Author:
I want to thank everyone who took the time to reply to my earlier blog reading and to those who went and reviewed the subject book on Kindle. Eight blasts are on the site for this story.
Currently, if you search for helaina Darlington there are four stories under her "authorship." "Playing a woman" >snarling grin showing fangs< is NOT one of them.
Yesterday she added another one and evidently Amazon took down the link for my book. The "new" story seems familiar but it isn't mine, the blurb reads like an old Usenet serial, but I can't quite place it.
I have not heard yet back from Amazon, but they usually respond fairly quickly and it appears that they have already started to take action.
This is a direct result of all of The Help from from my supporters here at big closet. Big-time thank you to everyone.
Warm free hugs.
Tiggs
Comments
Unfortunately it may not be Amazon
She could have removed the book herself when she saw the reviews to prevent others from seeing them and not buying her other books. A shame the other stolen properties can't be identified.
Of course we all could buy her books and then request a refund after a few hours and give plagiarism as the reason for asking. Enough refund requests and Amazon might begin to wonder. That would also allow you to review the books as an unhappy verified purchaser. It's what I did with Playing a Woman.
Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site
Visit my Amazon Page: D R Jehs
Never easy to catch thieves
I'm glad you achieved some satisfaction. The emotional reward is never enough as time and effort went into shutting down the theft of your works. Finding the name and address of the perp is a long hard row and again time consuming along with a horrendous expense in private investigators and lawyers. One may achieve a judgement for monetary reimbursement and never receive a dime. A court order doesn't mean they will actually pay. I know, shock right? Yeah, the system stinks at times.
I pray your hard efforts and time consumed help others in not only guiding them in what they need to do but also to stop this one thief.
I wish you happiness most of all. Everything else will fall into place.
always
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Strangely ...
... I have 'Playing a Woman' by Helena Darlington' on loan right now (through Kindle Unlimited) so, after reading Tigger's blog, I went to Amazon and my Manage your Kindle page. I selected the story and tried to access the page and it was unavailable. So I guess it''s been withdrawn either by the poster or Amazon itself. I still have to read it on my PC Kindle simulator. The font is a bit odd - some letters (b and y) are totally different from the rest. Her page is still there with just 4 titles all posted this month and doesn't include the one I have.
I haven't read it yet. Is this stolen? I must have missed the earlier blogs re this writer and Tigger because this is the first I've heard of this. I have spotted stolen stories before and made a comment to that effect but it was some time ago.
Robi
Stupid font tricks
The letters b, p and the letter combination bl in Dangerous Sex Change have been replaced in the text by near look alikes from UTC codes. The b is a Cyrillic soft-sign, the bl is a Cyrillic hard-sign and p is a Greek rho. I think the y may be a Greek lambda.
This is done to defeat Amazon's text matching search program which searches the net for text that matches submissions where upon the offending book has its Amazon price reduced to zero. This is why authors have to take their stories off of free sites like BCTS when they publish on Kindle.
A cheat like this is the action of someone who has larceny as their intent. It pretty much proves that this person is a human blivet. (A blivet is a burning sack of shit.)
If they are doing this under one name for TG stories, they are probably doing it under other names for other genres.
I don't have time to pursue this person but I would appreciate other people who have Kindle borrowing privileges to check these books out, write reviews detailing what they are doing and so forth. I'm steaming here and having trouble concentrating on other things I have to do.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Don't use KU if you can avoid it
You can't get a refund like you can by purchasing then returning the book and the thief gets to keep the money. It you request a refund on a purchase in the first 24 hours the refund comes pretty quick.
Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site
Visit my Amazon Page: D R Jehs
Thanks Erin.
That strange font thing has always puzzled me and now I see why it's done. I particularly like your blivet description, though I see it fails the spell check :)
Commentator suggests not using KU because even if the book is rubbish the writer gets the money but it works OK for the vast majority of books I borrow. Sadly most TG fiction on Amazon is, for want of a better word, fuck-fest blivet (tnx Erin) but there is a lot that's not - Tanya Allen and Karin Bishop to name just two and make it worthwhile. There's some good non-TG fiction available, too.
