Someone is Publishing My Idea!?
We've all heard people who claim that somebody took their idea and is now publishing it, or that somewhere somehow, another writer has come up with basically the same idea, sold it, and now, what does that mean for your idea?
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transcript for someone is publishing my idea video
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. I have a Q&A video for you today and it is, "Help. Somebody is publishing my idea."
We've all thought it. We've all heard people who claim that somebody took their idea and is now publishing it or that somewhere somehow, another writer has come up with basically the same idea, sold it, and now, what does that mean for your idea. So I'm gonna talk about this kind of secondary scenario a little bit more than the former. The former concern that an idea was stolen is very, very difficult to prove. Things are technically copyrighted the second they're written. You can take additional steps to copyright a manuscript. Some writers feel that it's necessary for themselves to do so before they submit to agents, to publishers. Manuscripts are, of course, put through the copyright process by a publisher when they are published. Sometimes, it does happen that there is suspicious overlap between a manuscript that was submitted, something that does end up being published by somebody that that idea was submitted to, that is a question for an intellectual property lawyer necessarily. It can be very, very difficult to litigate because oftentimes, if an idea comes into a publisher, it is very difficult to prove whether it was actually opened or reviewed, very difficult to prove that it was then stolen, assigned to a different writer, and published under a different umbrella.
So, there are writers who have come to me to claim this sort of thing. It can be a really, really difficult legal quagmire to wade into. What I want to address today is the second scenario of somebody just so happened to come up with a similar idea, maybe a similar title, similar plot, a similar concept, in fantasy, kind of a similar world that the characters are operating within, and it's getting published. Maybe it got a big splashy deal. And now, you're sitting there with your manuscript that hasn't yet been submitted and wondering, "Okay, what are the ramifications for me if something similar sounding recently sold?"
And it seems like this happens a lot to writers when they are starting to research the market, they're about to go out on submission. It's like this thing where I had never, ever, ever, I swear, seen a Honda Pilot on the road until I bought one. And then, I started looking around and everything is a Honda Pilot. It's that bias where you notice things only when they become relevant to you. So sometimes, that is the simple explanation. You start really, kind of, keeping your ear to the ground for stories about dragons. So, of course, every deal announcement that you read that has to do with dragons, you start flipping out because you're about to submit your dragon story.
Now, that's not to say that those feelings aren't valid. Very, very valid to see something and have your heart kind of clench up because you start worrying about your own odds. The market for dragons seem saturated all of a sudden and you wonder if you just wasted years of your life on a dragon manuscript because you sort of missed the boat. That being said, even if a story sounds freakishly similar, and here I'm talking specifically about deal announcements in Publishers Marketplace or in Publishers Weekly that you see, you know, Viking has bought a dragon trilogy, blah, blah, blah, and you get, like, two or three sentences, at the most, about what this dragon book is that has been purchased. Unless you are in the industry, or you work as a film scout, or you have other ways in which to get your hands on the manuscript itself, you are not gonna know what that manuscript is, what the voice is, what the tone is, what the atmosphere is, what the writing style is like, what the sort of use of language and the humor or seriousness or any of these other shades of the manuscript are. This is what I want to kind of nail home to writers who find themselves in this predicament or this perceived predicament.
Publishing is all about execution. Yes, premise is incredibly important and that is probably what sounds similar to you when you see a deal reported that seems in line with what you're working on. That being said, within a premise, there are a million different ways to execute. There are only a certain number of stories that can ever be told. A finite arrangement of character types, a finite number of plot points, twists, reversals, betrayals, all of the things that can happen. Those are finite. Their combination, a little more infinite, but not truly infinite. We recycle the same... That's why tropes exist in publishing, and movies, TV, storytelling. It's because we only have X number of things to work with when we're putting together a story. The real X factor is how you make those choices, how you rearrange those elements, how you play within, subvert, or use existing tropes, and your voice, your choices from word to word, sentence to sentence on a page, and all of that goes into the sort of bucket of execution.
So, at the premise level, a lot of things sound very similar. Even if it's dragons and princesses, even if it's dragons and warlocks or whatever the case may be. I don't know why I got on the dragon rep today. The story can be very similar to something else that's out there. But the execution matters a lot more when you start drilling down into those granular details. That being said, an agent might write to you, or a publisher might write to you and say, "You know, I have a dragon series. I'm not able to acquire this because I don't want to cannibalize my own list." That is a very valid concern. An agent already has a big dragon author. They don't want another one because they don't want to sort of siphon off attention and energy from their existing client. Fine and good. That being said, the next agent may not have a big dragon author. The next publisher may not have a big dragon series. They may still look at yours.
And so, there are a lot of considerations that go into this panic of, "Help. Somebody is doing my idea." No, the reality, more likely than not, is there is a finite number of ideas out there. Two people have chosen to use some similar settings, ideas, character points, plot points. But the end result are two very different manuscripts and that is what I would focus on. There's not just room for one dragon book in the world. That's why you can't copyright a title because all of them would be taken already, kind of like we see with domain names. Everything that's a .com is now spelled very strangely because there is just one .com domain name available for everything that wants to park at that domain. That is not true with books. And so, I wouldn't get into the scarcity mindset of there can only be one dragon book in the world.
Hopefully, that allays some of your concerns. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good story.
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