As we've discussed on this blog before, you can't copyright ideas, and you'd be mad to want to, but it's riling when someone appears to have taken your idea and flown with it, and doesn't even acknowledge you...
Maybe this isn't at all what has happened in the case of the anthology, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman, newly published in the US and receiving a lot of publicity, most recently in the New York Times. This book is strikingly similar in concept to last year's UK Bitch Lit anthology from the non-profit Crocus Books (in which one of my stories appears), but apparently bears no acknowledgement of the similarity. It's perfectly possible that when in 2004 Mary Sharratt, Bitch Lit co-editor with Maya Chowdhry, went to Ellen Sussman with a proposal for a US Bitch Lit version, Sussman had already had the same original idea. Though you can't blame Sharratt for wondering why, if so, she didn't she mention it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hi FB
Oh, no. That sucks. I don't get it because from the source of one good idea, you might assume others would spring and wouldn't you want to partner that in some way if you were a sharp commercial mind?
xxx
Pants
Well, I think the trouble is that if you've a sharp commercial mind you don't want to be swimming in the same pool as toothless nonprofit organisations - or rather you just chomp them up quickly. Not that I'm making any libellous accusations, mind....
Post a Comment