Luckily, I have the U.S. Copyright's Office file uploaded since September 4th, 2018. Unfortunately, it takes six months for them to approve copyright applications. I've sent what information that I have up to the Kindle [email protected] group saying. Here is everything I have. What else can I do to fight these false accusations? Is it possible to just have someone read each book to see that the accusations are false? Now I wait for their response. Hopefully this will be cleared up quickly. I'm like can someone just read both of our first books, that should clear this up easily.
Luke's accusations is that having a group of gamers entering into an online game to go to pro status and having the main character save a group of NPCs from goblins is stealing his story, world and everything. Wow, if that was the case, no one would be writing LitRPG, or romance novels or any identifiable genre. It's almost like Luke believes he's discovered LitRGP on his own. It doesn't matter that the story, the world the characters live in, the made up game world, the characters the story is about or the NPCs are all different. All that matters is the general concept is similar to his story so I am now being targeted in every way he can to get my books off Amazon.
He accused me of plagiarism and attacked my ratings on book one, had four of his friends join him in posting the same hate, they also followed those claims up on Goodreads, he had groups of authors and even an editor bash me on Amazon reviews and yet the series continues to get the support of the LitRPG community. Readers have seen the crazy posts and repeatedly said that there is no plagiarism here, you're wrong and then they followed their reviews up with positive ratings that has only increased the series popularity.
Since none that worked, Luke has gone to Amazon and said I stole his story. I copied up my pending copyright and other information and wait for Amazons response to hopefully get this resolved. Still, it is incredibly frustrating. Just because you lie and say something is so doesn't mean it's the truth.
I had a new fan contact me yesterday, his name was Jeff. Jeff had held off on buying my book because the LitPodcast that he listens to said that I'd basically cut and pasted the first half of Luke's Ascent Online book into my story and how I was a horrible plagiarist. After two months of only seeing Harem LitRPG books around, he decided to look at my book First Login to see what all of the commotion was about. A third of the way through the book, he contacted me asking if he could help with grammar corrections and explained his story. He was pissed off that what he'd been told about my book was all lies and wanted to help me fight that kind of bullshit. Thank you, Jeff and others who have read the ongoing debate and read both stories and supported me against these false accusations.
The sad part is the disruption this creates in my writing of book four and how it hurts in getting my book out into the world. Not to mention the pissed off feelings and stress one gets when someone is doing their best to bully you. For those of you who have read the series, it's just like dealing with a Real World Syndicate lead by Genele.
Anyway, wish me luck in my fight.