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Post by vrabinec on Feb 24, 2014 9:37:32 GMT -5
Can anybody sue an author if he/she passes fiction off as non-fiction?
I was reading an exchange on a message board a couple weeks ago (I tried to find it, but I'm not even sure what board it was on. If anyone knows which thread I'm talking about, kindly link it, if you can) Anyway, one of the authors said she was going to write a book about her travails as an actress and pass it off as non-fiction because she thought it would sell better. She was self pubbing, so she didn't have to worry about a publisher coming after her. And she wasn't using real names. But wouldn't Amazon try to get restitution?
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Post by shawninmon on Feb 24, 2014 11:18:06 GMT -5
Can anybody sue an author if he/she passes fiction off as non-fiction? I was reading an exchange on a message board a couple weeks ago (I tried to find it, but I'm not even sure what board it was on. If anyone knows which thread I'm talking about, kindly link it, if you can) Anyway, one of the authors said she was going to write a book about her travails as an actress and pass it off as non-fiction because she thought it would sell better. She was self pubbing, so she didn't have to worry about a publisher coming after her. And she wasn't using real names. But wouldn't Amazon try to get restitution? That's a tough one. The Coen brothers famously put "This is a true story" ahead of the movie Fargo without any ramifications. For a time, I had my memoir on both a fiction (contemporary romance) and a non-fiction (memoirs and biographies) bestseller list on Amazon. After a couple of weeks, the fiction chart just disappeared for it. If I was her, I guess I would pass off the deception as part of the story, kind of like the Coens did. From a legal standpoint of liability? I am clueless. |
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Post by Alan Petersen on Feb 24, 2014 13:32:39 GMT -5
There was a big brouhaha a few years ago about James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (I think that was the title). It was published as non-fiction, but a lot of it was fiction. He got a lot of flap over it, but not sure if he was sued. I think you would have to deal more with the ethical ramifications to your reputation versus legal. At the very least they should state its fiction somewhere in the small print. Frey's publisher added that in the front matter verbiage now. And even in Fargo the end credits state its fiction, but who reads that!  Fargo was a black comedy, so I think you get more leeway versus Frey's book about his redemption from drug addiction. |
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Post by cbedwards on Feb 24, 2014 13:34:51 GMT -5
Frey's book is the one I thought of, too.
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Post by Becca Mills on Feb 24, 2014 14:31:04 GMT -5
If you make up a pen name and write in the first-person, I don't really see the problem. A parallel might be Go Ask Alice: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Alice. If you use your real name, then you can much more easily get in trouble, I think, because you appear to be claiming that these things really happened to *you*, instead of a made-up person making the claim. There've been a bunch of fake memoirs in the last decade or so. I don't know if the writers got in legal trouble. |
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