For anyone affected by or following the plagiarism saga that began for me back in February, I am proud to say that the source account appears to have been removed/deactivated/vanished from Apple Books.
Back at the start of the year, I discovered that the Vampire Always Bites Twice was plagiarized and being resold on Apple Books by a “Diana J Vargas,” complete with a heinously AI generated cover (seriously, it looked like it had deformed flying monkeys in the background). I filed a copyright complaint and my book was taken down within a week (yay!). But during this process, I discovered that the “publisher” of “Diana J Vargas” was associated with multiple “author” accounts that all appeared to be plagiarizing various works from Wattpad authors.
In total, I managed to track down over seventy Wattpad writers and attempted to notify them that their works had been stolen; heck, that’s why some of you may be following me! Some of them were already aware of the situation, some had no idea before my contact, others appear to be inactive and have maybe not seen my message at all.
Every so often, I have returned to that “publisher” account to check if a new “author” has cropped up selling even more plagiarized works. But I am happy to say that “publisher” account seems to be no longer available on Apple books!
Has the plagiarizer/s learned a lesson? Meh, probably not. I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply abandoned one pseudonym in exchange for another. I will still consider this a small victory for us, my fellow writers. Cheers!