A high-profile politician whose career is taking off publishes a book tapping into the spirit of the age. The work, which follows an earlier bestseller, is intended to be both a serious talking point as well as an effective instrument of personal political marketing. But just as the plaudits for such a “thorough and urgently necessary” title begin to roll in, it is revealed that the book is actually the work of many, often unacknowledged, authors. Cue, a plagiarism scandal that sweeps through the political and cultural worlds, a damaged reputation and many a red face at the book’s publishers.
That is the story of Diana Kinnert, a sometime rising star in Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, whose 2021 book, Die neue Einsamkeit, a meditation on loneliness published in the wake of the pandemic, was found to have contained over 200 examples of plagiarism. Her publishers Hoffmann & Campe withdrew the book (though it is still available on Amazon). Kinnert apologised for what she said were unintentional mistakes that were attributed to the frenetic and disparate way the book was put together.
The Kinnert story is one of a number of plagiarism cases to have ensnared German politicians in recent years. Last week it found an echo in the UK when an FT reviewer discovered multiple examples of apparent plagiarism in a new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, by Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor. Reeves and her publisher, Basic Books, acknowledged the flaws — which involved cases of biographical description copied without attribution from other sources — and promised to amend any subsequent editions of the book.
While the initial furore may have moved on — though Reeves can expect to endure taunts of a “copy-and-paste” approach to politics — the reverberations are still being felt in the London publishing world. “It was a mixture of ‘oh, my God!’ and then, ‘there but for the grace of God’,” says Georgina Morley, publishing director at Picador.
The scandal has exposed a number of features about publishing and raised questions about just how and why certain books get produced — and by whom. In particular, it has drawn attention to both the phenomenon of the celebrity or high-profile author and the realities of an industry that for all apparent pretence to diligent, high-minded purpose is often overstretched and battling with limited time and resources, such as for fact-checking.
“Nobody really fact-checks,” is a common, if surprising, response you hear from publishers. Several publishers, big and small, that I spoke to this week in New York, London and Germany all said that if they had to check everything they would not be able to function. “It’s easier to fact-check a 2,000-word piece of journalism than a book of 150,000 words,” says Andrew Franklin of Profile Books.
Instead, much of the responsibility sits with the author. Contracts typically require authors to warrant that they will deliver original work. But policing that is another matter. “Ultimately, it’s an incredible act of trust,” says Natasha Fairweather, a literary agent.
Technology may provide an answer. Publishers in America and Germany already use software to check manuscripts. A sample poll of UK London publishers revealed that none of them did. Exactly why is not clear. The Reeves case might change that.
This does not mean that checking does not take place. There are several layers within the editing process — from commissioning editor to line editor to copy editor — where manuscripts are subjected to varying degrees of scrutiny. “Good, smart copy editors are critical,” says Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic in New York. “You try to keep continuity and experience.” Potentially legally problematic manuscripts may be sent to a lawyer and gone through line by line.
And yet mistakes still slip through. “There isn’t an editor alive who has not let something through,” says Morley, who has published a number of books by major politicians. These, says Franklin, present a “particular problem” as politicians often don’t write their own books.
The genre has been growing in recent years, but is actually nothing new. From all those hefty and dusty memoirs of life in the Westminster fray to the grandstanding American “campaign book”, books by politician authors are a familiar feature of the publishing catalogue. In France and Germany it is almost expected that a politician offer up their thoughts between the hard covers — with sometimes embarrassing results. What has changed in Britain is that whereas once it was typically the retiring grandee who turned to book writing, they have now been joined by the younger more active politician.
The content and quality of such books is varied. Some are personal memoirs — the fabled “back story” — others sharply policy-focused declarations of intent or straight works of fiction. Few are literary gems — though it would be wrong to write them all off. Barack Obama’s books, for example, are referenced in the industry as benchmarks of top-class political authorship.
But that is all somewhat beside the point. For many politicians — and indeed other high-profile personalities-turned-authors — producing a book is less a literary endeavour and more a form of marketing, a brand extension if you will, by which reputations are burnished, credentials underwritten and status enhanced. A book makes you a different person and opens up new opportunities — from the festival circuit to the chat-show sofa — for self-promotion (“as I say in the book”). Whether you actually make any money, or indeed anyone actually reads the book, seems almost secondary.
For publishers, politicians or high-profile authors have a certain appeal. For all its august, high-minded pretensions, the business of publishing is something of a gamble. No one really knows what makes a bestseller. There are many smart people in publishing who know a “good” book when they see one. Whether readers agree is another matter. So publishers take a series of bets in the hope that one or two will pay off (and recoup the losses on all the duds).
One result is that the market is oversupplied: there are too many books — which itself may feed a condition of too much activity under greater time pressure which makes elementary slip-ups more possible. Another is the increasing temptation to go with established brands — a well-known name, a face, someone with a large social-media following — whose very personality will garner attention and, hopefully, sales.
Having done the deal, the question is then how to make it happen. By definition this is extracurricular activity so any researching and writing comes on top of a busy day job. Also, as talented and prominent as the authors might be, it’s not a given that they can actually write. Addressing this problem through researchers, ghostwriters, co-authors or indeed editors, is nothing new. As one publisher puts it: “You can bet your bottom dollar that Erasmus had a student helping.” Using and acknowledging — which Reeves did — the work of researchers is fine. But it is a process that requires rigorous management, which seemingly did not happen in her case.
“There have been books I published where I thought ‘you haven’t written a word’,” recalls Iain Dale, founder of Biteback, a London-based publisher that specialises in books by political authors. “But if a book stands on its merits and the author is a credible person, then I don’t see why it can’t go ahead.”
Some industry figures see this all as part of a bigger problem where as editing resources have been cut back, or older, more experienced editors made redundant, technology is proving a predictably disruptive force. The speed and ease with which material can be accessed, copied and then passed around creates both opportunity for deliberate plagiarism as well as risk that somewhere in all the sharing, chopping and pasting oversight is lost. “It’s different from the time when you had to type and re-type material,” says one former head of a German literary publisher. “There’s no longer necessarily an understanding where it came from — and that is what everyone is grappling with.”
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