...Mirroring?

Sounds a bit of a get-rich-quick scheme. Short term this approach might sell books rapidly, but you can't keep repackaging the same book or three with different pen names indefinitely. And long term success means promoting you work. Multiple pen names means tons of promotion which means no writing time which means no new material.

While I'm sure there are folks who have done this, I imagine it's not especially successful over an extended term. Better to write and promote original content and build a backlist and platform.

It seems risky? If someone notices the plagiarism (not knowing it's the same author), they'll likely report it as plagiarism. Then either the author would be forced to come out and say exactly what they've been doing, or come up with another elaborate scheme to pretend someone else has been plagiarising them.

And no, I wouldn't do it. It sounds like a horrible idea. Not only for practical reasons, such as above, but because I'd like my work to appeal to people because of the characters I create. If they're easily changed by replacing a word or two then I haven't done what I set out to do.

We've had (former) AW members do this and boast about it, and I've seen the practice in certain sections of the Kindle erotic boards.

Personally, I feel if you are going to cannibalize an earlier story, rework it entirely. Put some effort in. Make it a new story. The quick-change act is profoundly disrespectful to readers, many of whom do catch on eventually.

I've seen it done. I always thought it was one author using dif. pen names to reach diff. audiences with dif. preferences. Like, in one, the mc is a woman in present times, in the next, it's a man in Roman times. Same story-line, dif. gender and setting.

I can't believe that would fool anybody. I can see how it might increase a writer's potential audience. But it seems kind of lazy to me, and unimaginative.

I was always taught that stealing your own work is still plagiarism. I might be wrong, but that's how my teachers growing up told us.

I can understand why someone might do it. No one really gets hurt, and it helps the story reach more markets. That being said... my gut still says it's unethical.

It's lazy.

I recently saw that an MM author is doing this (MM to MF). It seems so disrespectful to both straight and gay relationships, and to readers who spend hard-earned money on less than hard-earned words. Clearly, money is the bottom line, not craft or story or characters or any of the other reasons people tend to write. Do I want to get paid for my work? You betcha. Do I want to insult people's intelligence or sexuality for a quick buck? No flippin' way. I doubt any publisher would knowingly touch something like that with a two hundred foot reachin' stick, but in the self-pubbing world, it's apparently a real thing.

I vote totally yucky.

Kimber said:

I recently saw that an MM author is doing this (MM to MF). It seems so disrespectful to both straight and gay relationships [...]

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Not sure I follow your line of thought. How is it insulting to people of different sexualities?

Not trying to start anything, just genuinely curious.

Crap! I just typed a succinct and rather pretty reply that got eaten. I wish I'd copied it before I posted. I'd totally plagiarize myself right now if I could.

Here are the bare bones:

If I were a gay guy and I found out the book I was reading was identical to an MF book but for pronouns/names/sex scenes (and that is the case with the situation I'm referring to), I'd be extremely insulted that the author figured gay dudes are just chicks with penises. And vice versa. If I were a lesbian and found out an author I'd spent money on is selling the exact same book I'm reading, only with a new title and Robyn is a Robert, I'd feel that the author has no respect for who I am if he/she thinks I'm interchangeable with a straight man as long as you lick and stick a wiener on. Gay guys aren't chicks with penises any more than straight women are gay men with vaginae (and all other potential genitalia and sexual orientation swap-ups). It's insulting to everyone involved, especially when a reader realizes that the bottom line is only money; not connecting with people or showing some sort of understanding of their lives and struggles and desires. I know--it's erotica. That doesn't give authors an excuse to act like sexual identity issues don't matter.

Yeah, maybe I'm a highfalutin smut peddler. I'm good with that. I never want to write paper doll characters who only need a change of paper clothes to be something completely different, and I sure as hell don't want to read anything like that. :/

What Kimber said.

Ah. I tend to take the view that male characters and female characters are more or less the same. I don't spend a lot of time thinking "Would a man do this?" or "Is this how a woman would act?"

I write fantasy, though, in a world where men and women have the same societal roles and same-sex relationships are unremarkable. I can see why it might become a problem in contemporary.

