and WordPress Accounts (Impossible). It won’t work, there will always be footprints somewhere out there. Deleting all traces of the book at the various outlets takes months and months.
So what is the big deal? You maybe thinking. Well there isn’t a BIG deal, well not to all of you but there is to me.
Plagiarism.
I am scared to death that when I re-release the book I wrote as her, as Grace, that someone is going to come along and say ‘you stole her work’. That would be gutting to have that stigma, humans tend to believe the lies rather than the truths in these situations. More drama. I have enough drama. It’s not going to stop me of course, the book is a part of a series and I can’t leave 70,000 words sitting in my laptop.
So, I had decided that I would put a disclaimer in the blurb which says:
DISCLAIMER: 90% of this book has already been published under a different name with a different title. If you feel you have read this book before, please send a screen shot of your eBook and I will happily give you a refund.
That should work.
No one is going to die if I am linked to the other author name but it will make life exceedingly difficult. Life can be stressful as it is so naturally I want to avoid it.
I suppose this is my way of declaring that it was me who wrote the work, date stamping my issue. If someone does come along and point the finger I can revert them to this blog.
Thanks for reading.
Grace
X
Harper’s Motto: You will not be everybody’s favourite flavour, but that’s ok, because they will not always be your favourite flavour. Be who you want to be and you will attract the people who will support you no matter what.
XX
Grace Harper Books 