Link: Slate | Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism case. By Ann Hulbert.
This amazing plagiarism story has been all over, but Ann Hulbert at Slate has the good sense to point up all the incredible layers of irony running all through this story, where the Harvard student author in many ways enacts the crass plot her own heroine runs through, and perhaps in just as crass and calculating a manner.
Several thousands of dollars were plunked down to one of those elite college admissions consultants for Viswanathan, people who are actually college marketing "agents" for the very rich and the wanna-bes, the natural evolution to the practice of parents clawing each other's eyes out to get their dear kiddies into the "best" pre-school, etc. (I've been listening to a wonderful series of podcasts on this... on ABC News Nightline).
So is it one more small step to have the high-end admissions marketing "agent" work with the professional editors so many would-be authors are hiring these days, again at several thousand a pop, to massage their manuscripts before they ever get to an agent or a publisher? Hey, trust funds ought to be good for something! If you want to be a best-selling author, isn't this better than using your trust fund to buy up most of the copies? Vanity publishing reaching for new heights.
So we package high school students as marketing products for the college admissions process, and to reach an even more sophisticated level, we present the would-be Harvard student as a precocious, best-selling "chick-lit" author, working with several layers of the publishing industry to package and market the student to Harvard, and to package and market the Harvard student to the book-buying public. And if necessary, we edit, plagiarize, and package (what else? Focus group? Phrase-test?) the book manuscript as completely as the kind of testing multi-million-dollar audience-driven wag-the-dog Hollywood scripts are subjected to, right?
So art imitates life, which imitates art, which imitates life. The postmodern loop of irony closes in on itself in infinite regression. Of course it is highly dependent on an evolving new aristocracy, or wealthy class with a mind-boggling amount of discretionary income. But that makes sense, because postmodernism as a theory and a condition both seem to be dependent on a recursive system of thinking that requires unending leisure or a leisure class to give the recursiveness the time and attention it requires, sort of like a Japanese tea service.
Thanks Slate, for finding all the delicious irony and doing the research to bring it out. I suppose I could have dug for it more myself, but my condition of postmodernity doesn't have the requisite leisure or discretionary income [grin].
Link: Slate | Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism case. By Ann Hulbert.
How Kaavya Got Packaged and Got Into Trouble
Plagiarism and the teen-marketing culture.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006, at 2:50 PM ET"Is it hard work being a poser?" One of the Haute Bitchez at Woodcliff High School puts that taunting question to Opal Mehta, the protagonist of the teen novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose confession this week that she unconsciously plagiarized the work of the best-selling young-adult author Megan McCafferty has stirred controversy. The dig comes near the end of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life when Opal's parent-driven self-packaging mission has been revealed to the entire high school. As her peers now know (from a tell-all Treo that she dropped), the senior has been devoting her fall semester to a marketing plan that the Mehtas fondly refer to by the acronym HOWGAL, How Opal Will Get A Life—a plan geared toward turning a science grind into a glamour girl. Heretofore she had been doggedly pursuing a more conventional marketing plan, HOWGIH, How Opal Will Get Into Harvard. The inspiration for the strategic swerve is Harvard's dean of admissions himself, who, at Opal's August interview, suggests that a girl who has been engineered since birth to be a super high-achiever needs to "Have fun. … Find out what you're really passionate about." Harvard doesn't want "automatons." By the January application deadline, he says, come back and "show us what a well-rounded candidate you've become. Sound good?"
The ensuing formulaic story is far more poignant in light of the accusations that Viswanathan—a super-achieving, Scholastic Art & Writing Award-winning, Johns Hopkins program-attending high-schooler who went on to become a Harvard student with a half-million-dollar book advance—is a poser herself. In Viswanathan's novel, Opal's parents get right to work on R&D, scrutinizing trashy TV shows and teen magazines; they marshal their whiteboard, spreadsheets, to-do lists, and Photoshop technology to the end of packaging a new hip, popular, less uptight product.
[...]
The darker moral of her story seems to be that if you succeed by packaging, you can expect to fail by packaging, too—and you alone, not your packagers, will pay the price. McCafferty's publisher, Steve Ross of Crown, has rejected as "disingenuous and troubling" Viswanathan's apology for her "unintentional and unconscious" borrowings from two McCafferty books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, that she says she read and loved in high school. He's right, it doesn't sound like the whole story. I don't mean simply to let Viswanathan off the hook, but her own book—indeed, its very copyright line, Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan—suggests a broader culture of adult-mediated promotion and strategizing at work. It's a culture, as her novel itself shows, that might well leave a teenager very confused about what counts as originality—even a teenager who can write knowingly about just that confusion. In fact, perhaps being able to write so knowingly about derivative self-invention is a recipe for being ripe to succumb to it. Viswanathan may not be a victim, exactly—she's too willing for that—but she is only one of many players here. [emphasis mine]
Before the scandal hit, Viswanathan emphasized that her own route to Harvard was not as obsessively scripted as Opal's. Still, no one would mistake the fruition of her novel for a case of independent creative genius unfolding. The project got its impetus from none other than Viswanathan's professional college packager. Katherine Cohen, a founder of IvyWise, a premier outfit that choreographs the college application process from ninth grade onward, and, crucially, helps produce essays that convey students' "passions." Working with Viswanathan, Cohen sensed "a star in the making" merely from surveying the teen's writing samples. Just how the publishing deal evolved from there gets a little fuzzy—just as it can be a little hard, often, to say just how a carefully coached college essay evolves, or how, exactly, a particular résumé-enhancing after-school club membership came to be. Whose idea it initially was, how much massaging was involved, what relation the final result bears to the first impulse: Students and consultants alike can find it hard, or uncomfortable, to clarify such matters.
