As Maryann Miller detailed in her March post , recently a hack named Cristiane Serruya came up with what she thought was a clever scheme. She trimmed paragraphs from multiple books, quilted them together, then published them as her own work. She changed the titles, character names, and a word here or there. The results were a bit like Frankenstein's monster, but she got away with it, for a while. A fan of romance writer Courtney Milan's books noticed something odd when reading Ms. Serruya's book. The passages seemed a little too familiar to Milan's The Duchess War . She put the pieces together and sent an email to Ms. Milan. When contacted, the thief at first denied then deflected, blaming "ghostwriters" she hired for the crime. The battle went viral on Twitter with the hashtag #CopyPasteCris. Once the scam was revealed, a deeper dive showed Ms. Serruya had stolen from over forty authors, including Romance legend Nora Roberts. The affected authors might ...