Copyright Infringement

This post is also on Jinxie's Babbling Blogs.

Well, it's certainly been an interesting couple of days around my little part of the world. To start, I Googled myself the other day (yes, I know that sounds bad) and discovered this "lovely" review of Forever Nocturne e-zine. It's a year-old review, but a review nonetheless, and not a good one. Normally, I wouldn't think twice about it and brush it off like most negative things in my life (yes, we're back to the old Jinxie y'all know and love, and some of you are meeting me for the first time now), but I had to show my partner Sharon Gerlach (aka Siobhan MacIntyre) this immediately. Her response can be found here.

Now, the interesting thing about this post from Ms. Mitchell is that when I first came upon it, our e-zine partner TL Boehm had a comment up, also dated a year ago. And Sharon's daughter also posted a comment last night. Both comments are now gone, so we know Ms. Mitchell has seen them and possibly Sharon's post in response.

As I said, I don't care what Ms. Mitchell thinks about our 'zine. Her review was posted two days after she received an "edit and resubmit" request, rather than a flat out rejection. I'm chalking it up to "reacting without thinking before posting." A lot of writers tend to do this, thereby shooting themselves in the foot for later publication. DON'T DO THIS. Not to agents, not to publishing houses and their editors, not to magazines regardless of how well-known they are or not. You're only hurting yourself.

My issue with her post is that she has posted copyrighted material from our 'zine by one of our writers, Jessica F. Hayes, without permission. This is illegal. Sharon and I have both left comments, stating the she must remove this content immediately or possibly face legal action. Jessica F. Hayes has also been informed of this copyright infringement and I'm waiting for a response on what she would like to do.

I would also like to point out that Ms. Mitchell reviewed the very first issue, which I will admit wasn't the best, but hey, it was a FIRST issue. Sharon and I both feel that the 'zine has come a long way since that issue, and we have plans for making it even better than it is now. Part of that plan is to start charging $1.00 per download, beginning with this month's issue. What this will do is give us the opportunity to legalize things a bit more and start paying our writers down the road. We also plan to increase the 'zine to quarterly as soon as we're both finished with our degrees. And in the future, we'd like to publish e-books.

So, there you have it. We are serious about this and we intend to make things happen with our 'zine, even after we're both published authors.

Thank you,

NL Gervasio, Editor

Forever Nocturne E-zine