Mark Dawson, The Million Dollar King of Self Publishing, Accused Of Plagiarism
And the claims are pretty damning…
Mark Dawson’s time appears to have come.
For the uninitiated, Mark Dawson is big news in self-publishing, being well known as a huge proponent of the 20booksto50k ‘method’. According to his Wikipedia entry, he now has forty-six novels published in the space of ten years. And, according to Insider, he made a cool $1.3 million in 2021 from his self-publishing empire. How much came from direct book sales or related income streams is unknown, but he is said to have achieved more than six million book downloads.
There are a lot of pies that Dawson has his fingers in, such as a podcast, being a constant contributor to the famous 20booksto50k Facebook group, his self-publishing courses on pretty much every self-publishing subject there can be, and, of course, his attendance at the money-spinning 20BooksTo50k Vegas conventions he and his chums put on every year for wannabe self-publishing authors, promising them the golden ticket. Anyone can make a fortune self-publishing, they tell you. You just need to pay through the nose for their golden advice and you’re on your way to the big time, just like Dawson.
But one wonders… How does Dawson write so many novels, promote those novels, plan and attend his conferences, create and run all his courses, find time for all those Facebook posts, make his podcast, and so on, and so on…
The answer, it has been suggested, is old-fashioned plagiarism.
The Claims
The whole debacle is currently blowing up due to some claims made, innocuously enough, on a Reddit post in the Writing forum, by user Wilsebbis. The post opens with the suggestion Dawson steals his work from other authors. Wilsebbis then provides a couple of examples from the original texts and from Dawson’s work for comparison. Then there are more examples. Then more and more, and so many that Wilsebbis created a public Google doc with screenshots to support their findings.
Now, all of us here at Medium are writers. Fiction, non-fiction, we know what it is to occasionally accidentally write a line and think, wait, have I been a bit too heavily influenced by something I recently read? I may have repeated a word or two or a common phrase I heard. I may not have. It’s vague and not something you can always put your finger on, but a word or two, here and there, is not plagiarism.
See also, ‘It’s a book about a fae prince’. Yes, there are a billion of these — that’s also not plagiarism.
What Mark Dawson is accused of having done is bold and egregious and utterly shocking. If true, it’s incredible that he didn’t expect to be found out sooner.
The Evidence
Full credit to Wilsebbis for the following examples.
“…the gaudy harlequinade of youth much in evidence…” [2013 William Boyd interviews James Bond by William Boyd from the Guardian]
“The harlequinade of youth much in evidence…” [2014 The Driver by Mark Dawson]
“…the dark-eyed girls in their short dresses and the long-haired young men in crushed velvet and fur-trimmed Afghans…” [2013 William Boyd interviews James Bond by William Boyd from the Guardian]
“Long-haired young men in vintage suits and fur-trimmed Afghans, and girls in short dresses…” [2014 The Driver by Mark Dawson]
“The misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon tower above the treeline…” [2012 Annecy shootings: On a steep forest road, few signs of the horror that was by John Lichfield for the Independent]
“The misty slopes of the massif of the Montagne de Charbon stretched above the treeline…” [2013 The Cleaner by Mark Dawson]
“He settled in, feeling the tension in the trigger, finding his stock weld, sliding to the eyepiece, and seeing the world through the mil-dot-rich reticle…” [2009 I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter]
“The man settled behind the rifle. He felt the tension in the trigger, found his stockweld and slid up to the eyepiece, staring into it and seeing the ridge and the trees and the vegetation through the mil-dot-rich reticle…” [2014 Tarantula by Mark Dawson]
“Then pulling out his Kestral 4000 weather station and noting the wind, humidity, and temperature.” [2009 I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter]
“Took out a small weather station and noted the wind, the humidity, and temperature.” [2014 Tarantula by Mark Dawson]
“…the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger…” [2009 I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter]
“…the smell of the cleaning fluid that had been used on its metallic parts, the cold touch of the aluminum eyepiece against his eye socket. He felt the chill of the fibreglass stock against his cheek.” [2014 Tarantula by Mark Dawson]
“We pass the iron girder skeleton of a building that never seems to get finished…” [2010 Amexica: War Along the Borderline by Ed Vulliamy]
“Milton passed the iron girder skeleton of a building…” [2013 Saint Death Mark Dawson]
“…little shops, outlets for cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs, and heroin — which in Juarez are called picaderos, usually marked by a shoe tied to a nearby telegraph wire…” [2010 Amexica: War Along the Borderline by Ed Vulliamy]
“…Milton knew about Juarez […] Illicit outlets — picaderos — were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires, and their shifty proprietors sold whatever illicit substance you needed to get high…” [2013 Saint Death Mark Dawson]
Interestingly, Wilsebbis states that the quote directly above originally read as follows, but was later changed in a poor attempt to conceal the plagiarism.
