John Havel of The Hustle is a plagiarist.

21 Jul

Update: links at the end

Signal boosting from Kat Mayo’s eloquent rant over at Book Thingo.

The short version: asshole John Havel thought it would be funny to showcase his ignorance and arrogance all at once, by plagiarizing a romance novel and putting it up for sale on amazon.

Here is hoping Harlequin decides to take action, make an example out of this fucking asshole. We’ll see how funny and interesting he finds it to be in court.

In the meantime, here is the blurb of the actual, copyrighted work, by Australian author Anna Cleary:


Anna Cleary's book

Connor O’Brien is damaged, inside and out—proof of his dark and dangerous life.
Sophy Woodruff has never known a man as devastatingly sexy as Connor. Intense, brooding and distant, he’s everything she shouldn’t desire….

Despite his vow of noncommitment, Connor can’t resist bedding Sophy. But Sophy is a virgin, and once he’s undressed her, this billionaire isn’t sure he can walk away….

The book is on sale for kindle at amazon–this is not an affiliate link, by the way.

*

Kat Mayo has a follow up post here.

Nate at the Digital Reader commented on this, here.

Casey Lucas has a great piece on several of the issues at hand, here (hat tip to Kat for the link)

3 Responses to “John Havel of The Hustle is a plagiarist.”

  1. Bona 24/07/2015 at 4:13 AM #

    As I’m a follower of Bookthingo, I discovered this story there, as you did.
    I do agree with averything you say. I still don’t know what was the point of the ‘experiment’. He says that he looked for ‘a romance novel in the public domain’, but it’s clear that it’s not. In the majority of Western countries, it cannot go to the public domain until the author is dead for 50 years, so, what kind of journalist does not know that or even try to chek it?
    I live in European number 1 country of piracy, so plagiarism and violation of copyrights makes frequent news. In a moment, I remember four cases of fairly known authors condemned by this. And at least a couple of them belong to the literary fiction genre.
    So from my experience the experiment, and what he said about romance novels has no real ground. Anything can be plagiarized and the public will be tricked. You can plagiarize The Quixote or A hundred years of solitude and half the population -at least- is not going to discover it. What makes me go again to the first point, what was he trying to probe? That the Amazon algorythm can be manipulated?

    • azteclady 24/07/2015 at 6:36 AM #

      My opinion is that the whole thing was done exclusively to rile people up and drive traffic to the site. I mean, who had even heard of this piddly website until they did this?

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. John Havel, plagiarist for The Hustle, a (long) postscript | Her Hands, My Hands - 28/07/2015

    […] July 21st, I posted a note linking to Kat Mayo’s rant about John Havel plagiarizing Australian author Anna Cleary. I […]

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