Robi
Search / Text Matching
I have use search to find copied works, when I suspect something, letter substitution would work well to defeat that. I have spotted a few in the past.
If I understand correctly, Amazon doesn't not actually prevent you from having the work posted elsewhere, but there are certain conditions, limitations and rules. And that they do not always set the Amazon version to free. Is this correct?
>i<
Not possible to know the answer
They did make me ask for the removal of free versions of Donna Lamb's Blue Moon on other sites. As to whether they always do that, I cannot know. It is what they say their policy is.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Kindle Select/Unlimited
In order to be included in the Kindle Select advertising process... or to be available for loan through Kindle Unlimited... you have to meet the exclusivity requirement that ensures that there is not a cheaper/free version of the story elsewhere. By listing Glass the way I did (not in the Select program), I didn't get any of the advertising push that Amazon gives to newly published material (which lasts a month or two) and it isn't available for the Unlimited program for 'free' reading. But I also didn't have to take it down from anywhere online, either.
Kristin
Price match
The price match thing is a separate policy from KU/KS. Some website in Russia was selling Blue Moon for $1. It took me six months to get them to take it down. They claimed to have gotten the rights from Ingram who claimed to have gotten them from Lulu. The Lulu edition had been taken down but Ingram was still selling it. In the meantime, I priced Blue Moon at 99 cents on Kindle and it actually sold very well at that price point.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
huh - too many policies
Amazon has so many different programs and policies and a lot of them overlap, I'm surprised even THEY know what they're doing half the time. :)
But ya, tracking down people and having them stop selling things is no fun. We're still finding places here and there that are trying to sell non-existent copies of an Amazon released print version of the Whateley Academy Wiki... which was produced by some company that made complete data dumps of Wikia sites because the Creative Commons legalese allowed for it. Most of the ones we find still up now are overseas... and they get grumpy that we contact them directly instead of going via the international distributor to get it taken off that list. *shrugs* We just don't want someone paying $30 for a hard copy of fan created wiki data that's freely available online and doesn't even have any of the stories in it.
Actually to use KU
You can't have the book on sale on any other site while it is. The price matching is a requirement of all books for sale on Amazon. If it's for sale anywhere else for a lower price Amazon will make you match or beat that price. I've edited and published several books on behalf of an author. She had put the first couple of chapters on her blog and I got a note from Amazon that the book could not be published at the price listed. She had to delete the postings from her blog and then I resubmitted them with no problem. Then after six months I removed the books from the KU program and placed them for sale on other sites for the same price.
Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site
Visit my Amazon Page: D R Jehs
I find this all too disgusting to think about
and is one of the reasons that I haven't published my stuff, though I appreciate even on this site it's not entirely secure and seeing as Bike has been going since the dawn of time, it has probably covered every possible scenario. I think the Bible even copied some of it.
I don't understand the minds of thieves, surely it must take almost as much effort to steal someone's plot/text as it does to create your own? In my case it would take longer having, thankfully, never dried up for inspiration for a storyline.
Angharad
In these cases, no, it takes
In these cases, no, it takes almost no effort. They grab something they've read, or in some cases, they scrape a site of all material, then dump anything recent. Then, briefly scan the first 5 and last 5 pages for names. Search and replace the names, then run a global substitution with the ANSI replacements Erin mentioned. Then post. Probably less than 5 minutes per story.
That's 12 per hour, probably spread across 25 different "authors"
If they can eventually make $5 per book over a year, thats $60 an hour.
It's standard spammer tactics. They don't aim for lots of money per sale, and make up in volume.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
In that case ...
... it's better to spread a story, any story, over several postings so there's more to download. I know I save stories (for personal use only, I hasten to add) and it can be quite time consuming on multi chapter serials.
