I shared this on my twitter feed, though my following is negligible at this point. Anyway, here I was thinking only celebs had feuds this petty in nature. I mean, seriously, how low do you have to sink to have your readers go and give someone else’s hard work bad reviews just to outsell him? Your goals shouldn’t be to compete with other authors: we all do that enough as it is just by the nature of the business. Beale should be working with Scalzi, though I understand how hard that may be given their history. I wonder, do either of them even remember who threw the first punch, or what it was about in the first place?
While I understand what some posters are talking about when they dismiss the similarity between the covers, implying that there’s bound to be cross-overs with so much being published, I feel I must make a counterpoint: There are a million ways to skin a cat, the putty in this case a cover. Sci-fi alone offering and endless supply of concepts to mix and match with, limited only by the imagination. From a general gist of what the books about, or portraying a scene in the book, or a collage of the two, just to name a few. There’s just so much someone could think up to differentiate their cover from someone else’s. Then again, this point is mute because we’ve already been told in the article that Beale was out to rip-off Scalzi, so instead of making an original argument I’m just ending up beating a dead horse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
Attachment 155800
Lets ban them both because Hamilton got there 20 years ago. 
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How similar do they have to be before you ban it?
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For this, I think I’d have to say it’s a matter of reasonability and common sense. Is it close enough to a formerly publish work that the two could be confused by a reader of sound mind and average intellect? Then yes, it much be changed.