How Alloy Entertainment Got OPAL MEHTA
Today’s New York Times has two articles on the controversy over Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and how it came to echo the books of bestselling YA novelist Megan McCafferty.
There’s a front-page profile of Alloy Entertainment, the book packager formerly known as 17th Street Productions, and how it has created many of today’s teen “chick lit” bestsellers. And there’s an interview with Viswanathan in which she agrees that she must have remembered McCafferty’s sentences.
Together the articles inadvertently offer an answer to one of the biggest mysteries of this affair.
All along publishing people have wondered why Alloy Entertainment shares in the Opal Mehta copyright if its staff did nothing but help Viswanathan in ”conceptualizing” her story. You don’t get a copyright for an idea; you get it for putting that idea on paper. Furthermore, Alloy didn’t “discover” Viswanathan; she already had the interest of a major agency, William Morris.
There are, naturally, conspiracy theories. The Times noted that an Editorial Assistant who worked on McCafferty’s early books then went to work at Alloy (before returning to Random House). Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam theorized yesterday that the plagiarism would turn out to be the fault of some low-level assistant or writer at Alloy. However, everyone involved agrees that Visnawathan did her own writing, working with Little, Brown editor Asya Muchnick. So why is Alloy a party to the contract? What value did it bring to the deal?
I think the Times articles reveal the answer. According to Viswanathan, she “conceptualized” with Alloy in her senior year of high school. The following summer, “she wrote four chapters and a synopsis” and sent them to the packager. “After some minor editing, Alloy said it would get back to her.” The next that Viswanathan heard, apparently, was a call from her William Morris agent in October, saying that she had started to shop the book around. Little, Brown made an offer two days later. Only after that did Viswanathan finish writing the book.
That’s right: Little, Brown made a substantial offer (said to be $500,000 for two books, though the firm has denied that figure) for a book by a first-time, teenaged writer who had supplied only a synopsis and sample chapters. As we all know, most fiction writers have to submit a complete, polished manuscript. How else could a publisher be sure that we can finish the project, and that the ending will be satisfying for readers?
That’s where I think Alloy showed its value. Because it was involved in the deal, Little, Brown felt comfortable believing that Opal Mehta would be:
(a) completed, and
(b) very, very commercial.
Alloy was, in essence, vouchsafing for Viswanathan and providing insurance for Little, Brown. And in economic terms, those functions do provide value.
Illustration from a series of Little Red Riding Hood paintings