I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

Meta about the submission

• Some dislike HN’s habit of adding years to titles and see it as pointless noise; others note it’s a long-standing moderator convention and harmless.
• A few object to linking Reddit directly, but many feel the Reddit post has unusually strong documentation; an archive link is provided as an alternative.

Perceived strength of the plagiarism evidence

• Several commenters find the Reddit analysis “thorough” and “easily replicable,” seeing a clear pattern of copied, sometimes ornate, sentences and descriptions.
• Others are unconvinced: many examples are short phrases, clichés, or common constructions that they feel don’t clearly prove serious literary theft.
• Some think a key open question is whether only vivid descriptive snippets were lifted, or also larger story structures and plots; current evidence focuses on short passages.

Ethical vs legal framing

• Distinction stressed: plagiarism is an ethical issue; copyright infringement is the legal one. Small, scattered sentence copying likely doesn’t meet infringement thresholds.
• There’s concern that calling someone a “serial plagiarist” in certain jurisdictions could trigger libel actions if the case isn’t rock solid.
• Several argue this behavior, if accurate, still marks the author as a “hack,” even if not legally actionable.

Self-publishing, courses, and manufactured success

• Many connect this to a broader pattern in self-publishing and online entrepreneurship: people sell “how to succeed” courses that may earn more than their actual craft.
• Commenters compare it to trading and real-estate “get rich” influencers who flaunt cars and lifestyle, often monetizing followers rather than any underlying skill.
• Discussion notes claims of high author income that ignore ad spend or that most revenue actually comes from courses and affiliate deals.

Bestseller lists and hype gaming

• A cited incident of the author buying hundreds of their own books to boost chart position is seen by many as “scummy” hype gaming, similar to bulk corporate or conference buys used to hit bestseller lists.
• Debate over whether this is outright “fraud” or just common (if distasteful) industry gamesmanship.

Plagiarism standards: academia vs fiction

• Several contrast strict academic rules (where even a few unquoted words or reusing your own paper can be misconduct) with looser norms in commercial fiction.
• Some insist that distinctive, unusual phrases repeated nearly verbatim clearly cross any reasonable plagiarism line.
• Others argue novelists routinely borrow images, idioms, and set pieces, and that judging them by academic standards is misguided.

Self-plagiarism and political scandals

• A long subthread discusses “self-plagiarism”: reusing one’s own prior work without citation in academic settings.
• Many find the concept incoherent or absurd: if it’s your idea and your words, how is repeating them “plagiarism”?
• Others reply that in degree programs you’re graded on new work; submitting the same text twice without disclosure is treated as academic dishonesty even if you wrote it.
• Separate example: Norwegian ministers’ theses being re-examined, with reports of large percentages copied from others without attribution, seen as serious misconduct and hypocrisy.

Automation, outsourcing, and analogy to coding

• Some speculate the pattern could arise from using ghostwriters or low-cost freelancers who paste from online sources, or from the kind of fragmentary reuse we’re now seeing with AI tools.
• Others caution against over-attributing to AI: plagiarism, collage-like writing, and “pulp” shortcuts long predate language models.
• An analogy is drawn to copying code from Q&A sites: widely done, often without proper licensing or deep understanding, tolerated in practice but ethically and legally gray.

How serious is this, really?

• One camp sees the accusations as deeply damaging to the author’s credibility and especially troubling given their role selling advice to other writers.
• Another camp thinks lifting scattered descriptive sentences is “slimy but minor,” unlikely to affect readers or rise to meaningful legal or commercial harm.
• Several note that without a full corpus comparison, the true scale of borrowing is still unclear; script-based large-scale analysis is suggested as a future project.