I wrote this piece below for the Society of Authors’ magazine The Author after having had my work appropriated by yet another television production company. I and a number of other non-fiction writers are hoping to get a set of good-practice guidelines established to stamp out these ripoffs of authors’ labour and expertise.

“There is absolutely no factual basis whatsoever for any of your ludicrous claims…Your comments are clearly defamatory of my client… The claim of plagiarism is not only defamatory but itself can only serve to bring you into disrepute… First letter before action”
I’d never received a letter like that before. It was sent by the agent of a television scriptwriter, after I had mentioned on Twitter that the scriptwriter, whom I did not name, was thinking of adapting one of my non-fiction/history books for the screen, but instead had taken an aspect of the book and developed a present-day narrative that made use one of my book’s themes. I knew all this to be the case because the scriptwriter had said so himself in an interview in a magazine. I was only repeating what he had admitted. And I never used the “P” word – that was all in his imagination.

I’d thought it extremely odd, while reading the interview, that an attempt to adapt a book of mine for the screen had gone ahead without either me or my agent knowing anything about it, and certainly without an option being drawn up. I’ve had non-fiction books optioned twice before and that was a perfectly straightforward, civilised process by which, respectively, the BBC and ITV had secured temporary sole rights to adapt two of my books. I had assumed that that was how it always worked.

But I suspect a worrying trend may be developing that will rope off yet another pathway by which non-fiction authors can earn some money from their own work (no, I’m not going to call it ‘content’). And I’m writing this article to kickstart a debate that I think is long overdue: what can non-fiction authors do if their books are commandeered by telly folk without their agreement or even knowledge?

I know, the obvious answer is “sue the buggers”; but that is a daunting prospect to those of us who simply cannot afford to risk losing a case no matter how much moral right we may have on our side.

That First Letter Before Action unpleasantness was actually third time around for me. Previously, a TV award-winning series leaned heavily for one of its episodes on one of my books. The producer had contacted me and I had helped out by answering questions by email and contacting potential interviewees for him. I had asked for no money in agreeing to help out; but when, with filming completed, I asked if I could have a screen credit as a consultant, the request was treated as problematical. Far worse, the series’ tie-in book précis-ed my own book for one of its chapters, cleverly kicking over the traces by including no endnotes and no bibliography, thereby passing its contents off as fresh archival research on the part of the writers.

More recently, I was asked to be a paid consultant, for a modest fee, on a historical series, only to discover when the scripts were delivered that one of the episodes closely shadows a book of mine. The episode in question uses the same (rare) archival testimonies and historical witnesses, in pretty much the order in which I present them in the book, and echoes my conclusions as to what the testimonies might mean.

I explained that I was unhappy about this, and that the full option fee would have been more appropriate than a small one-off consultancy fee; but the large and very wealthy production company has not budged. These facts are “in the public domain”, they said; you don’t own the past, they said, and so we can make use of all the sources you listed in your bibliography because you have no exclusive rights to archival material.

So what do we think, folks? And what can the Society of Authors suggest we do? For fiction writers, plagiarism cases are easier to assess. But for those of us who take years (yes, I’m serious) carefully piecing together reconstructions of often deeply hidden histories, our work — it would appear — can simply be appropriated by others for no fee and no credit. This strikes me as profoundly wrong; and, more practically, as yet another hit on the incomes of non-fiction writers, at a time of plummeting advances and expectations that we will give talks for diddly-squat.