I received this question in my inbox the other day. I thought it was worth including since I do see this floated around every now and then.

Writers know how much time and effort go into stories, whether they be a two part short story or a seventy chapter epic. It's hard work. We don't want people swooping in taking all the credit.

So once we've got our manuscript ready (or maybe we're just planning on posting as we go), we start to wonder: what if? Many of us write to share our work with others, but what if someone takes it?

In the beta reading circuit, even here on Wattpad and other writing help sites, a lot of writers express concern for their stories and ideas being stolen. I'm going to start off by saying three things:

1. I'm not going into protections and that sort of thing (you can find information on copyrights with Wattpad and on the internet; in fact, I'm including an external link in this chapter to the United States Copyright office FAQs). Protections and what you have to do to acquire them or have the right to be able to sue someone, vary by country.

2. I'm not talking about mirror websites and people who just copy stories off places like Wattpad and put it up word-for-word on their mimic sites. That's a small risk for you to consider on your own.

3. I am not a lawyer, though I have worked for one. I'm just providing some perspective. I advise you all to do your own research.

They aren't talking about just their story. They're talking about the idea, sometimes even just the pitch, the logline. The writer really feels like they've got something special here, and they aren't keen on giving it up.

That's understandable. Most of us feel like we've written something special.

You see it all the time when someone is looking for help with the story, or they ask you if it's something you'd read, but they give shallow details. When you ask for more, they say something like: Well, you'll have to read the story to find out. ;) or straight up say, I don't want anyone stealing it.

I've also seen it in stories pitched to me by people who want me to write for them.

Example of stuff I receive: Hello Ms. Bowe. I admire your writing. I have a million dollar idea for you for the next bestselling romance novel. Together we could be successful. I have the idea ready for you and outlines of the first few chapters. They're brilliant, that's all I can say until you agree to write for me.

1. The odds are very low that someone would want take your idea. Most writers are writers because they have their own stories they want to tell. There's a very good chance that the thief has got their own headaches and stories and ideas filling up all their time and energy.

Put simply: most writers have too much going on to be bothered with another writer's ideas.

2. The odds are astronomically low that someone will take your idea and turn it into the exact same novel you're writing. Writers don't all write the same. That's where things like style come into play and let us tell different writers apart. On top of that, we treat ideas differently. Give a group of ten writers a prompt like: girl meets boy at a supermarket. You'll get ten different stories. Make it more specific, add that it must involve an orange. You'll still get ten different stories based off the same idea.

3. The odds are equally as low that you have an idea that is in no way similar to something someone else is writing or already has written. As we so often hear, "There are no new ideas." When you reduce stories or scenes down to a paragraph or less, you're going to find that a lot of stories sound the same, especially if you trim them down into their tropes and cliches. This is especially true when you're writing fiction in established genres. Whatever your idea is, some version of it has likely been done before.

Harry Potter, for example, isn't the first and won't be the last story about a wizarding school. Anita Blake and Bella Swan both have vampire and werewolf love interests.

If you look at a lot of popular books, a quick search will yield all kinds of "SO&SO STOLE FROM THIS STORY." If you look further into some lawsuits brought against stories, you'll quickly find that in some cases, Nancy probably never read Bill's unpopular story from thirty years ago. She just happened to also write a story focused on a penguin living with fishermen in Belize.

4. You have a head start to the finish line. Unless you've got a prolific writer on your tail (let's face it, if Stephen King came after you, the first draft is already in his editor's hands) you are already farther along than the person trying to steal your idea. There's a very good chance that, depending on what you want to do with your story, you'll be first published, which means your written story with all its details will attain some level of copyright protection that can help protect you, so get writing!

5. You cannot copyright an idea. Per the Copyright Act, "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied in such work."

This one's kind of important. You can love it all you want and never tell a soul about it, but those tricksy hobbitses can come along and use it, too!

6. Even if someone steals your idea, they still have to be successful with it, and that's incredibly difficult. So maybe your story idea gets stolen by another user. They, like you, think a tale about an aging cheese curl in the back seat of a soccer mom's mini van is going to be the next Hunger Games. The thief has to still:

A. Write the book.

B. Attract readers and/or an agent and/or a publisher.

C. Make some kind of a financial splash.

D. Get noticed by you or someone who knows your story.

Basically, IF lightning strikes and someone steals your idea, it is more likely that you will never know they did! Most thieves won't make it out of A. Of the ones that do, they'll probably get crushed somewhere in B and never achieve C or D. In general most writers don't get out of A or B!

7. Unless they're directly plagiarizing you, you have an uphill battle. Remember, you can't copyright an idea. You're going to need your story to back you up. And even then, with the way writers write, if they took the story based on your idea (which is what we're talking about here) vs the entire published novel, it's probably not all that similar to yours.

8. If you aren't a big name or proven story writer, people tend to be a bit more hesitant to take what you say and use it. When you're unproven or unknown, you get some good advantages and disadvantages. One of those murky points is that people are overall less interested in your story because you haven't had any success so far. Sure, your idea might sound great, but until you execute it, it's still just an idea. Maybe it's worth a million dollars, but if your bank account isn't cashing that check yet, it's not easy to convince someone else it is (hence writer's query letter woes).

9. If you want your story to be read, if you want your story to be successful, or if you just plain want to learn how to write a better story the next time, you'll have to show it to someone. That's the way of the world. You need readers. We're all bestsellers in our own imaginations. If you want to be one outside of your head, you'll have to allow eyes on your work at some point.

Bonus: Recently I have been contacted by a couple big name companies for publication and other rights to my fiction. In at least one contract I was reviewing (for consideration, this one was for television, I believe), one of the sticking points in their terms is that (summarizing/simplifying here) they'll look at your work, but you can't sue if they decline and you end up seeing a similar idea down the road. (Because, you know, if you wrote a story about modern elves and a network was looking to acquire modern elves, they might get 100 submissions. Modern elves alone don't say they stole.) Trust me, staring down those words is terrifying! But at some point, yeah, you've got to let go or you won't get any where!

In the writing world, I'm that little flash of light you see in a pond on a bright summer morning. You aren't entirely certain if it's a minnow or just a particularly sparkly rock that caught your eye as your head turned. That's how insignificant I am.

HOWEVER, after clinging to the top of paranormal hot list with Dark Side and now Hunted, I've acquired some fans. Every so often I get a story dedicated to me (usually it's a first chapter that starts with an alarm clock from my ever so clever readers who want to annoy me, lol). Every so often someone pays homage to a memorable character like sheriff Caelan Harlowe and they let me know they share a last name or something. Fantastic. Cool.

I've even had someone tell me that a phrase I used in Run Cold was *exactly* the way someone was looking to express an idea. They asked permission if they could use the same phrase!

That's all minor stuff, nothing to write home about.

Well, one enthusiastic reader of mine came to me talking about how inspired one of my stories had made them. So they wrote their own story (started to, anyway) and asked me to read it. They were/are a really great person and loyal reader, so I agreed. They told me in advance that it was similar so I knew that going in, but I about died when I read it. I was honored, but on another level, alarmed.

You know déjà vu? It was that x10.

The entire time I read it I had this eerie feeling that I was reading a ghost of my story. Sure there were some differences, but it was like hearing your echo played back to you on a grainy tape recorder. It didn't sound like me narrating my story, but it was my story. The characters were similar, the situations were similar, the scenes were similar, even the food was the same! This wasn't fanfiction, either. It was Kellie's Story, as told by Inspired Reader.

Worse, I read every section, from the title to the blurb to the chapters, and there wasn't one mention of the story they'd pinched the plot, characters, etc from. Not a single "Hey, this is based off Kellie Bowe's story!"

Immediately I checked to see how many people might've seen this inbred ghost of a tale. Not many: the read count was low. They barely updated. Their grammar stunk. They stopped writing it altogether a few months ago. It's not going to find any success. It's going to wither away into oblivion.

In my arrogance I like to think that my version was better written and since my plots are the original plots, they'll come across stronger, but it got me wondering: what else is out there? What if someone didn't say a word to me, they just wrote that manuscript and picked up an agent or went viral or something? And here I am empty-handed?

But at the end of the day I'm not worried for all those reasons above. :) I've got my manuscript, I'm prepared, and I'm focused on the task at hand: writing my stories. [and if you ever read my stories, you'd feel bad for someone copying them too!]