A story a year ago in the New York Sun said Viswanathan's "plot was hatched well before she signed up with Ms. Cohen," and reported that a manuscript went from Cohen's own literary agent at the William Morris Agency to the fiction specialist there, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and from her straight to Little, Brown. According to a Boston Globe article of two months ago—which, strangely, comes in the novel's media packet—there was considerably more intervention than that. Several recent articles in the New York Times add more confusing details about a less-than-streamlined process. What the Morris agent saw wasn't "commercially viable" work, the Globe reported.
[...]
Viswanathan was referred to 17th Street Productions, now owned by Alloy Entertainment, which describes itself as "a creative think tank that develops and produces original books, television series and feature films" with a focus on the teen market. Their properties are carefully targeted—and they're not known as showcases of authenticity in the sense that most writers usually mean it. The whole idea is to produce variations on a tried-and-true formula...
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To be sure, there were "lots of discussions about 'finding my voice,' " as Viswanathan told the Globe, no doubt reminiscent of those conversations with Cohen about her various college essays—but probably even more reminiscent, to judge by the 17th Street Productions think-tank style, of the meetings convened by Opal's parents to map out what could be learned and applied from the latest episodes and outfits on, say, The O.C. Once the book's concept had been "fleshed out," the project went back to Walsh, who worked with Viswanathan further, according to the Globe. It doesn't sound as though the Morris Agency's goal was to tap into her unique imagination. "We had all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well," Walsh told the Globe. "We worked on it some more and sold it for oodles and boodles of money." Having bought it for those oodles, Little, Brown then did its share of meddling. "There was more shaping to this book than we generally do," Asya Muchnick, a senior editor, said in the same piece; she declined to comment in the Times this week.
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An overloaded Harvard freshman with plenty of other writing to get done, Viswanathan might almost be forgiven for having forgotten that originality was even the goal she was striving for. Not that she would think twice, either, when Little, Brown's publisher touted the "freshness of the voice" in a special publicity letter about her book. A veteran of a college packaging process that puts a premium on audience-targeted expressions of "passion," she's surely used to that hype.
[...]
Here's a bit from the New York Times article that shed some light on the calculating process Viswanathan went through. Yes, I get that Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were also products of this same hamburger grinder, but Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were not push-button consumer marketed to climb the best-seller's charts for Little Brown in the same way music "stars" are created, by a marketing machine that looks for image first and talent second, if at all.
Link: First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author. - New York Times.
First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author.
The books' spines bear names like Cecily von Ziegesar, Ann Brashares and, most controversially, since plagiarism charges were leveled against her on Sunday, Kaavya Viswanathan. But on the copyright page — and the contracts — there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment.
Nobody associated with the plagiarism accusations is pointing fingers at Alloy, a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing. Ms. Viswanathan says that she alone is responsible for borrowing portions of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." But at the very least, the incident opens a window onto a powerful company with lucrative, if tangled, relationships within the publishing industry that might take fans of series like "The It Girl" by surprise.
In many cases, editors at Alloy — known as a "book packager" — craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers).
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Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them. This Sunday, books created by Alloy will be ranked at Nos. 1, 5 and 9 on The New York Times's children's paperback best-seller list.
"In a way it's kind of like working on a television show," said Cindy Eagan, editorial director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, a sister imprint of Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, and the publisher of the "Clique," "A-List" and "Gossip Girl" series. "We all work together in shaping each novel."
Depending on the series, some writers have more freedom to develop plot and characters than others. Ms. von Ziegesar, who created the concept, plots and characters for the "Gossip Girl" books while an editor at Alloy, went on to write the first eight books of the series. She said that while at Alloy she crafted carefully plotted packages for other series and recruited writers who were told to follow her directions closely. But other writers on different series received very broad-stroke outlines.
[I had a friend in my MFA program who wrote Harlequin and Silhouette novels this way. She was translated into 13 languages, did very well, considering. They'd send her the outlines and she'd whip out the books in about 3 months. She was a tough, practical butchy sort of straight woman, but she said she had a more romantic friend, who would go through the manuscripts and sprinkle around more "heaving bosoms" and such.]
Ms. Viswanathan was, in some ways, an unusual Alloy author. She was not recruited by the packager, but rather, was introduced to it by William Morris, the agent. In an interview yesterday Ms. Viswanathan said that after an initial meeting with the book packager, "They asked about my life, who I was." She added, "Basically, it was like, 'Send us an e-mail writing about yourself that seems most natural.' "
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Once Little, Brown decided to buy the book, Ms. Viswanathan said that she worked almost exclusively with Asya Muchnick, an editor there.
But the publishing contract Little, Brown signed is actually with Alloy, which holds the copyright to "Opal" together with Ms. Viswanathan. Neither Little, Brown nor Alloy would comment on how much of the advance or the royalties — standard contracts give 15 percent of the cover price to the author — Ms. Viswanathan is to collect.
The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory.
Alloy works for many of the biggest publishing houses. The "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series has generated three best sellers for Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, while Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishes Alloy's "Au Pairs" and "Private" series.
Packagers have been around for decades, dating at least as far back as the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series. Today, packagers work not just in the teenage market, but on all kinds of titles, from illustrated coffee-table books and toddler series to self-help tomes and graphic novels.
But the market for young-adult fiction is undeniably hot for book packaging. The financial stakes are much higher: Carolyn Keene, the pen name for the writers of the Nancy Drew books, never earned a $500,000 advance, which Ms. Viswanathan received, The Boston Globe and others have reported. (Little, Brown said the amount was less than that.)
For publishers, the appeal is that the packagers will take care of jobs like copy-editing and designing book covers.
[...]
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