News & Publishing Juno Editor/Paula Guran on 14 Jan 2008 11:38 am
Smart Bitches Expose of Edwards Now in NYTimes
The Smart Bitches Trashy Books allegations that novelist Cassie Edwards has inserted large chunks of unattributed material into her work has hit the New York Times which reports Signet Books, one of Edwards’s publishers, is now examining all of her work that it has published. Signet initially denied any wrongdoing on the author’s part.
Smartbitchestrashybooks.com’s Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell posted excerpts from Ms. Edwards’s novels alongside passages from other sources to show the similarities, which the site’s authors said they had discovered by plugging some of Ms. Edwards’s writing into Google. A typical discovery was, for example, passages from “Shadow Bear,” published by Signet in 2007, that appear to have come, with little or no modification, from novel “Land of the Spotted Eagle” by Luther Standing Bear and an article about black-footed ferrets from Defenders of Wildlife magazine.
Of the seven novels examined by the bloggers, three were said to come from Signet, one from Topaz, two from Dorchester Publishing and one from Zebra.
Ms. Edwards told an Associated Press reporter earlier this week that she did not know she was supposed to credit her sources. “When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” she said.
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Of course the Times article leads with the derogatorily “cute” intro: “Who says romance novel fans care only about ripped bodices and manly men?” You know, if reporters are going to deride a genre, you’d think they could come up with something clever?
on 14 Jan 2008 at 1:09 pm 1.Carole Nelson Douglas said …
About the “cutesy” Times lead. You need to know the newspaper reporter mentality. Men or women, they are not “objective” about women or genre fiction writers, particularly in their own community.
As a former journalist, I can tell you most of the breed believe they would write the Great American Novel if only they got down to doing it. Few do.
And romance is a favorite whipping girl. It fries them that those silly “nonprofessional” women can be considered “authors” and sometimes make tons of money on nonintellectual and inessential subjects like love and emotions and sex.
When I began having novels published while still working at my St. Paul newspaper I became a pariah and an object of ridicule. The first two were award-nominated or winning historical Gothic (no sex) and romance (sex), the third was bestselling high fantasy (no sex), the next three were mainstream women’s fiction (a little sex).
The older woman book reviewer was humiliated for reviewing the first two books and left her job. The Minneapolis sf/f reviewer gave my high fantasies and Probe books terrific reviews. A sf/freelancer enthusiastically reviewed my first Probe book in a St. Paul column after I left the paper a few years later. That was allowed to “slip” through.
None of my 50-some books has been reviewed in St. Paul since, or in Minneapolis, for that matter. I spent 40 years and went to school in St. Paul and worked for 17 years at the daily newspaper.
One of the reasons I left St. Paul for the Sunbelt
was I came into journalism sans journalism school and really believed and practiced the objectivity and integrity of the press (because I was scared to death to fail to live up to journalism degree standards.) Turns out “insiders” in anything become careless and I had far higher standards than they did. I couldn’t stand to see the disappointing proof of my co-workers’ jealousy in the newspaper year after year. I’d thought better of them. I’d liked them and thought they liked me, and had gotten along well with all of them. Until I became published.
I did get an extensive interview with the rival Minneapolis book reviewer when I came back to town to sign and visit several years later. Everyone in the Twin Cities book world was aghast. He was a total elitist who only praised literary fiction, but he’d read one of my Irene Adler books and loved it.
Turns out he was curious as heck about why the St. Paul papers weren’t reviewing my work and why I moved.
About the move, I said I figured if “I was going to be ignored, I might as well go somewhere warmer to do it.” He laughed and asked if he could use the quote. I said sure.
Then he did this huge, positive piece that listed my whole 20-novel bibliography etc. He may have been an elitist, but he was fair and didn’t like what he saw had happened at the St. Paul paper.
P.S. The male book reviewers at the newspaper where I moved ignored me and all other female writers in the region, including bestsellers. In fact, the writing elements in the whole state of Texas ignores us. Funny, we kept going, most of us.:)
Many mourn the shrinking of mainstream newspaper book pages, but I see it as a shrinking of an organ for cultural bias. If you look, the only thing women review at newspapers are restaurants. They’ll recruit black and gay reviewers for the arts and pop arts, but not women.
There is always the occasional exception that proves the rule, but that’s been the pattern.
on 14 Jan 2008 at 8:18 pm 2.Strepsi said …
re: “Ms. Edwards told an Associated Press reporter earlier this week that she did not know she was supposed to credit her sources. “When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” she said.”
Er, no, but you are asked to WRITE AN ORIGINAL WORK.
Cassie Edwards gives the equivalent of a grade 5 excuse - “But you didn’t ASK me not to take money out of your purse!” And if you have read the quote from Defenders of Wildlife magazine, she is in deep doo doo.
on 18 Jan 2008 at 3:56 pm 3.Lori Devoti said …
Ah, but did you see the Newsweek article by the author of the black footed ferret piece? The Times has nothing on that piece (plus comments) for insults.
And thanks Carole Nelson Douglas for sharing your experience. Well said.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 3:30 pm 4.Anonymous said …
>The Times has nothing on that piece (plus comments) for insults.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 3:31 pm 5.Jenni said …
[Sorry, forgot to leave name and I see it truncated my response]
Lori Devoti says:
“The Times has nothing on that piece (plus comments) for insults.”
Well, if your only exposure to romance books was a Cassie Edwards book, wouldn’t you be “insulting”? And those hunky covers and titles don’t do a lot for the genre either. If your only exposure to mystery or horror or SF was from the dregs, you’d be making denigrating noises about those genres, too.
Me, I think he was hysterically funny. And he did apologize nicely. The trouble with romance authors & readers is they’re so damn defensive (understandably so!) that they sometimes lose a little perspective and some sense of humor. Shoot, read some of the romance parodies at Laurie Likes Books (forget the website URL). And today’s Smart Bitches Trashy Books makes some great points about category romances.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 4:04 pm 6.Lori Devoti said …
Oh, I agree he is/was funny. And I did hear he apologized.
I hope I wouldn’t be “insulting” though after reading just one example of a genre–although personally, I found the reader comments more insulting than anything he said.
That all said, I agree being overly defensive serves no good purpose, but that is different than being aware that attitudes exist.