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#Amwriting Life: How I became a Goodreads author and credited with books I never wrote

24/5/2020

As I've just launched a new book and have a couple more in the pipeline, I thought I'd better get my Goodreads account in order. Oops, the contact email address was obsolete and there were unanswered friends requests dating from 6 years ago. My bad!

However as I was updating my Author Profile and adding my latest book, I noticed something else: Goodreads was also crediting me as the author of/or contributor to books that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Basically as a registered 'Goodreads Author' – using my name Charles Christian – the system credits ALL books by a 'Charles Christian' to me – whether it was actually written by me or some other bod also called Charles Christian.

Thus I find myself listed as the author of a science fiction collection (it wasn't me); a learned work on immunology by Cornell University Medical College, NYC (it wasn't me); a biography of a flying doctor (it wasn't me) and A Brief Treatise on the Police of the City of New York City which I would have had to have written while I was still a sixth-former at school! That definitely wasn't me.

As far as I can see, it is not actually possible to remove these mis-credited books from my Author Profile – and some Goodreaders report that having successfully removed such books from their My Books section, they magically reappear a couple of days later.

Hmmm... I wonder if that means I can collect the royalties?

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