I am seeking opinion, not legal advice. 6 years ago I self-published a novel via amazon/kindle, all my own work and original content. This was more to prove I could do it as writing and computers were alien to me. here we are now six years later I feel I am much improved in my writing computers are still something of a mystery. Anyway, I re-read my original and I am painfully aware of how bad the writing is the story and plot are great but the punctuation, proofing, layout, and grammar are shocking. Because of the way self-publishing works, I can't take it down. What I want to do is rework the title and protagonist the story will be slightly different but the mechanics of the plot will remain the same. Would that be acceptable morally for a writer, in a nutshell, can you plagiarise yourself?
plagiarism /ˈpleɪdʒ(ɪ)ərɪz(ə)m/ noun the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. Obviously, since the ideas are your own, it's not plagiarism.
Do you not use a spellchecker? Because this post could use some going-over. There are some run-ons caused by missing periods, and some sentences are missing capitalization. Plus it's poorly formatted. There are a lot of such errors considering it's such a short post. I would think the whole thing would be rife with red underlines, or whatever your browser uses.
You can, but generally not in this context. The only kind of self-plagiarism I've heard of is submitting your old works for new school assignments.
I wonder if re-writing a trad-pubbed book of yours, making significant changes including the title and character names, but essentially it's the same story, would be considered plagiarism? That might not be the right term, but I'm sure the publishers would have something to say about it. Of course that's very different from a revision of an old self-pubbed story.
Good point. Your particular example illustrates some kind of violation of intellectual property rights, for sure. I've never seen a trad-publish agreement but there must be something about that in one of those.
There has to be, as well as who 'owns' the characters, unique setting, etc. from the particular story. My guess is if it's not started otherwise the author retains the rights to the characters, etc. but not the specific story/work for the duration of the deal. Of course, there's the case of how John Fogerty got sued for sounding too much like John Fogerty, but that's music.
If you took an existing work , reworked it and tried to get another deal, if it was still in contract the first time round I'd imagine that publisher would have a case for violating contract... but realistically who does that? If you've got an existing deal it would make a lot more sense to go back to them and explain why you wanted to retool the work However the OP said he self published... in that case, taking it down and uploading a revised edition would be fine. Trying to publish the new work under a new title while leaving the existing one up would be a breach of the amazon ToS, if the two were substantially similar
Thank you all for your comments. This gives me a flavour of opinion. On consideration of this most if not all novels work to a standard template see freytag's pyramid. This was more of a moral /ethical question, than a legal one. So even if the plot line is similar but with a different location, and characters, this would not give anyone offence. when you consider Lee Childs Jack Reacher books the plot lines are all pretty similar. However, the story is pretty much the same.
