Plagiarism Isn’t Cute!

By Lisa Maliga Copyright 2014

My eBook, Matcha Green Tea Melt & Pour Soap Recipe, had been plagiarized. This free 23-pager is available on Amazon, B&N NOOK, Smashwords, Kobo, and many other places online.

I burst out laughing when I saw that someone named Jay Cute had disfigured the cover: 

Wow, great job of hiding my name! I think children in the lower levels of grade school could do better work.

Also, this individual had the nerve of whittling the eBook down to 15 pages and charging $2.50. Mr. or Ms. Jay Cute also took the time to enroll it in the Kindle Unlimited program, which the original is not.

The person who emailed me about this theft also included an Amazon link to report the problem. I saw the faux eBook had acquired a few one-star reviews, all warning people not to purchase it as it was plagiarized.

On December 7, there were 37 eBooks attributed to the busy Jay Cute: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=JAY%20CUTE&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank

But by the early morning hours of December 8, they had vanished into cyberspace.

I also want to thank fellow author Glynis Smy for posting this information on my Facebook page – helping to warn others about this not-so-cute thief who stole people’s eBooks. Before the eBooks vanished, I noticed that one of the stolen books had a ranking of about 567,000. Unfortunately, that meant that at least one copy had been sold.

At least the problem was taken care of once it was made public. Thanks to those who care about plagiarized works and take the time to do something about it.

NOTE: If you discover a plagiarized book on Amazon, here's the link to report it:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/infringement