I've been bragging for over 25 years that my first New York Times bestseller was a book I copied from the U.S. Government Printing Office!
Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.
I never admit to wishing I'd written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of 'The Guns of August,' I wouldn't complain.
Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.
When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
There is an enormous shadow industry of scammers and amateurs who prey on aspiring writers, who divert people from the real publishing industry into this shadow world of vanity publishing and fee-charging agents.
Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.