From my consultations with gay male friends, there are important differences in both physical and psychological interactions. I would never assume that I could simply cut-and-paste between het and gay sex.

But I have seen mirroring in the het erotica genre - mostly in self-published work. As I said before, it's lazy. Sure, authors get hooked on themes and revisit them in different ways. Word-for-word copying with minimal changes? Not kosher.

Filigree said:

From my consultations with gay male friends, there are important differences in both physical and psychological interactions. I would never assume that I could simply cut-and-paste between het and gay sex.

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I'm not sure I agree with that, but then I again, I don't have much experience writing about het sex.

Whenever someone starts a thread about the differences between writing male and female characters, there are dozens of people (me among them) saying "there is no difference, just write about people." Why is it different here?

I took two of my male characters and made them female during a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. They were almost exactly the same. The only noticeable difference was that "Jocelyn" was a bit more crude than "Jonathan" and...

Actually, that's it.

If there are specific reasons a person's gender affects them -- if the characters in a historical setting, or if they are affected by societal expectations, or something like that -- it makes sense there would be differences in personality between male and female. Otherwise? It doesn't seem like a big deal.

What specific things do you feel are inherently different about gay relationships and straight relationships? As a bisexual woman, they've been the same for me. What would strike you as normal in a heterosexual relationship and strange in a same-sex relationship?

I went on a walk and thought it about it some more and I think I understand what you mean. Some books -- like Twilight -- would make no sense as m/m or f/f. She's passive, he's active, she's always blushing and biting her lip, he's always brooding and powerful.

... which isn't really a bad thing, it's just a thing. A stereotypical heterosexual thing. In Outlander, I also can't imagine the main characters in a same-sex relationship, because both the leads are heavily influenced by the historical setting they live in. There's no way that Claire's relationship with Jamie would progress the same way if she were a man.

That being said, not every heterosexual relationship is like that. Like the male and female lead in Nora Robert's Blue Smoke. One character is an arson investigator, the other is a carpenter who resells houses. Both live in modern-day USA and aren't very influenced by gender roles. They're both equally active and neither is incredibly masculine or feminine, they're just people in a relationship. If they were both women or both men, I wouldn't so much as blink.

Cuddling and touch seem to be exactly the same emotionally. Some differences show up in hard-vs-soft body types, but those can fall along a scale (muscled women, 'soft-bodied' guys). People are people, I agree with you there. I noticed a lot of the differences seemed drawn from cultural backgrounds. It was very interesting, based on twenty interviews I did decades ago of gay males who'd dated or married het for whatever reason. Height of the first AIDS epidemic; I was lucky mutual friends put me in touch with the interview subjects. Lotta work for a college paper. I'll try to find if I kept the notes or the paper.

Is that like plagiarising? in other words, stealing someone's story and characters? Sounds really bad to me.

I'm kind of intrigued by the whole thing, because I think it could be really cool if done thoughtfully.

Like, start with the same setup, and characters that are the same in every way EXCEPT those ways directly related to sex or gender, and then see how the story spins out.

I agree that with some characters/settings, there wouldn't be much difference, so it wouldn't really be worthwhile to write the story. But for SOME characters/settings, it could be a whole different story.

If an author was upfront about it (maybe even packaged two novellas in one book to show the connection) I think I'd be interested.

But, yeah, doing it without being honest just seems lazy and sneaky and gross.

It could be a good jumping-off point IF the author was honest about doing it, and IF the author were doing it deliberately to experiment with the idea or *as* a jumping-off point, rather than for the purpose of just getting as many stories out there as humanly possible and not giving a crap whether they're well-written or offensive of whatever.

Kind of a multiverse switch thing, maybe. Done openly and honestly, it could be cool. Hell, 'Cloud Atlas' sold, with all its flaws.

Is it bad of me that my first thought about all this was that the mirrored versions of these characters are living in alternate universes and there should obviously be a sequel where they all meet and have the weirdest sexual tension? Because that's where my mind went first...

I once started writing a book about alternate universes, where the antagonist was male in one universe and female in the other, and they hooked up. Is that lust, narcissism, or self-abuse?

I'm glad I'm not the only person whose mind jumps into these places. I blame boredom and the caffeine.