Little, Brown

Little, Brown, & Co. is the publishing house that picked up the Twilight books. They originally gave Meyer a 3-book deal, but as we know, Edward and Bella's adventures just wouldn't stay bounded within the traditional trilogy structure; or, perhaps more likely, Meyer is not adept at concise storytelling.

The first time I had heard of Little, Brown in the news and not on the title pages of tween lit was when the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism story broke.

Viswanathan is actually a classmate of mine from my alma mater. She wrote a book called How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.
It was a big deal because she wrote it her freshman year of college and got a $500,000 book deal from Little, Brown for it. Then supposedly Dreamworks picked up the movie rights and paid her even more ca$h money.

Then it became kind of a bigger deal with the revelation that many, many sections of Viswanathan's book were lifted word-for-word from Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings books.

Anyway, I'm glad that Little, Brown finally got the legitimate tween breakthrough it was shelling out good money for. Even if it had to come from a stay-at-home mom and not a "glamorous" young Indian star.

There was a conspiracy theory going around at the time of the Viswanathan scandal that perhaps Viswanathan was not the one who did the plagiarizing, but that she'd had a ghost writer and the ghost writer was the one who'd done the dirty deed. And after all was revealed, Little, Brown wanted Viswanathan to take the fall so that no one would know there had ever been ghost writers on the project.

I don't know if I buy that, but "ghost writer" is a cool term and I like using it.

I just feel like...if you're gonna copy from someone, at least copy from someone great? McCafferty is hardly a Jane Austen or L.M. Montgomery.

Maybe S.Meyer should have been assigned a ghost writer? It might have helped with the grammar mistakes and added more variety to her diction!