"Hi," said and eagle-eyed reader
who'd seen my novels on the Meryton.com site. "I didn't know you'd
published your stories."
Celebration ground to a halt, I rampaged
around Amazon - horrified to see that someone had smooshed my two stories
together, under a hideous cover, with an ungrammatical title and using the pen
name I'd used on-line. Horribly, this
meant it was someone who'd read my stories in a closed group I'd thought was a
safe space, perhaps even someone I'd interacted with socially.
It took me two days to get Amazon to admit
that the stories were mine and take them down, followed by Nook and Barnes and
Noble. "Phew," thought
painfully naive me. "Thank heavens that's over." Of course, I never saw a penny/cent/pesos of
what the plagiarist had made but I consoled myself that they probably didn't
either and that it had all disappeared into Amazon's coffers.
