If you want to get published, you need to be prepared to deal with plagiarism. Plagiarism is word-stealing: taking the writing of someone else, changing it a little (perhaps), and then claiming it as your own. Those that get caught have no future as writers: they will generally not get published again.
Plagiarism is best explained and discussed with an example. Angel Zapata is a dark fiction and horror writer in the US who has been published in a number of online literary journals. He discovered he'd been plagiarised by an author going by the name of Richard Ridyard. Angel did not take the attitude of a helpless victim, however. His actions serve as a model to other writers who are looking to get ahead and get published, and then discover that they have been plagiarised.
Read Angel's account of the Richard Ridyard Affair in this post on his blog. You will see that Angel's first response was to investigate further. Investigation and data gathering is a much more sensible course of action than making a purely emotional, knee-jerk reaction.
Once he had gathered enough information (that is: evidence), he then contacted affected editors and authors. And then: goodbye Richard Ridyard.
A big part of the success in removing the Ridyard stain on online publishing was the involvement of the online community in getting behind Angel, and helping with the process of contacting editors and authors. I wrote a short piece on my Surge Bin blog about this called The Richard Ridyard Affair.
So, if you want to get published, get wise to plagiarism. Familiarise yourself with the Richard Ridyard affair (follow the links above). Take action if you discover plagiarism of anyone's work - not just your own.
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