Like most e-mail solicitations, the offer I received in February 2005 from Alloy Entertainment was unambiguously sexual: “We’re looking for a writer to write a young-adult book called ‘The Sex Drive.’” Unlike most e-mail solicitations, however, Alloy’s offer did not reek of fraud.
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Fifteen months later–after Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan partnered with Alloy, accepted a reported $500,000 two-book deal from Little, Brown, and was subsequently revealed to have cribbed heavily from the published work of several other YA authors–the role of book packagers in contemporary children’s literature has been widely examined. The normative position has been cynicism and mistrust. The severance of the author from subject and plot strikes many as an almost diabolical corporate ploy, one that’s perpetrated against children hundreds of times each year by packagers and publishers. Said the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten in an April 29 column, “Packaging operations dovetail so neatly with the values of the sprawling corporations that now control the publication of most books in America. It can come as no shock to anyone that they believe in marketing and the bottom line over and above everything else. When it comes to books for young readers, the result–in the overwhelming majority of cases–is a focus-group-driven literature of solipsism.” Bloggers have been far less generous. Cinematical.com referred to Alloy’s “pernicious inner workings.” Bookninja.com wrote that they were “preying on kiddies.”
It’d make good copy if I could confirm any kiddy preying, clandestine focus groups, or sinister editors grafting long passages of Freckle Juice onto my work. No such luck. Writing on contract for a corporate fiction think tank is clearly out of step with the romantic ideal of how a novel should be created–by a solitary writer toiling away until inspiration strikes and then hurling the finished manuscript into the publishing vortex–but it was pleasant and instructive, and it paid the bills. After weeks of outlines, drafts, and revisions (a process not radically different from the way most fiction is produced) I’d written a book. That book, now called All the Way after a muckety-muck somewhere balked at “The Sex Drive,” was released May 18 by Dutton.
Viswanathan was such a client, steered to Alloy by an agent at William Morris. Alloy worked with her to plot her since-recalled YA novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and the collaboration led to her notorious book deal. Opal Mehta was released in March. By late April, the Harvard Crimson was reporting that several passages appeared to have been taken almost verbatim from two young-adult novels written by Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. The New York Times later reported that other sections of Opal Mehta seemed to be lifted from Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? Soon the business of young-adult book packaging in general–and the operations of Alloy specifically–were being scrutinized and commented upon by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, and the New York Observer. But Morgenstein maintains the shop has gotten a bad rap.
Kathie Bergquist, a Reader contributor and coauthor of the soon-to-be-released A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago, has written four celebrity biographies for Billboard Books, a subsidiary of Watson-Guptill Publications. She landed the first gig through a retired publishing guy she met while working as a bookseller at Unabridged. “He came into the store and told me that Watson-Guptill was looking for someone to write a quick Ricky Martin book,” she told me in an e-mail. “I stewed it over a bit, and then called him. He hooked me up with an editor at Watson. I sent them my writing resume and an outline. They sent me a contract.”
However, Viswanathan’s quick ascent and quicker fall attest to the marketplace’s ability to hold any writer mercilessly accountable.
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