The Worst Thing You Can Do To Us

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This is going to be somewhat of a departure from my normal content so I appreciate your time in reading it. Something has happened within the last few weeks to myself as well as many others, something which I feel obligated to lend my voice to.

As far as I’m concerned, for writers there is one crime, one offense, one infraction that rings in worse than all the rest. Even worse than illegally downloading books or allowing others to obtain copies of books from you.

This would be the theft of another author’s work.

As much as I detest the prospect of someone obtaining a copy of one of my books without earning any royalties, the other side is even worse. Namely, the consumer actually does pay to read my book but instead of that meager amount going to me, the payoff is going into someone else’s pocket.

Early on a Saturday morning I received word via the blog that a story of mine, Staying Dead, had been published in a book titled Death At Dawn, by Michael Nemeth. Needless to say, this was done without my permission or knowledge. He changed the title to Creature Feature and added a paragraph of introduction, but otherwise it was a word-for-word reproduction.

And my story was not the only one he had stolen.

I don’t have many of the specific details on Michael and how all of this came about. My understanding is that he started by posting a series of short stories on Watttpad, a website for sharing original works of fiction. I have no idea if there was ever a point when he was sharing his own writing or if it was always material he had stolen. Regardless, he seemed to pick up some followers and at some point, expanded his reach out onto Twitter. The stories he published seemed to be popular and garnering an online following for him and as that wave of support grew, he evidently came to the decision to compile the stories he had stolen into a book and publish it via Amazon.

That same Saturday, I was given a link that an author friend had discovered showing that there had actually been work initiated on a web series based on stories in the book. Michael, or as he goes by on Facebook, Mikey Marksmen, had also boasted on his personal page that the book had been picked up by Crystal Lake Publishing and had sold over a hundred copies.

I want to be absolutely clear on this point. Both myself and other writers have reached out to Crystal Lake and they have issued a statement that they have no idea who this guy is. They have never handled this book or done any kind of business with him so the dilemma becomes how to separate Mikey’s truth from his fiction. 

To say I was furious at the situation would be putting it mildly. I did the best I could to take it lightly and let it roll off my back. After all it was just one very short story but it is hard to accept the notion that someone out there could be accepting money on the back of my work. I contacted Createspace to notify them of the unauthorized content and that if the book was going to stay on the market, my work would have to be removed.

I think that in the end, Mikey’s greed is what led to things getting out of hand and as they escalated, his house of lies just collapsed in on itself. The happy ending to everything was that the book was shut down due to severely outspoken backlash against Mikey from his many victims. Evidently it’s not the smartest idea in the world to steal from multiple authors and put all of their work in the same book. They tend to come after you, as well as whatever supporters who might come to their defense in social media. The film project was immediately shut down. In addition to removing the book from Amazon, Mikey has also issued an apology.

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For any artist, having someone steal your work and claim credit for it is like having someone rip your soul out through your ears. You end up being the guy staring incredulously at the empty space where you had parked your car, trying to figure out what you’re missing. And on top of everything, to find out that someone is taking money, profiting off of your creative efforts, it’s the worst. Writing is already enough of an assault on our self esteem and confidence as it is.

If you want to be a writer, fucking write. It really is that simple. Do it. Write it out. Even if it’s God awful, at least it will be yours. Otherwise, you’re just trying to wear someone else’s clothes that don’t fit you, spending your life waiting to be found out.

When Mikey issued his initial apology, shown above, it was on the Facebook page for the now non-existent web series. As you can see, he initially claimed that he would repay any royalties he earned to the authors who he had stolen from. As of today, this has not happened. We have sent him multiple messages that we expect and require him to provide a screen shot or some other documentation, revealing what money he has earned as well as how many authors he stole from. As of today, this has also not happened. He was told to place an apology and a confession on his personal Facebook page which he did, but not all of the authors could see the post for some reason. This is pure speculation on my part, but the fact that we all couldn’t see the post makes me believe that in order to minimize personal embarrassment, Mikey set the privacy settings on the post so that only the people he was apologizing to would see it, forgetting to include some of us in the process.

And if you think that this treatment of him seems harsh or unfair, just remember that he chose to put himself in this position. He was in complete control of what he did and he’s the one who tempted fate one too many times. My interests in this situation have always been two-fold. First, the book had to be taken off the market, which has happened. Second, we need to establish what royalties, if any, Mikey collected. And I don’t want this to seem like a money grab on my part, an attempt to cash in a few bucks on an unfortunate situation. Honestly, I don’t care if I see any of the money or not. I don’t really care where it goes, as long as it isn’t in his pocket. Donate it to a charity, donate it to a local library for all I care. My main concern is that Mikey doesn’t get to earn a payday off of other people’s work.

I appreciate you hanging in with this as it is an extremely important issue for me. And if you don’t mind helping spread the word, please share this article. People like this need to be made an example of. Again, it might seem like the response is disproportionate, but when someone can be so quickly and easily seduced by the ease of right-clicking “copy” and “paste”, repercussions must be severe.

Thank you.

On behalf of all real writers out there.

Thank you.

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