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From Amazon: There are people in this world who are Nobody. No one sees them. No one notices them. They live their lives under the radar, forgotten as soon as you turn away.

That's why they make the perfect assassins.

The Institute finds these people when they're young and takes them away for training. But an untrained Nobody is a threat to their organization. And threats must be eliminated.

From Amazon: They needed the perfect assassin.

Boy Nobody is the perennial new kid in school, the one few notice and nobody thinks much about. He shows up in a new high school in a new town under a new name, makes a few friends, and doesn't stay long. Just long enough for someone in his new friend's family to die-of "natural causes." Mission accomplished, Boy Nobody disappears, moving on to the next target.

I wonder if the coincidences are why they rebranded the paperback of Boy Nobody and renamed it I Am the Weapon. Some ideas just float around in the ether. 

Starting with an anecdote about two authors who wrote alphabet books featuring animals who are too impatient to wait their proper turn (a musk ox and a moose), Publishers Weekly looked at what happens when authors come out with books that have quite a bit in common.

Read more here.

In February 2006 I had a book come out called Shock Point. I put "Shock Point" in as a Google Search term, and began to get emails when it was mentioned on the Web. A few months after my book came out, I got this little snippet from Kirkus for a book called The Silent Room. "With a plot that mirrors April Henry's rather shallow Shock Point..." I didn't get any more, just that.

I had three thoughts.

One: "rather shallow"? Kirkus seems to pride itself on snide comments. (Full disclosure: Although I always discount their snideness, if they ever gave me a starred review, I would decide they were the most insightful folks ever.) (Full disclosure two: likelihood of this ever happening? Close to zero.)

Two: WTF? With a plot that "mirrors" mine? From an imprint of the same house?

Three: Thank God mine came out first.

I was desperate to read the rest of the review, but no one I knew subscribed to Kirkus. Finally, I managed to finagle a copy of the advanced readers edition of the other book. It did have some similarities, but there were also many differences. The similarities came about because Walter Sorrells and I had obviously read the same newspaper accounts of this chain of boot-camp schools for troubled teens run by a former used car salesman.

So neither of us copied from each other. It was just a coincidence. That's the danger when you write about something in real life. Some other author may already be writing that story. May already have written it.

Now You See Her - Published 1995, by Whiney Otto (description from Amazon)
Kiki Shaw, a game show question writer, is about to turn forty. She doesn't mind that, except that she's also disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are vanishing, and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates this experience, Kiki makes certain discoveries about her life and those of the women closest to her. Perhaps they will all evanesce bit by bit, until they detect where they misplaced themselves and their once-promising lives 



Calling Invisible Women published 2012 by Jeanne Ray (description from Amazon)
A mom in her early fifties, Clover knows she no longer turns heads the way she used to, and she's only really missed when dinner isn't on the table on time. Then Clover wakes up one morning to discover she's invisible--truly invisible. She panics, but when her husband and son sit down to dinner, nothing is amiss. ... Clover discovers that there are other women like her, women of a certain age who seem to have disappeared.

A few years back, I got a Google Alert about a review in Kirkus that began, "With a plot that mirrors April Henry's Shock Point, Walter Sorrell's Silent Room..." The snippet stopped there.

To be honest, I freaked out. That was the extent of the review that was available online unless you subscribed to Kirkus. I actually managed to buy a copy of the ARC on e-bay, and when I read it, it turned out that while the two stories began in a similar fashion (stepparent arranges for kid who is actually not that bad to be sent to a draconian boot camp), they really did not have that much in common beyond boot camps. And around the same time, Todd Strasser also ended up writing a book called, you guessed it, Boot Camp).  

While I haven’t checked with Todd and Walter, I have a feeling we all read a series of articles in the New York Times about WAASP schools that sparked the idea of writing about boot camp schools.

Recently, I received a nice note from Printz-honor author Helen Frost.  When Helen learned about Girl, Stolen, she realized that we had books coming out fairly close to each other (her book, Hidden, comes out next spring) with some similarities in the story lines. 

Curious, Helen read about Girl, Stolen online and realized that the beginning of her next book, Hidden, is something like the beginning of Girl, Stolen. Just like I did with Silent Room, she was able to get an ARC, at which point she realized just how different the two books were. 

Helen says, “My main character is eight in the first part of the story, the part that parallels yours. Then the rest of the book is about when she is 14 and meets the daughter of the guy who stole the car (they meet at a summer camp)--it's their relationship that is really at the heart of the book. In the rest of the book, the two stories are very different. Hidden is a novel-in-poems, like all my recent books.”  It’s also a middle-grade, as opposed to a YA. And of course, her main character isn’t blind.    

In a similar situation to Helen’s, I heard about a YA

It's every authors worst nightmare: you spend years writing a book with an unusual angle - only to find out that someone else is coming out with a book covering the exact same thing. Even though the two books will probably be quite different, is there space in people's limited attention spans to remember both?

What it you could taste something that is not normally associated with taste - like a word or an emotion? Two authors, both with books out this summer, explored the same unusual premise.

In Bitter in the Mouth: A Novel, 30-something Linda has the ability to taste the words she hears. This is "lexical-gustatory synesthesia," which according to Wikipedia "is one of the rarer forms of synesthesia, in which spoken or written words evoke vivid sensations of taste, sometimes including temperature and texture (e.g., for lexical-gustatory synesthete JIW, 'jail' tastes of cold, hard bacon)."Despite its starred review from Publisher's Weekly, I think the book is going to have a hard time finding traction because of:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel. PW says, "Bender's narrator is young, needy Rose Edelstein, who can literally taste the emotions of whoever prepares her food, giving her unwanted insight into other people's secret emotional lives—including her mother's, whose lemon cake betrays a deep dissatisfaction."