“Illicit outlets — picaderos — were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires and their shifty proprietors sold cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs and heroin. The legitimate marketplace at Cerrajeros was busy with custom, a broad sweep of unwanted bric-a-brac for sale: discarded furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator fridges.” [2013 Saint Death Mark Dawson]
Wilsebbis then goes on to show Vulliamy’s incredibly similar writing in the following excerpt:
“… lines the streets in overload quantities: sixties furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator cookers and Osterizer blenders…” [2010 Amexica: War Along the Borderline by Ed Vulliamy]
These are just a few of the damning examples. Wilsebbis states that all the above evidence (and more) was found in the opening pages of Dawson’s novels in the free ‘look inside’ feature Amazon offers. He simply picked out any of Dawson’s text that “seems either interesting and profound or technical about matters he’s not familiar”, and googled the phrases, quickly finding the earlier authors of the purportedly stolen work.
It’s not the first time Mark Dawson’s been called out for shady practices…
Back in 2020, The Guardian ran an article about how Dawson bought himself the status of Sunday Times bestseller, the UK equivalent of the New York Times bestseller list. How? He bought hundreds of copies of his own book, thus artificially inflating his sales.
It’s a well-known trick big publishers and some self-publishers use, which is why accolades such as ‘New York Times bestseller’ mean nothing to anyone in the know. All it truly says is, the rich get richer. It’s totally unethical, regardless of how many people are doing it.
Why Dawson’s alleged plagiarism is so important…
Plagiarism is a crime, and it’s not okay. We can all agree on this. Sadly, in the current self-publishing climate, the issue goes much deeper.
Roughly 7500 new books are uploaded to Amazon each day. That’s a lot of books. The quality of those books? Often appalling. There are no checks to make sure the books even make sense, let alone checks for basic grammar, spelling and punctuation.
As though that’s not bad enough, with the onslaught of generative AI, Amazon has had to limit uploads of new books to three per day per author. That’s right. How many authors are out there uploading more than three books every day? Those using AI to create books for them.
Making a living in the world of self-publishing is getting harder and harder for talented writers. People increasingly associate self-published books with poor quality, despite the work a lot of professionals put in to lift the bar. Sadly, for every one of those well-edited, proofread, expertly studied, original and well-written books, there is ten times as much bilge for readers to sort through.
And now we have to question whether someone who purportedly made $1.3 million from his self-published books in 2021 is even doing his own work. If Dawson is willing to lift almost whole paragraphs from someone else’s work and claim them as his own, what else is he lifting? Plots? Characters? How is that any different from generative AI plagiarising the works of authors and spewing the mess back out for literally anyone to slap an AI generated cover on and claim it as their own?
Dawson is a huge name in the industry and if the claims of plagiarism turn out to be true, this will, and should, have a huge impact on the industry.
As physical book stores close en masse, self-publishing is a vital field for creativity. In a world where traditional publishers work on tighter and tighter guidelines, forced to narrow their interests to ‘what sells,’ it’s an ever-narrowing range of stories and experiences. Talented writers just aren’t getting picked up unless they have a ‘platform’ with 100k+ followers, or unless they’re telling the same story we’ve all already heard. Look at literary agents’ websites. “I want the next…” is their cry. They do not want anything new and original. They want guaranteed money from repackaging what’s already out there.
Damaging the already-tarnished image of self-publishing even further with the frankly reprehensible crime of plagiarism hurts everyone. It hurts writers, readers, and anyone who cares about the arts and human creativity.
The motto of 20booksto50k (you know, that group he’s always commenting in and those conventions he’s always presenting at) is ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. One wonders, did Dawson think he was lifting other authors up if he typed those words, took credit for them, and kept the profits for himself? Did Dawson think he was raising other authors up when he bought himself bestseller status instead of the place going to someone who might have actually earned it? Does Dawson think he’s raising other authors up after this latest self-publishing mess that damages everyone in the industry?
Let’s hope this is a major misunderstanding and the man that’s making a fortune telling others how to write will explain exactly how so many words and phrases of his that echo those of his colleagues almost exactly made their way into his books.
The Reddit user who dropped this bomb has sent their findings to a flurry of newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times, so one thing’s for sure: Dawson had better come up with something good and soon.
Amazon is known to very quickly ban authors, even those much bigger than Dawson, over claims of plagiarism.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out…