So, Ang, you're safe. How many dozen chapters of Bike are there? :) You're right though. They're arseholes.
Robi
Not actually that hard
If you go to the parent entry of any story and select to get the printer friendly option, it actually pulls every child entry together into one page for you.
Lol
That will actually work for Bike too. If you're willing to wait for it. :)
But the Frinter Priendly pages are not clean, they have a lot of garbage on them in the form of headers and footers. These guys are not careful enough to replace all the names correctly. Lazy.
The covers they've done look like Fiverr jobs. Putting out a good clean book is a lot of work, especially if you do the covers and interior design correctly yourself.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The headers are easy to find a remove
Just pick a phrase from the first header and do a search - it will take you to each new header and you can delete it. Normally the footer is just a link and you can do the same thing. I do it all the time to read a story on my Kindle after it's finished.
Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site
Visit my Amazon Page: D R Jehs
Oooh. I think I'll do that.
Oooh. I think I'll do that. I've been meaning to re-read Bike, but even with the chunks of 50, clicking 'next' gets annoying.
What's the best time to do that so I don't break the server?
You can automate pulling out headers/footers, but I doubt anyone with that level of skill to do it fully automated is going to fart around with ripping off old alt.sex.stories and Yahoo groups posts.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Automating that is easier
Automating that is easier than writing even a basic story.
It could be as simple as loading into MS word or compatible word processor and doing a search and replace. Just search for the offending text and replace with a space, a dash, or whatever suits you.
To a point. Keep in mind
To a point. Keep in mind that many of them now have formatting that has to be stripped. The old A.S.S. threads, for example, were forced to 80 character, and won't be very clear. New ones have css or html to be removed. Then there's the search/replace, etc.
I've done that sort of thing for my own use. It's not as easy as you might think. A lot of scripting, yes, but not 'easy'.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Late night
Late night Eastern time. Not too late, the server does a reset at about 2:05 a.m. EDT. Or it did, I think we may have turned that off after the recent upgrade because the servers are more stable now. Doing a F.P. on Bike is one of our standard stress tests when we make a configuration change. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Took about six minutes to
Took about six minutes to generate, and appears to be everything. Interestingly enough, the web browser stopped displaying at chapter 2392, but saving it seemed to go all the way to the latest (3*55..?)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Rereading 'Bike' in blocks
One way to simplify the rereading is to just directly open the 'hundreds' links from the storyline on the right side and then select 'Printer-friendly version'.
This will give you all chapters of this hundred in one page without trying to load thousands of chapters at once.
Martina
I'm a speed reader. I've re
I'm a speed reader. I've re-read Bike at least three times so far. The last time took about three days. No, I didn't just read, yes, I did work most of those days.
I've thought about building a timeline out of it, but that would require a bit more uninterrupted time.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
For those that thought the other stories were familiar...
Sir Lee IDed three of them.
The story named "Witchcraft" has been posted previously by M.A.Thermidor over in TG Storytime under the name "Curses, Magic, Alchemy and Ancient Technology". But for some reason, it's no longer available there.
"Dangerous Sex Change" is actually The Last Boy Scout's "The General's Daughter". Which is posted here.
"Changed Into a Girl" is Casey Thompson's "Dakota", over at TGStorytime
I left reviews for the two I could verify.
The Last Boy Scout ...
... stopped writing TG fiction (for free) because he was getting a publisher for (I think) some science fiction he was writing - obviously in another name. I did a bit of editing for him in the story 'Cometh the hour cometh the woman' so he may not have noticed if something of his had been lifted by a thief.
I've had no contact with him for about 4 years nor do I expect to.
When I worked I was a so-called team leader and had few people nominally working for me. Most of them were a lot cleverer than I am and I always was very careful to make sure they got the credit for their designs (s/w and electronics). I couldn't have lived with myself if I got kudos for someone else's work. How the hell do these thieves?
Robi