Please enjoy this guest post by Callie Crown, and be sure to check out her personal links to follow this amazing aspiring author!
Flip the Script by Callie Crown
Do you have a book or series you just adore? Perhaps, you enjoy the author’s style of writing. Perhaps, it's the way they tell a story. Perhaps, it’s the stories they tell. Do you think you’d notice if one day that author’s style started to change?
I want to be completely honest with you dear reader. I love to read series, I typically can’t put them down. A few years ago I was gifted The Secret Circle by L.J Smith, and I finally got around to reading it. The book follows a young teenager, Cassie Blake, through her adventures of moving to a new town and finding out she was a witch. The series is made up of a total of six books. Three of these books were written in 1992 by L.J. Smith, and three were written in 2012 under the name L.J. Smith using a ghostwriter.
You may be looking at the author’s name wondering, “where else do I know her from?” L.J. Smith wrote the now-famous, Vampire Diaries series. Well, she started the series at least. L.J. Smith has been vocal about her contract with her publisher noting that she was young and naive so she didn’t realize she was selling the rights to her stories and her pen name. This leads me to ghostwriting, unsolicited by the author.
I have never read the Vampire Diaries but as I stated before, I am reading The Secret Circle. I loved the first three books, they were an easy read with a reader-pleasing storyline. It made sense that the books ended where they did, left for open-ended interpretation. However, I was horrified when I picked up the fourth book in the series. The characters felt toyed with. They weren’t important to this new author, nor was the prior storyline. The ghostwriter got simple details wrong (possibly on purpose). The previous novels talked about how powerful witches Cassie and her friends were only to make them quiver in fear in the next three novels at problems they had already faced fearlessly.
So, I want to pose a question to you, how would you feel if another author took over your favorite book series without input from the current author? In this case, I believe it was not worth the continuation of the series. It felt as though the new author was writing fan fiction, and not the good kind. I was very bummed reading these books since I felt they frankly took a big dump on the originals. Spoiler Alert, the ghostwriter quite literally killed the old characters just to replace them with her own. I understand some characters may be killed off in a series, but this just felt cruel since there was a clear lack of respect for the 1992 story. I will say this isn’t always the case with ghostwriters, but I feel the original author should have some input with their beloved characters.
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Callie Crown is an aspiring author who is looking to have her first book published by the end of 2023. You can find out more about her and her upcoming book as well as other publications on her website, www.calliecrown.com. You can follow Callie’s writing journey on her instagram @calliecrown_author where she provides tips to other aspiring novelists.
