22 February 2012

And that's how your sausage gets made

Spoiler for the end of the New Yorker's feature on Quentin Rowan alias Q.R. Markham, the spy novel plagiarist discovered last fall: At the end he got another book deal, this time for a memoir, because people who serially fail to tell the truth should just get more money and attention thrown at them because that will totally make them go straight. To quote from the piece itself:
"One publishing executive told me that scanning every manuscript for plagiarism would be like 'vaccinating the entire population because two people had come down with some nasty disease.' Instead, publishers hope that editors and agents are well read enough to detect plagiarism, and they rely on intuition about an author’s credibility."
That intuition worked so well the first 20 times...

No comments: