Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Serendipity in a new avatar! Is it a kind of plagiarism?

How do you feel when you see some chapters of your yet-to-be completed novel  published as a book on a foreign website without your permission?

I got really surprised when I came across twenty chapters of my novel "Serendipity and After" as a book with a new title"A novel about publishing of a novel" on Ridoro, a Russian website. Interestingly, it selected the chapters that related to publishing only.

 I published this novel on Medium a couple months ago - one chapter every day for seventy one days at a stretch and then stopped for some reason, leaving it incomplete. I haven't worked on it since. The new title was actually the tagline of the serialized novel.

Is it right for this website to publish my novel this way without my consent?

I wanted to shoot an angry email to the owner of the website, but strangely there was no contact email at the site. So I wrote to my editor-friend V Ramaswamy asking for his take and what I should do under the circumstances.

Ramaswamy was also taken aback, and advised me to write to the website editor to take down my work from the site.

But he added,"Actually, I wouldn't worry. It spreads the word."





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