A NOVEL PACKAGE -- by Steve Nadis
I'm an innocent. I've had my hand in a number of books (whatever that means), but I've never written a novel. (Maybe a novella, if you stretch the definition.) So it's clear I don't know the first thing about it. I thought novelists wrote the books themselves. I had no idea there was such a thing as "book packagers" like Alloy Entertainment (with 17 New York Times bestsellers in 2005!) that actually write (they say "package") the books for you. All this came to light for me--and for many of you, no doubt--when stories surfaced about the poor Harvard undergraduate who apparently was overly zealous in "internalizing" the novels of another author. (Perhas the Harvard girl should have picked a more obscure writer?) The question now is whether that other author--the one who "externalized" it rather than "internalized" it--wrote the books herself, or did she leave the prose to the pros at Alloy or similar firms?
