AddieBookss
Hi! Five of my readers reached out to me saying your story seemed very similar to Her Plaything over the past few days, so I decided to check it out myself. After reading it, I understood the concerns they were raising and my issue isn't with individual tropes or isolated scenes, but with the amount of similarities in the characters, their personalities, family dynamics, relationships, motivations, and several plot points and sequences of events. At the moment, I genuinely feel the story is too similar to my work, and I'd like to know how you intend to address those concerns. I don't want to cause a fight or a bigger mess, so please do reply.
LOST_GHOST_FOUND
@AddieBookss I understand your concerns and if your genuinely uncomfortable with how it’s similar to yours so far and to avoid any arguments that might arise I will change my story line, it will still be the same but I will change my scenes from the book, I won’t however delete my work because I have truly worked hard with it.
AddieBookss
@LOST_GHOST_FOUND Thank you for responding! I don't think you're copying my work word for word, and I understand that many individual elements can be found in other books. My concern is that the overall combination of character dynamics, backgrounds, relationships, motivations, and story beats is similar enough that multiple readers immediately connected it to Her Plaything without any involvement from me. What I keep coming back to is that if these similarities are simply the result of common tropes, then I genuinely have to ask: what other stories are readers supposed to be thinking of here? Because the people who reached out to me didn't compare your book to ten different stories. They all compared it to one specific book. That's why I'm struggling to see this as a coincidence of genre conventions alone. It's not a single trope that's raising concerns, it's the specific combination of elements appearing together. I appreciate that you intend to take the story in a different direction later on, but the similarities readers have pointed out are already present in the chapters that are published. Because of that, I'm still uncomfortable with how closely it currently resembles my work. I'd be much more comfortable if those similarities were significantly revised before continuing the story, rather than relying on future chapters to make it feel different.
LOST_GHOST_FOUND
Hello! First off I wanna say I love your books and writing style and really admire you as a person, and yes some of your fans have commented the same issue as to why my story is so similar to yours and I just want to say that I know it might seem that way right now but that’s only because I have included some scenes that are quite famous and most writers use in their books and yes I saw your story and that inspired me to make my own with the same trope but that’s only it, I have not looked at your story word for word and put it as my own, and I plan to do different things for the rest of my book and also in her plaything the mmc has issues with both of their parents as far as I am aware but in mine it’s only the mmc’s father along with my FMC having a sister and cousin attending the college and instead the mmc is the new guy (who’s not a gamer) but instead has different jobs to get by and the background for my characters will be completely different once revealed. If you still feel uncomfortable with it and have anything else you’d like to say please tell me because I don’t actually want you to feel as if I am taking your ideas or stealing your work.