Doesn't this pop up every six months or so?
Yup. The last time they tried this, somebody ripped off stories by prize-winning authors such as VS Naipul, then used the whole thing to prove Naipul couldn't get published today, etc. I think it proved the editors could use Google.
Sadly, some authors on a list I moderate were sure this was proof that the big publishing companies were clods who wouldn't recognize a great manuscript and were interested only in pap. Right, whatever.
In this case, what really pisses me off is that the guy tried this
three times. First he sent a copy of
Northanger Abbey. When it was rejected, he decided that wasn't Austen's best book, so he'd try again, and then he sent them
Persuasion. For some strange reason, that wasn't accepted, either. So he sent them
Pride and Prejudice, without even changing the famous first line. One of the responses did point out that his writing was clearly ripped off Austen. Thank God somebody called him on it, or he might have sent them a copy of
Emma as well. Didn't he realize that he was wasting their time with this nonsense? Editors and agents have a limited number of time in which to read giant stacks of submissions (one of the editors who gave a talk at RWA said she gets
six feet of mail per week!), so he was taking time away from authors with legitimate submissions.
And what would he have done if one of his plagiarized manuscripts had been accepted? (Very unlikely, of course, but let's say that Google was broken on their computers, and the Jane Austen portion in the brains of all editors and other staff members had been destroyed in a freak subway accident.
) I can just imagine him having to explain himself. "Sorry, it was an experiment. Heh heh. I'll... heh heh... be going now."
Maybe the agents who rejected it recognised her work, but just sent a form rejection rather than bothering to say, "We know what you're doing." They probably thought it was beneath them to even acknowledge it.
Fromw what I've heard about editors, this is probably what happened. Editors are in the business because they love books, after all. Otherwise, they'd be making more money marketing toothpaste.
Whenever this happens, they tend to send off form rejections because they figure they're dealing with 1) a plagiarist; 2) another writer wasting their time with the same experiment that has been done dozens of times or more; 3) delusional; or 4) a reporter.
In the case of sending them Pride and Prejudice, the guy didn't even bother changing the first line, and barely changed the other lines, at least at the beginning. Come on, doesn't he think editors use Google? And I wouldn't need Google to recognize such a famous first line.
I think it would be a greater experiment to take a novel by, say, Richard Russo and change it a bit and find out what the reception would be. I think one might find the very same results. As an agent told me last spring, if you are a debut novelist, you better come from a famous family or be famous. Otherwise, your chances are remote at best.
Nah. I attended the Romance Writers of America conference last week, and a lot of the editors -- yes, even the ones who only take unagented submissions -- were very excited about some of their debut authors. (I met some of these authors. They really exist, and they don't come from famous families.)
I'd be realllly interested in knowing which agents are saying things like this. Often, the agents who make these sorts of claims aren't established agents who really know the business. Some of them are even infamous agents who make these claims in the hopes of driving more authors their way.
In the article, it looks like this author tried the experiment because he had been unable to sell his book. Well, gee, maybe it wasn't publishable?... The editor I mentioned above also said that despite popular conceptions, the chasm between publishable and unpublishable is "like the Grand Canyon." While you often hear of publishers whose manuscripts "almost" got published, she pointed out that you don't "almost" miss being published, adding, "People don't get published by a nose, they get published because it's inevitable." (This was particularly true with her publisher, which didn't have a "comittee" that turned down manuscripts the editor liked.) This was a commercial publisher, so maybe the situation is different for literary manuscripts, but I'll bet the competition is just as hard there.